James Newton Howard
American composer and music producer (born 1951)
James Newton Howard (born June 9, 1951) is an American film composer, orchestrator and music producer. He has scored over 100 films and is the recipient of a Grammy Award, an Emmy Award, and nine nominations for Academy Awards.
His film scores include Pretty Woman (1990), The Prince of Tides (1991), The Fugitive (1993), Space Jam (1996), The Sixth Sense (1999), Dinosaur (2000), Unbreakable (2000), Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001), Signs (2002), Treasure Planet (2002), The Village (2004), King Kong (2005), Batman Begins (2005) and its sequel, The Dark Knight (2008) (both composed with Hans Zimmer), Blood Diamond (2006), Michael Clayton (2007), The Hunger Games series (2012–present), the Fantastic Beasts trilogy (2016–2022), and Raya and the Last Dragon (2021). He has collaborated extensively with directors M. Night Shyamalan and Francis Lawrence, having scored eight of Shyamalan's films and eight of Lawrence's films since I Am Legend (2007). He has also worked with other directors such as Peter Jackson, Edward Zwick, Michael Hoffman, P. J. Hogan, Paul Greengrass, Andrew Davis, Lawrence Kasdan, Joe Roth, Martin Campbell, Joe Johnston, Tony Gilroy, Taylor Hackford, Ivan Reitman, Joel Schumacher, and David Yates; conductor Pete Anthony; and violinists Bruce Dukov, and Eun-Mee Ahn.
Early life and career
Howard was born in Los Angeles to Samuel Howard (né Horowitz) and Joan Howard (née Royall). He is from a musical family; his grandmother was a violinist. His father was Jewish but he did not want his children to know he was, so he changed his last name from Horowitz to Howard.
Howard began studying music as a child, taking classical piano lessons at the age of four. He went on to attend the Thacher School in Ojai, California and the Music Academy of the West in Montecito, California with Reginald Stewart and Leon Fleischer.
“James Newton Howard” enters the record as american composer and music producer (born 1951). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what James, Newton and Howard can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q213869. VIAF identifies the subject as 85571763. The Library of Congress control number is n90699532. 4 of 5 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1951, 1990, 1991 and 1993.
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This entry incorporates text from “James Newton Howard” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.