James Horner

Died: June 22, 2015.

James Horner, who has died in a plane crash aged 61, not only composed the music for many of the most successful films of the last 25 years, but also provided a soundtrack for an entire nation when he wrote the dramatic score for Braveheart.

Arguably Hollywood's greatest composer of recent times, he won two Oscars for Titanic in 1998, for best score and best song, My Heart Will Go On, sung by Celine Dion.

He co-wrote the song with lyricist Will Jennings and it had some viewers in floods of tears which might have drowned poor Leonardo DiCaprio were he not already on his way to a watery grave.

Originally, director James Cameron had not wanted any actual songs in the film and Celine Dion recorded a demo in secret.

It became one of the most successful singles of all time, selling more than 15 million copies worldwide and topping the charts in the US and UK. But it was not to everyone's tastes - co-star Kate Winslet said it made her "feel like throwing up".

Horner also wrote the music for such diverse hits as Aliens (1986), Field of Dreams (1989), Glory (1989), A Beautiful Mind (2001), Troy (2004) and Avatar (2009), which overtook Titanic as the highest-grossing film ever.

Always drawing inspiration from the story and subject, his soundtracks contributed significantly to the success of many films and helped fix them in audiences' minds.

He won dozens of awards and garnered a total of ten Oscar nominations. In 1996, he was nominated for Braveheart, Mel Gibson's epic about the Scottish patriot William Wallace and his battles with the English - the same year he was nominated for the music from its main rival Apollo 13. In the event Luis Enrique Bacalov won for Il Postino.

For his Braveheart soundtrack Horner drew heavily on bagpipe music and also on the melody of the sad, old ballad Loch Lomond, about the spirit of an executed warrior returning to Scotland. The score was in turns delicate and rousing and it remains a feature of Scottish life two decades later.

At a personal appearance a couple of years ago Horner revealed that Gibson did not originally want music to play in the background when Wallace addresses his troops before battle, but he wrote a long and very powerful piece anyway and Gibson immediately decided to use it.

"Mel is brilliant," he said in another interview. "He was so easy, so full of experience. He knew how much space I needed. I've always been partial to Celtic music and the music of that world. It was a natural world for me to work in."

James Roy Horner was born in Los Angeles in 1953. His father Harry Horner was also a double Oscar-winner. A production designer who came to Holywood from Czechoslovakia in the 1930s, he won Academy Awards for The Heiress (1949) and The Hustler (1961).

His son had no intention of following him into the film business. A musical prodigy, he was playing piano at five, studied at the Royal College of Music in London and subsequently at the University of Southern California and UCLA, the University of California Los Angeles, where he also taught.

His original intention was to become a serious, avant-garde classical composer. But he soon discovered that making a living as a serious, avant-garde classical composer was tricky.

Although he had little interest in film music, he had to earn a living and took commissions writing for Roger Corman's low-budget movies, including Battle Beyond the Stars, Corman's 1980 response to Star Wars.

"I had no idea who Jerry Goldsmith or John Williams were before I did The Hand (a 1981 horror movie)," he said.

He learned quickly. "I'm sure that I was influenced by Goldsmith's large orchestral scores when I started out, and that was because the people who employed me wanted that kind of sound. I wasn't in a position to say, 'Go to Hell!'."

He quickly established himself in the business and was hired to compose the score for Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982). The director Nicholas Meyer said they hired him because they wanted someone who sounded like Goldsmith, but they could not afford Goldsmith.

While working at Corman's company Horner got to know James Cameron, with whom he would later work on several mega-budget films, including Titanic and Avatar, by which time he had long since emerged from Goldsmith's shadow. He composed for over 100 films in total.

Horner "borrowed" from other composers, including Wagner and Prokofiev, these musical "borrowings" became a feature of his and were controversial with some purists.

His film work made him rich and he flew his own plane. He was flying solo in a two-seater when it crashed in a forest in Southern California.

He is survived by his wife Sarah and two daughters.

BRIAN PENDREIGH