George Fenton, the British composer whose sweeping orchestral scores accompanied films including Gandhi and Groundhog Day as well as landmark natural history programmes such as Blue Planet and Planet Earth, has died at the age of 76.
His family confirmed the death in a statement released on Monday, describing it as unexpected. "We are very sad to announce that George Fenton passed away unexpectedly today," the statement said. They noted that he leaves behind his wife Amanda, his former wife Jane, his children Gemma, Grace and Bridget, and six grandchildren: Lola, Audrey, Alfred, George, Frank and Beatrice. The family also paid tribute to what they called "a life of music."
Few British composers of his generation worked across such a wide range of disciplines. Over a career spanning more than five decades, Fenton wrote for cinema, television, radio, the theatre and the concert hall, shifting with apparent ease between the intimate demands of drama and the vast canvas of wildlife documentary.
He received five Academy Award nominations in total. The first came in 1983 for his score for Richard Attenborough's Gandhi, the epic biographical film about the Indian independence leader. For that project he collaborated with the Indian composer and instrumentalist Ravi Shankar, building a score that drew on the subcontinent's musical traditions rather than imposing a Western orchestral template on the material. Remarkably, it was only his fourth attempt at writing music for a film, and he remained almost entirely self-taught at the time.
Further Oscar nominations followed for Cry Freedom in 1987, the story of the South African campaigner Steve Biko, who was killed in police custody. Working with the South African jazz musician Jonas Gwangwa, Fenton earned two nods for that film, one for best original score and another for best original song. He later recalled that the title track had come about almost by accident. He had recorded the lyrics himself as a guide vocal for Gwangwa, listing the names of anti-apartheid activists imprisoned or killed by the South African government. Gwangwa chose to keep some of that recording intact, describing it as a gesture of brotherhood, and the result was an Oscar nomination. Fenton subsequently found himself performing the song live on television in front of an audience of around a billion people, something he admitted he had never intended.
His other nominated scores included The Remains of the Day, the Merchant Ivory adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro's novel, and The Fisher King, Terry Gilliam's modern-day retelling of the Holy Grail legend. The latter demonstrated his versatility, moving between the mythic and the comic.
Born George Howe in Bromley, Kent, in 1949, Fenton grew up in a musical household. His father was a mechanical engineer who played drums, while his mother had worked as a dancer before becoming a nurse during the war and played piano. Fenton himself picked up the electric guitar at the age of seven. Speaking to the Express newspaper later in life, he said that was the point at which music overtook football in importance for him, and he credited The Beatles with a huge influence on his development.
His first lessons came from an unlikely source. A musician named Brian Rudd arrived at the family home posing as a chimney sweep, a deception that ended badly when he filled the house with soot. As he left, he apologised to Fenton's mother but mentioned that he had tuned the boy's guitar. She suggested he give her son a lesson by way of compensation for the mess, and those lessons continued from there. Fenton later studied the church organ, but he turned down the chance to go to university and music college in favour of pursuing a career as a performer.
In 1968 he appeared in Forty Years On, the first West End play by Alan Bennett. Union rules at the time prevented two actors from working under the same name, so he adopted his mother's maiden name, Fenton, and kept it for the rest of his career. During that production he also understudied the show's musical director, Carl Davis, who went on to become another of Britain's most prominent composers for film and television.
A year later he signed a record deal and scored a top ten hit in Sweden with a cover of The Beatles' Maxwell's Silver Hammer, though his time as a solo recording artist proved short-lived. In the mid-1970s he took a recurring acting role as the soldier Martin Gimbel in the ITV soap opera Emmerdale Farm, but he noticed that directors kept casting him in parts that required him to play an instrument. That realisation pushed him towards making music his primary occupation.
His first job as a composer and musical director came in 1974, for a Royal Shakespeare Company production of Twelfth Night in Stratford-upon-Avon. Throughout the 1980s he wrote soundtracks for a string of acclaimed television dramas, among them the Bafta-winning The Jewel in the Crown, The Monocled Mutineer and Alan Bennett's Talking Heads. He also composed some of the most recognisable themes in British broadcasting, including music for the BBC's One O'Clock News, Six O'Clock News and Nine O'Clock News, as well as Newsnight, The Money Programme and Radio 4's PM Programme.
It was perhaps his partnership with David Attenborough that brought his music to the widest audience. After writing the score for the BBC's Trials of Life in 1990, Fenton went on to compose music for what became known as Attenborough's Earth Trilogy: The Blue Planet, Planet Earth and Frozen Planet. His writing for those series combined the full forces of the orchestra with a keen sense of narrative, shifting from wonder and awe to tension and suspense as the footage demanded, and lending emotional weight to images of the ocean depths and the polar ice caps.
The documentaries' success led Fenton to create a live concert experience, The Blue Planet Live, which toured internationally and introduced his music to audiences far beyond the television screen. He was equally celebrated for scores including The Fisher King, Groundhog Day and Bergerac, and his television work on Blue Planet alone brought recognition from the Baftas, the Emmy Awards and the Ivor Novellos.
Fenton spent most of his working life writing alone, but he never lost his appetite for performance. "I love live audiences," he told Radio 4's Sue Lawley in 2003, a remark that helps explain why he so often took his music out of the studio and onto the stage. His death leaves British screen music without one of its most adaptable and enduring figures, a composer whose melodies accompanied both the grandeur of the natural world and some of the defining dramas of his time.
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