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Information about Newman's background:
The youngest son of Fox composer Alfred Newman, Thomas Montgomery Newman (whose nickname is Tommy) was born in Los Angeles on October 20, 1955. He grew up not only in the shadow of his father, but also uncles Lionel and Emil. Lionel, who succeeded Alfred as music director for Fox, gave Thomas his first scoring assignment (on a 1979 episode of television's The Paper Chase). Emil, best known as a conductor at Fox and Goldwyn Studios, was responsible for the young composer's entry into the BMI representative agency. Cousin Randy Newman, meanwhile, was already a popular singer/songwriter (and also now a Grammy and Oscar-winning film composer), while brother David was a studio violinist who also joined the ranks of film composers in the 1980's and has had a prolific career of his own.
A classical training, inspired by Newman's desire to master the piano and violin, led to an informal Hollywood apprenticeship in the early 1980's due his family ties with his uncle Lionel, who was head of music at Fox during Thomas' high school and college years. The apprentice had previously watched John Williams conduct and record several major scores, including The Towering Inferno and The Poseidon Adventure in the early 1970's. Through that connection, Newman was responsible for orchestrating Darth Vader's death scene cue for Return of the Jedi in 1983, although Newman claims that Williams' composition was so complete that his own influence on the task was minimal.
Newman studied at both USC and Yale and then spent time writing for off-Broadway productions, theatre, and pop bands such as "The Innocents" and "Tokyo 77." He was mentored by Broadway great Stephen Sondheim and backed into a film scoring career when producer Scott Rudin hired him as a musical assistant on the 1984 teen-angst drama Reckless. He wound up scoring the movie, the first of a batch of hip and popular films to boast Newman scores, including Revenge of the Nerds the same year, Desperately Seeking Susan in 1985, and The Lost Boys in 1987. As the 1990's dawned, it became clear that Thomas Newman's modus operandi was an endless odyssey in search of just the right sound for each movie. The choices are vast, especially considering Newman's facility both with the traditional orchestra and the ever-growing electronic palette.
Although most of Newman's early scores were written for electronic instruments, he soon tried using acoustic instruments along with the synthesizers. There were the off-kilter chimes and percussion of Robert Altman's Hollywood satire The Player in 1992, the rich 19th-century Americana idioms of Little Women and the dark, brooding strings of The Shawshank Redemption, which won him dual 1994 Oscar nominations. He was again nominated for an Oscar for the strange ensemble of zither, hurdy-gurdy, psaltery and dulcimer used in Diane Keaton's comedy Unsung Heroes. He would explore shifting romantic moods of Up Close & Personal in 1996 and tackle the ambitious and haunting orchestral-and-choral accompaniment for the period Australian drama Oscar and Lucinda the following year.
His duo of The Green Mile and the Best Picture-winning American Beauty in 1999 presented Newman with polar challenges, with the former requiring 95 minutes of music over six months and the latter highlighting the moral ambiguity of the film through the use of xylophones, marimbas, tablas, bongos, cymbals, guitars, piano, flute and various world-music instruments. Newman would continue to experiment with these ideas in Erin Brockovich and Pay it Forward in 2000, as well as In the Bedroom in 2001, and he would win his first Emmy Award for his title music to the hit TV series "Six Feet Under" the same year. He would venture back into the territory of grand orchestral ambience for his Oscar-nominated score for Road to Perdition in 2002 and his journey into the animated film arena with Disney's Finding Nemo in 2003. Newman lives in Los Angeles with his wife Ann Marie and their children.
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Legendary Golden Age composer Alfred Newman was the winner of nine Academy Awards and the longtime music director at 20th Century Fox Studios. His death in 1970 came as his son Thomas was just 14, and yet, the legacy of Alfred Newman's career has been carried on in Thomas Newman's prolific, if not paradoxical film scoring career. Despite the magnificent musical talent applied to films and television in the past and present, Thomas unintentionally stumbled into the scoring business by accident. He is well known for writing spectacular scores for large orchestral ensembles, and yet he personally prefers writing for small ensembles and producing quirky, off-beat rhythms. He continues to be one of the most sought-after composers in Hollywood, despite his lack of ego and an insecurity he often feels about his own scores (though his frustration at his continued lack of an Oscar persists). Newman works today in the same old Pacific Palisades studio that his father used for years.
