"In the end, it's in everyone's best interest for it to be done right. While there may be a schedule looming, there's also everyone's arrogant sense of excellence. Sometimes, though, you just have to swallow hard and do the work. Those are the moments when you face huge kinds of primal fears. But the good thing about movie music is that oftentimes you defeat those fears and it teaches you something basic about your nature."
- Thomas Newman in 1998

The youngest son of legendary 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 scores throughout the 2000's, and he would win his first Emmy Award for his title music to the hit TV series "Six Feet Under" the same year. While continuing to explore this unorthodox selection of instrumentation in his scores, he has also remained in touch with his orchestral past in impressive works ranging from Road to Perdition in 2002 to his James Bond debut for Skyfall in 2012.