Harry Sukman

Chicago-born music prodigy Harry Sukman made his concert debut in 1925, at age 12, and while still in high school served as an accompanist to violinists Mischa Mischakoff and Louis Persinger, and cantor Joseph Rosenblatt. He later worked on radio as a pianist and conductor, and moved to Hollywood in 1946, where he joined the music department at Paramount as a pianist, and was taken under the wing of the head of the department, <a href="spotify:artist:3HqN7Sq7rmpOEI9UV5ERuz">Victor Young</a>. During the late 1940s and the first half of the '50s, he mastered the art of film scoring, but also found time to play and record with <a href="spotify:artist:3HqN7Sq7rmpOEI9UV5ERuz">Victor Young</a>'s orchestra, and to play on recordings by <a href="spotify:artist:1Mxqyy3pSjf8kZZL4QVxS0">Frank Sinatra</a>, in addition to collaborating with <a href="spotify:artist:602DnpaSXJB4b9DZrvxbDc">Peggy Lee</a> as a composer. Most of Sukman's work in movies was for independent productions, and his ability to work quickly, and also to effectively adapt existing compositions -- which he demonstrated in Samuel Fuller's Verboten -- served him in good stead in some of his more prominent assignments of the '60s, including his work adapting the music of <a href="spotify:artist:1385hLNbrnbCJGokfH2ac2">Franz Liszt</a> for the film Song Without End, for which he received an Academy Award (shared with Morris W. Stoloff). Sukman received two subsequent Oscar nominations, for Fanny (1961) and The Singing Nun (1966), but by that time he was busy on television as much as in movies, on series such as The Virginian and Tales of Wells Fargo at Universal, Dr. Kildare (which he took over scoring from <a href="spotify:artist:7t8q7ikEtcPNtoaKAm9Vu6">Jerry Goldsmith</a>, while retaining but re-arranging <a href="spotify:artist:7t8q7ikEtcPNtoaKAm9Vu6">Goldsmith</a>'s thematic material) and its spinoff, The Eleventh Hour, at MGM. He also later wrote the music for The High Chaparral and one season of Bonanza. Sukman closed out his career with music for Tobe Hooper's Salems Lot (1979), a quintessential television horror entry, and a genre in which he'd hardly ever worked in his previous 35 years of scoring films and television shows. It earned Sukman an Emmy nomination. In more recent years, Sukman and his early musical life, and his love of the piano, have provided the basis for the children's book Harry's Piano, written by his daughter, Suzanne Sukman McCray, a Hollywood casting director who has worked on such series as Mannix, Hawaii 5-O, Happy Days, Little House on the Prairie, and Father Murphy. ~ Bruce Eder, Rovi