George Fenton

George Fenton was born in 1949 in Bromley, Kent,[2] one of five siblings. He was educated at Carn Brea School and St Edwards School, Oxford. He began learning the guitar at the age of 8 and at St Edwards studied the organ with Peter Whitehouse.[3] He did not attend music college but continued to study with Peter Whitehouse and subsequently with the ethnomusicologist and composer, John Leach.

In 1968 whilst considering a career in acting, he was offered a part in Alan Bennett's first West End play Forty Years On.[4][5] The following year he was offered a place at the Central School of Speech and Drama but had by then decided to continue with his music and had a record contract with MCA Records. For the next few years he continued to work in theatre playing small parts and playing and writing music.

In 1974, Fenton received his first major commission, as composer and musical director for Peter Gill's theatre production of Twelfth Night by the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon.[6]

Throughout the rest of the 1970s and early 1980s Fenton worked frequently as a composer for theatre productions.[7][8] He continued to collaborate regularly with Peter Gill. Between 1974 and 1981 Fenton composed for 9 of Gill's productions; 4 of these were at the Riverside Studios theatre where Gill was appointed artistic director in 1976,[9] while the following 3 were at the National Theatre after Gill became Associate Director in 1980.[10]

During this period Fenton also worked regularly at the Belgrade Theatre, composing for 3 of their productions in 1976 and another 3 in 1978, and in 1981 he collaborated with Adrian Noble on 3 productions at the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester.[7][8]

He continued to work with the prestigious Royal Shakespeare Company composing for 4 of their productions between 1981 and 1985.[7][8]

Other theatre includes The Judas Kiss, Last Cigarette, Untold Storie, Allelujah!, Mrs Henderson Presents, Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, Talking Heads and Racing Demon.

Fenton wrote his first television score in 1976.[11] This was a continuation of his collaboration with Peter Gill and it was for Gill's production of Hitting Town written by Stephen Poliakoff.

By the late 1970s Fenton was working regularly in television, becoming a popular choice of composer for dozens of television productions. These included Shoestring, a BBC crime drama which ran for 21 episodes in 1979–80, and Bergerac,[12] which ran for a decade from 1981 to 1991, and for which he won a BAFTA in 1982.

He composed the music for all six of the LWT television plays by Alan Bennett, which were broadcast during 1978 and 1979 and are collectively known as Six Plays by Alan Bennett.[13] Their collaboration continued with the TV series Objects of Affection in 1982. A year later he composed the score of Bennett's TV film An Englishman Abroad (1983) which was directed by John Schlesinger. Fenton also composed for all of the episodes of Bennett's acclaimed Talking Heads series in 1988 and, a decade later, Talking Heads 2 in 1998.

During this period Fenton also frequently collaborated with the director Stephen Frears, composing for his television productions of Bloody Kids (1980), Going Gently (1981), Walter (1982) and Saigon: Year of the Cat (1983).

By the mid-1980s Fenton was composing for big budget TV series including the multi BAFTA winning The Jewel in the Crown (1984) and The Monocled Mutineer (1986).

Fenton has composed for a number of notable wildlife television programmes, often collaborating with the wildlife broadcaster David Attenborough and nature documentary filmmaker Alastair Fothergill. He started on the BBC's long-running series Wildlife on One and Natural World, and continued with specials such as Polar Bear.

He has spoken of how much he likes composing for wildlife programmes. In 2012 he said with reference to The Blue Planet: "The minute I heard the title I was sold. I just thought it was so great that I turned down the offer of doing another film in the States and flew straight back home."[14]

Since 1990 he has written the music for a number of big budget wildlife series.[15]

• The Trials of Life (1990)
• Life in the Freezer (1993)
• The Blue Planet (2001)
• Deep Blue (2003) (feature-length version of The Blue Planet)
• Planet Earth (2006)
• Earth (2007) (feature-length version of Planet Earth)
• Frozen Planet (2011)

His track record in this genre has placed him firmly as the BBC's composer of choice for its flagship wildlife programmes.[16]

Fenton has composed the jingles or theme music to dozens of British television and radio programs, mostly for the BBC.[6] Some of these are; the BBC's One O'Clock News, Six O'Clock News, and Nine O'Clock News, Newsnight and Newsnight Review, On the Record, Omnibus, BBC Breakfast Time, BBC World News, Westminster – In The House, Reporting Scotland, London Plus, Midday News, Telly Addicts and Daily Politics. For the radio, he composed the old theme for BBC Radio 4's PM programme.[17]

George Fenton is also known as a composer of film scores. He has written the music for over one hundred feature films and has collaborated with some of the most influential film makers of the late 20th century.[18]

Together with Michael Feast and David Dundas he co-wrote the music for Private Road (1971), a film he and Feast also starred in.

His film scoring as a professional composer began in 1982[18] with Richard Attenborough's biopic Gandhi for which he was nominated—with his collaborator, Ravi Shankar—for the Academy Award for Original Music Score. Fenton's career as a composer of film scores owes a debt of gratitude to Attenborough's asking him to compose for Gandhi.[19] Fenton said of him in a 2014 interview: "He always made me feel incredibly secure with what he was doing. He loves music, and he’s very musical."[19] Fenton wrote another four film scores for Attenborough's films; Cry Freedom (1987), Shadowlands (1993), In Love and War (1996), and Grey Owl (1999).[19]

He has also frequently worked with the theatre and film director Nicholas Hytner, writing the score for all six of the movies that Hytner has directed. These are: The Madness of King George (1994), The Crucible (1996), The Object of My Affection (1998), Center Stage (2000), The History Boys (2006), and The Lady in the Van (2015). The latter three of these allowed Fenton to collaborate once again with their writer Alan Bennett. Although Fenton composed the original music of five of these films, for The Madness of King George he instead adapted and arranged the music of Handel.[20]

Fenton's long-standing collaboration with Stephen Frears has not been limited to television productions. Fenton has scored four of Frear's feature films: Dangerous Liaisons (1988), Hero (1992), Mary Reilly (1996), and Mrs Henderson Presents (2005). He has also worked with director Neil Jordan; scoring The Company of Wolves (1984), High Spirits (1988), and We're No Angels (1989).

Fenton has scored more feature films for Ken Loach than for any other filmmaker; by 2015, a total of fourteen. This started in 1994 with Ladybird, Ladybird; then, in chronological order: Land and Freedom (1995), Carla's Song (1996), My Name Is Joe (1998), Bread and Roses (2000), The Navigators (2001), Sweet Sixteen (2002), Ae Fond Kiss... (2004), The Wind That Shakes the Barley (2006) which won the Palme d'Or at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival, It's a Free World... (2007), Looking for Eric (2009), The Angels' Share (2012), the documentary film The Spirit of '45 (2013), and, most recently, Jimmy's Hall (2014).

Fenton has developed other long-standing collaborations with filmmakers, scoring several films each for directors as diverse as: Harold Ramis, Nora Ephron, Phil Joanou, Andy Tennant, and many others. These include Hussy (1980), Runners (1983), Clockwise (1986), 84 Charing Cross Road (1987), White Mischief (1987), A Handful of Dust (1988), The Dressmaker (1988), Memphis Belle (1990), The Long Walk Home (1990), The Fisher King (1991), Final Analysis (1992), Groundhog Day (1993), Born Yesterday (1993), Mixed Nuts (1994), Heaven's Prisoners (1996), Multiplicity (1996), You've Got Mail (1998), Anna and the King (1999), Bewitched (2005), Fool's Gold (2008), and The Bounty Hunter (2010).

In 1990, Fenton scored his first natural history documentary series, David Attenborough's The Trials of Life, and followed it up with Attenborough's next series, Life in the Freezer. This led to the producer Alastair Fothergill asking Fenton to compose the music for The Blue Planet in 2001, which began a 10-year period of writing for natural history television programmes, including Planet Earth, Frozen Planet, and Life. Fenton went on to turn The Blue Planet's score into the concert series The Blue Planet Live!, in which an orchestra played live to sections of the cinematic footage. In 2003, he scored and conducted the music for the documentary film Deep Blue, which was performed by the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra – the first film score the orchestra had recorded in its history. In 2007, they repeated the collaboration for the documentary film, Earth. With the producer Jane Carter, Fenton turned each of the scores into concert works. His live film scores continue to be performed by orchestras worldwide.[21]

Fenton founded the Association of Professional Composers which later amalgamated with the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors and with the Composers' Guild of Great Britain to become the British Academy of Composers & Songwriters. He is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and is a visiting professor at the Royal College of Music and the University of Nottingham.

He composed the score for "Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show" – a dinner show recreating the experience of the famous world travelling show of Buffalo Bill. The dinner show was created exclusively for the Disneyland Resort Paris and opened together with the resort (then EuroDisney Resort) on 12 April 1992. A recording was released by Walt Disney Records/Sony Records in France but is long out of print.

• Official website
• George Fenton at IMDb
• George Fenton at AllMusic
• George Fenton discography at Discogs
• George Fenton discography at MusicBrainz
• British Film Institute, Film and TV credits
• British Academy of Composers and Songwriters
• The Gorfaine / Schwartz Agency PDF file
• Desert Island Discs
• George Fenton's The Blue Planet Live!