George Fenton


George Fenton is an English composer best known for his work writing film scores and music for television. He composed the themes for several programs on the BBC, including Newsnight, Bergerac, The Blue Planet and Planet Earth. He is also known for his work on films like Groundhog Day, Gandhi, The Fisher King, The Wind That Shakes The Barley, Dangerous Liaisons, You've Got Mail and The Bounty Hunter. He is a frequent collaborator of directors Ken Loach, Richard Attenborough, Nicholas Hynter, Stephen Frears and Terry Gilliam.

Early career

George Fenton was born in 1949 in Bromley, Kent, one of five siblings. His father was a mechanical engineer, and his mother had been a dancer and dance teacher before becoming a nurse during the war. Both his parents were musical – his mother played the piano and his father the drums – but weren't professional musicians. However, his great grandfather on his father's side was a conductor, and as a child had been a chorister and had even sung at the funeral of the first Duke of Wellington. George sang in church choirs as a boy, but it was the electric guitar – a Rosetti Lucky 7 – that first won his heart at the age of 7. Fenton attended St Edward's School in Oxford where "he learnt his music" from Peter Whitehouse. He has no further formal training in music. Fenton's involvement with St Edward's continued as an adult and he has been a governor of the school since 1998.
Fenton initially worked as an actor, changing his name as there was already a George Howe, and getting an early break in 1968 with a part in Alan Bennett's first West End play Forty Years On. He had some success as an actor in the early 1970s appearing in the film Private Road, in Alan Bennett's first television play A Day Out directed by Stephen Frears, and in the soap opera Emmerdale Farm. In 1969, Fenton tried his hand as a recording artist with a cover of The Beatles song "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" and recorded piano for the folk group The Peelers on their Polydor LP "Banished Misfortune". In 1973 he dabbled in band management helping to get the folk-rock band Hunter Muskett a recording contract with Bradley's Records. While working as an actor Fenton was frequently asked by directors to play an instrument and he decided on a career switch to composing music.

Theatre

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.
Throughout the rest of the 1970s and early 1980s Fenton worked frequently as a composer for theatre productions. 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, while the following 3 were at the National Theatre after Gill became Associate Director in 1980.
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.
He continued to work with the prestigious Royal Shakespeare Company composing for 4 of their productions between 1981 and 1985, working again with Adrian Noble on Anthony and Cleopatra in 1982, and most recently with Othello in 1999 directed by Michael Attenborough.
Since the mid 1980s Fenton's theatre work has become sporadic, just 7 productions since 1987, as opposed to over 100 television and film scores. From time to time he still composes for the theatre, often when working with long-term collaborators such as Richard Eyre, and Nicholas Hytner. His most unusual theatre work occurred in 1992 when he wrote the music for Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, a dinner theater show at Disneyland Paris which The New York Times described as a "fake-rodeo-cum-dinner-theater" and the "indisputable highlight in the live performance category".
In 2015, he teamed up with Simon Chamberlain, to compose the music for Mrs Henderson Presents, with lyrics by Don Black.

Television drama

Fenton wrote his first television score in 1976. 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, 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. 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 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, Going Gently, Walter and .
By the mid-1980s Fenton was composing for big budget TV series including the multi BAFTA winning The Jewel in the Crown and The Monocled Mutineer.

Wildlife television

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."
Since 1990 he has written the music for a number of big budget wildlife series.
His track record in this genre has placed him firmly as the BBC's composer of choice for its flagship wildlife programmes.

Television and radio jingles

Fenton has composed the jingles or theme music to dozens of British television and radio programs, mostly for the BBC. 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.

Feature films

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.
Together with Michael Feast and David Dundas he co-wrote the music for Private Road, a film he and Feast also starred in.
His film scoring as a professional composer began in 1982 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. 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." Fenton wrote another four film scores for Attenborough's films; Cry Freedom, Shadowlands, In Love and War, and Grey Owl.
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, The Crucible, The Object of My Affection, Center Stage, The History Boys, and The Lady in the Van. 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.
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, Hero, Mary Reilly, and Mrs Henderson Presents. He has also worked with director Neil Jordan; scoring The Company of Wolves, High Spirits, and We're No Angels.
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, Carla's Song, My Name Is Joe, Bread and Roses, The Navigators, Sweet Sixteen, Ae Fond Kiss..., The Wind That Shakes the Barley which won the Palme d'Or at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival, It's a Free World..., Looking for Eric, The Angels' Share, the documentary film The Spirit of '45, and, most recently, Jimmy's Hall.
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, Runners, Clockwise, 84 Charing Cross Road, White Mischief, A Handful of Dust, The Dressmaker, Memphis Belle, The Long Walk Home, The Fisher King, Final Analysis, Groundhog Day, Born Yesterday, Mixed Nuts, Heaven's Prisoners, Multiplicity, You've Got Mail, Anna and the King, Bewitched, Fool's Gold, and The Bounty Hunter.

Live

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 Planets 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.

Discography

Films

Awards and nominations

Academy Awards

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 on 12 April 1992. A recording was released by Walt Disney Records/Sony Records in France but is long out of print.