Henry Mancini
The sounds of Henry Mancini set the gold standard for film and television scoring. Born in 1924 in Cleveland as Enrico Nicola, Henry played piano, flute and piccolo with his father. At Carnegie Tech he studied piano, and then entered Juilliard for composition and theory. War service interrupted his Juilliard studies. After the war, Mancini joined the Glenn Miller Orchestra, then led by Tex Beneke, as a pianist and arranger. In 1952, Mancini moved to Los Angeles and began work as an in-house composer for Universal Pictures. Over the next six years, Mancini worked on scores of movies, including Creature from the Black Lagoon and It Came from Outer Space. He also received his first Oscar nomination for Universal's The Glenn Miller Story. In 1958, Mancini began to collaborate with the producer and director Blake Edwards. First on the television show Peter Gunn, and then through twenty-six movies, including Days of Wine and Roses, The Great Race, Victor/Victoria, 10, and S.O.B., Blake and Mancini made some indelible music. Perhaps the two most lasting Mancini compositions are "Moon River" from Breakfast at Tiffany's, and the theme song to the Pink Panther movies. Mancini also worked with other directors, such as Orson Welles on Touch of Evil, created pop albums across musical styles, such as those with James Galway and Luciano Pavarotti, and along the way earned four Oscars, twenty Grammy awards (from seventy-three nominations), and two Emmys. Henry Mancini died in 1994 in Beverly Hills.
