George Fenton
The Society of Composers & Lyricists mourns the passing of our dear friend and colleague George Fenton.
George was a musician in the truest sense. A guitarist, arranger, performer, recording artist and composer whose career encompassed film, television, theatre, popular music and the concert stage, his music enriched some of the most memorable films and television programs of the past half-century.
Having begun his professional life playing guitar, working as a session musician and arranger, and recording with his own band, George understood musicians and the recording process from the inside, and colleagues admired him not only for his extraordinary compositional gifts but also for the way he worked with other musicians.
His breakthrough came with Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi (1982), which he co-scored with Ravi Shankar, and which earned him his first Academy Award® nomination. It began a long association with Attenborough and led to such celebrated scores as Cry Freedom, Shadowlands and Chaplin. George’s versatility was extraordinary. He wrote the sophisticated period score for Dangerous Liaisons, the haunting music for The Fisher King, and the witty, romantic scores for Groundhog Day and You’ve Got Mail. He also developed a particularly fruitful collaboration with director Ken Loach, scoring nearly 20 films.
But perhaps his most widely heard music came from his work with David Attenborough. Beginning with The Trials of Life, George went on to score The Blue Planet, Planet Earth, Frozen Planet, Life and Wild Isles. His music gave the natural world an emotional and dramatic vocabulary that became inseparable from the extraordinary images on screen. George was also among the first film composers to successfully bring his scores into the concert hall. The Blue Planet Live! became a major touring orchestral production, while his music for Deep Blue and Earth was recorded by the Berlin Philharmonic, the first film-score recording in the orchestra’s history.
Throughout his career, George received five Academy Award nominations, along with BAFTAs, Emmys, Ivor Novello Awards and numerous other honors. In 2023, he was appointed a CBE for services to music.
Always a musician at heart, George understood that creating music was fundamentally about collaboration, with directors, performers, engineers and fellow musicians all making valuable contributions. His legacy is that of someone who could move effortlessly from Shakespeare to Hollywood, from a recording studio to the world’s greatest concert halls, and remain unmistakably himself.
To George Fenton, all of it was music, and the world should be grateful he spent his life making such memorable music.
May he rest in peace.
Ashley Irwin
SCL President