Eric James (2)

Eric James (11 August 1913, London, UK — 28 March 2006, Whitby, Ontario, Canada) was a British-Canadian pianist, composer, and arranger best known for his extensive collaboration with Charlie Chaplin that lasted over two decades; he wrote original music for most of his last films and several silent era classics reissues. Playing piano since early childhood, James dropped out of high school at fifteen to work as a cinema organist at Savoy Theatre in Uxbridge, where he accompanied numerous silent films live; this experience proved invaluable in later years, as Eric effectively self-taught the art of film scoring. In 1931, as sound films gradually took over the industry, he lost the Savoy gig. James then joined the Sun publisher as a song plugger and later became a manager at Southern Music. In 1939, he quit the publishing industry and joined singer Elsie Carlisle as a tour accompanist for two years, interrupted by military service in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War. After WWII, Eric James joined Charles Shadwell's orchestra and hosted a solo BBC radio program, "Piano Playtime." He performed with several vocalists and singers, such as Ann Blyth, and served as a pianist on board of P&O Cruises ship. James first met Charlie Chaplin in 1956 at Shepperton Studios in London, invited to work on A King in New York film; Eric had to play Chaplin's "A Thousand Windows Smile at Me" precisely synchronized with the actor's on-screen movements. Impressed with his performance, Charlie Chaplin soon invited James to his Swiss home to work on new scores for reissues of Chaplin's silent era classics. They established a prolific collaboration, where James would render and arrange Chaplin's rough ideas and hummed melodies as complete orchestral scores. For The Chaplin Revue's theatrical release in 1959, he encouraged James to pick any screen credit he liked, resulting in "Music written and composed by Eric James in spite of Charlie Chaplin." Subsequently, Eric became Chaplin's sole musical associate and worked on all later films, including A Countess from Hong Kong (1967) and reissues of the early 1920s iconic movies, like The Kid and The Circus. Their final project, an opera based on Thomas Hardy's novel Tess of the d'Urbervilles for La Scala in Milan, was canceled after Chaplin died in December 1977. James emigrated to Canada in 1987. He continued working on various Chaplin posthumous projects, hired by TV Ontario in 1990 to compose piano accompaniments for thirty silent shorts made in 1914–18. In 2000, Eric James published a ghost-written memoir, Making Music with Charlie Chaplin; a documentary dedicated to his life, Silent Music: The Story of Eric James, came out in 2002.