James Bernard (2)

James Bernard (20 September 1925, Nathia Gali, India {Pakistan} — 12 July 2001, London, UK) was an English film composer notable for his contributions to the horror genre and extensive collaboration with Hammer Films studio that lasted almost forty years. (For copyright roles, please use James Bernard.) He often worked with his lifelong partner, librettist and screenwriter Paul Dehn (1912—1976). In 1952, Bernard and Dehn won the "Best Motion Picture Story Writing" Oscar — a notable achievement for James as an amateur; it was his first and sole foray into film scripts. Curiously, James Bernard never got professional accolades or nominations for his scores (even though critics and historians often cite him among the most seminal and impactful early horror film composers). Born in the British Army officer's family stationed in the Himalayas, James Bernard returned to England in his early childhood due to weak health. He attended Wellington College, an alma mater of the actor Christopher Lee (who starred in many Hammer Film productions that Bernard subsequently scored). In 1942, seventeen-year-old James first met renowned composer Benjamin Britten, who later became his mentor and close friend, during Britten's visit to Wellington to consult with the school's art master, Kenneth Green (4). During the Second World War, Bernard served in the Royal Air Force on the unit that tried to break the Enigma machine codes used by Germans and their Japanese allies. In 1944, Bernard met Paul Dehn, a Major of Political Warfare in MI6 who served for the clandestine Special Operations Executive unit. James and Paul began dating and moved together in an apartment on King's Road in London. Between 1946 and 49, James Bernard studied with Herbert Howells at the Royal College of Music. Soon after his graduation, in 1950, Benjamin Britten commissioned James to copy out his Billy Budd opera's score for Boosey & Hawkes. Around the same time, Bernard co-authored a Seven Days to Noon script with his partner, Paul Dehn, which they successfully pitched to The Boulting Brothers. Co-directed and co-produced by John and Roy Boulting, the movie was a critical and box office success, earning Dehn and Bernard the shared Academy Award for screenwriting. In 1953, BBC commissioned James to write incidental music for Patric Dickinson's radio play The Death of Hector; a few more BBC broadcast productions soon followed, including the XVII-century Jacobian "revenge tragedy," The Duchess of Malfi, starring Peggy Ashcroft, Richard Burton (2), and Paul Scofield. A distinguished conductor, John Hollingsworth, who regularly collaborated with Hammer Film Productions, enjoyed the work enough to note the young composer's name. When John Hotchkis, hired by Hammer Films to score their current production, fell ill, producers asked the conductor to suggest a replacement composer; Hollingsworth proposed James Bernard. In 1955, The Quatermass Xperiment sci-fi horror came out, with Bernard's score for strings and percussion performed by the Royal Opera House Orchestra. Predating Bernard Herrmann's iconic Psycho soundtrack by five years, James Bernard pioneered such techniques as using tone clusters or bowing on the wrong side of the bridge to create an uncanny, suspenseful mood. Between 1955 and 1974, he wrote thirty feature-length scores for Hammer Films; Bernard championed the "classic" horror series, starting with Dracula (1957) and The Curse of Frankenstein (58), and worked on other notable film adaptations, like Conan Doyle's Hound of the Baskervilles in 1959. After Paul Dehn died at sixty-four in 1976, James Bernard began dating actor Kenneth J McGregor (1932—1994). They lived in Jamaica for fifteen years in semi-retirement, when Bernard only sporadically contributed to TV productions and "Hammer Films" anthologies. After McGregor died in 1994, James returned to London. In 1997, a film historian, Kevin Brownlow, commissioned Bernard to write an original score for F.W. Murnau's 1922 silent horror classic, Nosferatu; he also composed music for Brownlow's Universal Horror (1998) documentary. Bernard's last jobs were on two horror shorts, including Paul Cotgrove's Green Fingers (2001), notable for the participation of Ingrid Pitt from the original Hammer Films cast.