John Barry

Five Academy Awards®. Four GRAMMYS®. One half-century of making some of the best-known, most admired music in all of filmdom. If ever a cinematic artiste could be called a composer's composer, it was John Barry — not just because of his phenomenal success, but also because he was almost an anti-stylist; like Johnny Depp or Dustin Hoffman, Barry seemed to become a new person with every role he took on. He just about single-handedly defined the sound of swingin' '60s spydom with "The James Bond Theme (From 'Dr. No')." But he was equally comfortable in the wilds of Africa, as you'll hear in the majestic "Born Free," which won him his first Oscar® — he also got a second for that film's score — in 1966. And he took a pastoral turn in "The John Dunbar Theme" from his score for Dances With Wolves, winning awards from both the motion picture and recording academies.

In Next Steps, we'll hear when Mr. Barry retired to the lounge for some bachelor pad beauties.

When he put his mind to it, John Barry proved himself to be a swinger's swinger, and could lounge it up with the best of them. Take the slinky seduction of "Blues for Bubber," written for Robert Redford's character in the 1966 film The Chase, all saxed up and dry as a double martini. Or the groovy glide of the main theme from The Knack and How to Get It, the 1965 glimpse of how England swings like a pendulum . . . setting the stage for Austin Powers more than three decades later. But if you want to hear Barry at his most smashing, baby, you have to check out his "Beat Girl," which is not only far more memorable than the film it comes from, but also hints at massive things to come, with its "Rock Lobster"-style guitar riff and a big, bold, blast of brass.

In Deep Cuts, Barry took us to three different continents with three very diverse sounds.

In our Deep Cuts, John Barry was all over the map — both geographically and stylistically. Two decades after Barry won his first Oscar® for Born Free, he traveled back to the Dark Continent for the score to 1985's Out of Africa, a sweeping epic that demanded a regal score. He totally nailed it, as the stately "Karen's Journey/Siyawe" demonstrated, winning yet another Academy Award® in the process. In 1965's King Rat, based on the James Clavell novel about WWII soldiers in a Japanese POW camp in Singapore, Barry summoned up a John Philip Sousa-meets-Elmer Bernstein martial vibe for its "King Rat March." And no cinematic résumé would be complete without a sagebrush saga, so Barry dons the saddlebags and spurs in "The Good Times Are Comin' (From 'Monte Walsh')," a theme as expansive and untamed as the West itself.

You may not know the name Jonathan Barry Prendergast — after all, it's not the name he went by for the last half-century or so — but we can guarantee you know John Barry's music. After all, it's just as much a part of film history's all-time most successful series as the three simple words that introduced a man with the license to kill: "Bond. James Bond." Surprisingly, the four-time GRAMMY®-winning and five-time Academy Award®-winning composer didn't get a golden statuette for any of the Bond films, but for movies whose sound is as different as their stories, from Midnight Cowboy to Dances With Wolves. Unlike some of his celebrated peers (John Williams, Danny Elfman, and Ennio Morricone leap to mind), Barry didn't have an instantly recognizable style, but he adapted to his material, like the great actors who have played in the films he's scored. We've assembled half-a-century's worth of his very best, right at your fingertips.