AN
Alex North
American composer
1910 – 1991aged 80
A film composer who brought jazz into the Hollywood score with his 1951 music for A Streetcar Named Desire, then scored Spartacus, Cleopatra, and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? across fifteen Academy Award nominations without ever winning — an omission the Academy corrected with an honorary Oscar in 1986, the first ever given to a composer. His rejected theme for the 1955 film Unchained became the standard "Unchained Melody," recorded more than 1,500 times.