Alex North
Alex North | |
|---|---|
| Birth name | Isadore Soifer |
| Born | December 4, 1910 Chester, Pennsylvania, U.S. |
| Died | September 8, 1991 (aged 80) Los Angeles, California, U.S. |
| Genres | Film score, theatre, classical rock, jazz rock |
| Occupation | Composer |
Alex North (born Isadore Soifer; December 4, 1910 – September 8, 1991) was an American composer best known for his many film scores, including A Streetcar Named Desire (one of the first jazz-based film scores), Viva Zapata!, Spartacus, Cleopatra, and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? He received fifteen Academy Award nominations for his work as a composer; while he did not win for any of his nominations, he received an Honorary Academy Award in 1986, the first for a composer.
He wrote the music for the Oscar-nominated song "Unchained Melody", which was used in the 1955 prison film Unchained. The song became a standard and one of the most recorded of the 20th century, with over 1,500 recordings made by more than 670 artists, in multiple languages.