Howard Shore
Early life and career
Shore was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, the son of Jewish parents Bernice (née Ash) and Mac Shore. He started studying music around the age of 8 or 9. He learned a multitude of instruments and began playing in bands at the ages of 13 and 14. When Shore was 13, he met and became good friends with a young Lorne Michaels in summer camp, and this friendship would later be influential in his career. By 17, he decided he wanted to pursue music in his adult life too. He studied music at Berklee College of Music in Boston after graduating from Forest Hill Collegiate Institute.
Early life and career
From 1969 to 1972, Shore was a member of the jazz fusion band Lighthouse). In 1970, he became the music director for Lorne Michaels and Hart Pomerantz's short-lived TV program The Hart & Lorne Terrific Hour. Shore wrote the music for Canadian magician Doug Henning's magic musical Spellbound in 1974 and, from 1975 to 1980, he was the musical director for Michaels' influential late-night NBC sketch comedy show Saturday Night Live, appearing in many musical sketches, including Howard Shore and His All-Nurse Band, and dressed as a beekeeper for a Dan Aykroyd/John Belushi performance of the Slim Harpo classic "I'm a King Bee". Shore also suggested the name for the Blues Brothers to Aykroyd and Belushi.
1978–2000
During 1991, Shore composed the score for the highly acclaimed film The Silence of the Lambs), starring Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins, and directed by Jonathan Demme. He received his first BAFTA nomination for the score. The film became the third (and most recent) to win the five major Academy Awards (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Actor, and Best Actress). Shore is the only living composer to have scored a "Top Five" Oscar-winning film.
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