Composer Miklos Rozsa (1907-1995), whose evocative scores enhanced many a film noir and MGM epic, was born in Budapest and studied the violin from the age of five. After creating chamber and symphonic works and composing the ballet Hungaria, he began creating film scores for fellow Hungarian producer Alexander Korda in the late 1930s. While composing the score for The Thief of Bagdad (1940), Rozsa moved to California.

Rozsa won a total of 17 Academy Award® nominations for his scores, including those for such film noirs as Double Indemnity (1944), The Lost Weekend (1945) and The Killers (1946), which introduced the "dum-de-dum-dum" later to be used in the score for TV's Dragnet. Another memorable Rozsa noir score is for the Barbara Stanwyck melodrama The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946). He won Oscars® for the Alfred Hitchcock thriller Spellbound (1945), George Cukor's psychological drama A Double Life (1947) and the remake of Ben-Hur (1959), for which he created some of his most majestic music.

Other epics for which Rozsa was Oscar®-nominated included Quo Vadis? (1951) and Ivanhoe (1952). His MGM period also included scores for the Korean War drama Men of the Fighting Lady (1954) and the sci-fi mystery The Power (1968).

by Roger Fristoe