Harry Horner

Harry Horner (July 24, 1910 – December 5, 1994) was a Czech-born American art director, stage designer, and film and television director. Born in Holice, Bohemia, in what was then Austria-Hungary, he appeared on Broadway as a performer in 1936, with credits including Escape This Night and Iron Men, before establishing himself as one of Hollywood's most accomplished production designers. He was the father of Academy Award-winning film composer James Horner.

Horner began his professional life in Vienna working under the influential theater director Max Reinhardt. When Reinhardt relocated to the United States in the early 1930s, Horner accompanied him as part of his production group, serving as stage manager. In that capacity, Horner worked on Reinhardt's 1934 staging of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, where he also appeared as an actor in the production. He continued in the stage manager role when Reinhardt mounted the Biblical musical spectacle The Eternal Road in New York, a production featuring music by Kurt Weill, scenic design and costumes by Norman Bel Geddes, and conducted by Horner. The show ran at the Manhattan Opera House from January 7 to May 15, 1937. When Bel Geddes repeatedly failed to attend rehearsals, Reinhardt turned to Horner to supervise the sets, costumes, and lighting, a circumstance that redirected Horner's career toward scenic and production design.

Following that experience, Horner was engaged as a stage designer and went on to design the scenery for Lady in the Dark, a drama with a musical dream sequence composed by Kurt Weill, which opened on January 23, 1941, and ran through multiple engagements into 1943. His design for that production introduced the first use of a center-stage donut turntable ring, with inner and outer rings moving simultaneously in opposite directions, marking the first turntable usage on a Broadway stage. During World War II, Horner served as production designer and set designer for the U.S. Army Air Forces show Winged Victory.

His transition to Hollywood yielded significant recognition. An early notable success came with George Cukor's A Double Life in 1947, and Horner won his first Academy Award for art direction in 1949 for his work on William Wyler's The Heiress. He collaborated with Cukor again in 1950 on Born Yesterday. Horner won a second Oscar in 1961 for his work on Robert Rossen's The Hustler, with Gene Callahan serving as the film's set decorator. He received a third Academy Award nomination in 1969 for Sydney Pollack's They Shoot Horses, Don't They?

Horner also directed a number of feature films, beginning with Red Planet Mars and Beware, My Lovely, both released in 1952, followed by Vicki (1953), New Faces (1954), A Life in the Balance (1955), Man from Del Rio (1956), and The Wild Party (1956). He additionally directed episodes of television series including Gunsmoke. His final professional credit was the Neil Diamond remake of The Jazz Singer in 1980, after which he retired.

In his personal life, Horner married Betty Pfaelzer in 1938; she died in 1951. He married Joan Ruth Fraenkel in 1952, and she remained his wife until his death. Together they had three sons, the eldest of whom was composer James Horner. Harry Horner died of pneumonia on December 5, 1994, in Pacific Palisades, California, at the age of 84. His papers are preserved at the UCLA Charles E. Young Research Library Special Collections and Archives.