Henry Mancini

Henry Mancini, born Enrico Nicola Mancini on April 16, 1924, in Cleveland, Ohio, was an American composer, conductor, arranger, pianist, and flutist who also appeared on Broadway. He was raised in West Aliquippa, Pennsylvania, by Italian immigrant parents: his father, Quintiliano "Quinto" Mancini, a laborer at the Jones and Laughlin Steel Company and amateur musician originally from Scanno, Abruzzo, who first came to the United States around 1910, and his mother, Anna (née Pece), who had emigrated as an infant from Forlì del Sannio, Molise. Over the course of his career, Mancini accumulated four Academy Awards, a Golden Globe, twenty Grammy Awards, and a posthumous Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1995.

Mancini's musical education began at age eight with the piccolo. Hearing Rudolph G. Kopp's score for the 1935 Cecil B. DeMille film The Crusades pointed him toward film music composition, a direction his father opposed, preferring that his son become a teacher. At twelve, Mancini began studying piano and orchestral arrangement under Max Adkins, a Pittsburgh concert pianist and conductor at the Stanley Theatre. Through Adkins, Mancini was introduced to bandleader Benny Goodman, for whom he wrote an arrangement. After graduating from Aliquippa High School in 1942, Mancini briefly attended the Carnegie Institute of Technology before transferring to the Juilliard School of Music in New York City, where his audition included a Beethoven sonata and an improvisation on Cole Porter's "Night and Day."

Following his eighteenth birthday, Mancini enlisted in the United States Army Air Forces in 1943. During basic training in Atlantic City, New Jersey, he encountered musicians being recruited by Glenn Miller, and on Miller's recommendation was assigned first to the 28th Air Force Band before being sent overseas to the 1306th Engineers Brigade in France. In 1945, he participated in the liberation of the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp in Austria. After his discharge, Mancini joined the reconstituted Glenn Miller Orchestra, led by Tex Beneke, as a pianist and arranger in 1946. He subsequently studied composition, counterpoint, harmony, and orchestration with composers Ernst Krenek and Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco.

In 1952, Mancini joined Universal-International's music department, where over the following six years he contributed to more than 100 films, among them Creature from the Black Lagoon, It Came from Outer Space, Tarantula, This Island Earth, The Glenn Miller Story, The Benny Goodman Story, and Orson Welles' Touch of Evil. His first Academy Award nomination came for The Glenn Miller Story. He departed Universal-International in 1958 to work as an independent composer and arranger, and almost immediately began scoring the television series Peter Gunn for writer and producer Blake Edwards. That collaboration grew into a partnership spanning 30 films over 35 years, encompassing Breakfast at Tiffany's, which produced the standard "Moon River," Days of Wine and Roses, Experiment in Terror, The Pink Panther and its sequels, The Great Race, The Party, 10, and Victor Victoria. The Music from Peter Gunn won the inaugural Grammy Award for Album of the Year.

Among Mancini's most recognized works are "The Pink Panther Theme" and "Moon River," the latter from Breakfast at Tiffany's. His arrangement and recording of the "Love Theme from Romeo and Juliet" reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 for two weeks beginning with the chart dated June 28, 1969. Beyond his work with Edwards, Mancini maintained long collaborations with director Stanley Donen on films including Charade, Arabesque, and Two for the Road, and composed scores for directors including Howard Hawks, Martin Ritt, Vittorio de Sica, Norman Jewison, Stanley Kramer, George Roy Hill, and Arthur Hiller. His proposed score for Alfred Hitchcock's Frenzy in 1972 was rejected and replaced by Ron Goodwin's work.

Mancini's television work was equally extensive. He composed the theme for the NBC Nightly News beginning in 1975, and his piece Salute to the President served NBC News election coverage from 1976 to 1992. During the 1984–85 television season alone, four series carried original Mancini themes: Newhart, Hotel, Remington Steele, and Ripley's Believe It or Not. He also scored television movies including The Moneychangers, The Thorn Birds, and The Shadow Box, and composed the "Viewer Mail" theme for Late Night with David Letterman. His songs were recorded by artists including Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Peggy Lee, Sarah Vaughan, Andy Williams, Quincy Jones, Herb Alpert, Johnny Mathis, and the Boston Pops Orchestra, among many others.

On Broadway, Mancini appeared in 1974 in Anthony Newley / Henry Mancini and later in Victor / Victoria, the stage adaptation of the Blake Edwards film he had originally scored. He served as both a performer and book writer in his Broadway work. Mancini died on June 14, 1994.