Biography

Elliot Goldenthal is an American composer of contemporary classical music. He was a student of Aaron Copland and John Corigliano, and is best known for his distinctive style and ability to blend various musical styles and techniques in original and inventive ways. He is also a film-music composer, and won the Academy Award for Best Original Score in 2002 for his score to the motion picture Frida, directed by his long-time partner Julie Taymor.

Goldenthal lived in a multi-cultural part of town, and this is reflected in his works. He attended John Dewey High School in Brooklyn where, at the age of 14, he had his very first ballet Variations on Early Glimpses performed; he continued to display his eclectic musical range, performing with rock bands in the seventies. He then studied music full-time at the prestigious Manhattan School of Music, where he studied with composer John Corigliano (whom he greatly admired), to earn his Bachelor of Music degree (1977) and Master of Music (1979) in musical composition.

Most Notable Awards

17 Award Wins, 16 Nominations

Academy Award	1 Win
Golden Globe	1 Win

Goldenthal has written works for concert hall, theater, dance and film. His work includes music for films such as Alien 3, Michael Collins, Batman Forever, Heat and the Academy Award-winning score for Julie Taymor's "Frida", a movie in which Goldenthal had a small acting part as a "Newsreel Reporter". Incidentally he also had a small part in the stage show "Juan Darien" as a "Circus Barker / Streetsinger". The Tony-Award winning carnival mass Juan Darien (1988/'96) and The Green Bird (1999), based on a story by Carlo Gozzi, are a few of the composer's theater works. In 2006, Goldenthal completed his original three-act opera with Taymor entitled Grendel an adaptation of the John Gardner novel which told the story of Beowulf from the monster's point of view. It had its world premiere in early June 2006 at the Los Angeles Opera, the role of Grendel performed by Eric Owens, with an audience containing the likes of John Williams and Emmy Rossum; the opus was added to the Los Angeles Opera's permanent repertoire and earned Goldenthal a nomination in April 2007 for the Pulitzer Prize for Music. In 2008 Goldenthal reunited with Michael Mann to score 1930s gangster movie Public Enemies and in 2009 he scored another Julie Taymor Shakespeare adaptation, The Tempest. He has also collaborated four times with Irish director Neil Jordan, scoring movies like Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles and In Dreams.