| Biography | Michael J Lewis, the award winning composer and producer was born in Aberystwyth, Wales. He started his career as a choirboy, aged six, became church organist at ten and later trained at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London where he studied harmony, counterpoint and composition. He scored his first movie The Madwoman of Chaillot, starring Katharine Hepburn in 1968, for which he won the Ivor Novello Award for Best Film Score. His many subsequent scores include Julius Caesar starring Charlton Heston, The Medusa Touch starring Richard Burton, 11 Harrowhouse with Candice Bergen and Theatre of Blood starring Vincent Price and Diana Rigg.
His Broadway show, Cyrano, written with Anthony Burgess (A Clockwork Orange), earned the writers a Grammy nomination and the show's star, Christopher Plummer, a Tony Award. Michael's score for the 1979 TV animated adaptation of C.S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe won him a coveted Emmy Award. He moved from the UK to the USA in the 1980s and his first venture into American films, scoring The Rose and the Jackal (starring Christopher Reeve), received an American Cable Excellence nomination. Upon This Rock, a dramatized documentary of St. Peters Basilica in Rome, starring Orson Welles, Sir Ralph Richardson, Dame Edith Evans and Dirk Bogarde, had one showing on Network television in the United States and has never been seen since. Michaels music for Upon This Rock was regarded by Gramophone Film Music Guide as This magnificent score is as powerful as anything that Alex North (Spartacus) or Miklos Rozsa (Ben Hur) could have ever done.
In 2005, KMozart, Los Angeles, devoted an entire program to a rare broadcast of this music. |