Biography

Born on August 21, 1945, in Kansas City, Missouri, to Greek immigrant parents originally from Messenia in the Peloponnese, Poledouris was raised in the Greek Orthodox Church. He sat transfixed by choir services as a small child — an early encounter with choral music that would echo decades later in the opening bars of The Hunt for Red October and the liturgical grandeur of Conan the Barbarian. He began piano lessons at seven, initially aiming for a concert career.

After graduating from Garden Grove High School, Poledouris enrolled at Long Beach State University on scholarship, where he quickly grew disillusioned with the atonal and serial composition that dominated academic music at the time. He was drawn instead to the work of film composer Miklós Rózsa, whose big, romantic orchestral scores suggested a world where music could still be heroic, lyrical, and accessible. Following Rózsa's lead, Poledouris transferred to the film school at the University of Southern California — and the timing proved extraordinary. His classmates included George Lucas, John Milius, and Randal Kleiser, each of whom would shape American cinema and several of whom would become Poledouris's most important creative partners.

After graduation, Poledouris spent years scoring educational films and documentary television — more than a hundred of them — which gave him invaluable practical experience with smaller orchestral sections, choir writing, and the mechanics of matching music to image. His break came in 1978 when John Milius invited him to score Big Wednesday, a surfing drama set across three decades. It was the first time Poledouris heard his own music played by a full symphony orchestra. "I had done about a hundred of these things before Big Wednesday," he later recalled, "and that was the first time I really got to hear my work played by a group of that size."

Then came 1982 and Conan the Barbarian. The score Poledouris wrote for Milius's epic fantasy — choral, barbaric, sweepingly romantic — was unlike anything Hollywood had produced in years. It drew on his Greek heritage, his Orthodox upbringing, and his love of Rózsa's grand historical scores, fusing them into something wholly original. The music runs almost continuously through the film and functions as a second protagonist. It announced the arrival of a singular talent. The film composing community took notice. So did the studios.

What followed was one of the most varied careers in Hollywood music. Poledouris worked with Paul Verhoeven — first meeting for the medieval adventure Flesh & Blood in 1985, then delivering the iconic, anvil-driven march for RoboCop in 1987 (which won the BMI Film Music Award), and finally spending an extraordinary nine months writing the vast, complex score for Starship Troopers in 1997. Each Verhoeven collaboration found Poledouris playing his earnest romanticism against Verhoeven's ironic detachment — a productive creative tension that enriched both the scores and the films.

In 1989, his score for the four-part CBS miniseries Lonesome Dove won him the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Music Composition. The title theme — a gently rolling, spare melody — became one of the most instantly recognizable pieces of music ever written for American television. Within a year, his opening choral anthem for The Hunt for Red October transformed John McTiernan's Cold War thriller into something ancient and mythic, earning him another BMI Film Music Award.

Poledouris scored family films (Free Willy, winning a third BMI Award; Lassie; The Jungle Book), action pictures (Under Siege 2, On Deadly Ground), and offbeat comedies. He found an unlikely collaborator in director John Waters, for whom he wrote a straight-faced orchestral score for Serial Mom (1994) — the deliberate incongruity between music and subject matter delighted Waters. In 1996, he was commissioned to compose "The Tradition of the Games" for the opening ceremony of the Atlanta Olympics, joining a small and distinguished group of composers so honored. That same year he scored It's My Party, an intimate AIDS drama for Randal Kleiser, entirely for solo piano — one of his most personal and vulnerable performances.

Poledouris worked from his studio, "Blowtorch Flats," in Venice, California. He married his wife Bobbie in 1969; they had two daughters, Zoë and Alexis. His elder daughter Zoë became an actress and film composer who occasionally collaborated with her father — including, memorably, on Conan the Barbarian, where a melody she invented as a small child was woven into the score. He spent the last four years of his life on Vashon Island, Washington. On November 8, 2006, he died of lung cancer in Los Angeles, aged 61.

He never received an Academy Award nomination — an oversight that still puzzles the community that admired him most. But among those who love film music, and among the generations of listeners who felt something shift in them at the first notes of the Conan theme or the Lonesome Dove title music, his reputation has only grown. He was, as those who knew him said, someone who believed in music's power to move people in ways nothing else could — and proved it, score after score, for nearly four decades.