Names such as Ennio Morricone or John Williams inevitably spring to mind when the conversation turns to film music composers, but the extraordinary and varied career of George Fenton undoubtedly earns him a place in the first rank of that profession. Fenton, who has died unexpectedly aged 76, made his decisive breakthrough into film music when, collaborating with Ravi Shankar, he created the score for Richard Attenborough’s 1982 film, Gandhi. This brought Fenton the first of his Oscar nominations, shared with Shankar.

He would be Oscar-nominated four more times, twice – for best original score and best original song – for Attenborough’s Cry Freedom (1987), along with Jonas Gwangwa, and for Stephen Frears’ Dangerous Liaisons (1988) and Terry Gilliam’s The Fisher King (1991). He would go on to have a long working relationship with Frears, as he did with the directors Ken Loach and Nicholas Hytner, as well as the playwright Alan Bennett.

Also greatly in demand for television work, he won Emmys in the 2000s for The Blue Planet and Planet Earth, the natural history series presented by David Attenborough, Baftas for his music for Bergerac, The Monocled Mutineer and The Blue Planet, and five Ivor Novello awards, for The Jewel in the Crown and The Monocled Mutineer, as well as his film work.

Yet his most familiar work to a British audience might be his short themes and idents for the BBC, including the Nine O’Clock News, Breakfast Time, Telly Addicts, Daily Politics, BBC World News and Radio 4’s PM programme. His prog rock-esque theme for Newsnight has survived from its 1980 inauguration to the present day.

The key to Fenton’s brilliant career was his versatility, enabling him to find the musical forms and instrumentation that best suited the project in hand. For Cry Freedom, he mixed African instruments with a western orchestra, and for The Madness of King George (1984), directed by Hytner, he incorporated arrangements of baroque pieces by Handel. He created sweeping symphonic textures for David Attenborough’s nature films, and deployed 1940s-style music-hall songs and a dance band for Frears’ 2005 film Mrs Henderson Presents.

About 10 years ago, his music publishing company calculated that he had composed and recorded 192 hours of music. “You could start playing my music on a Wednesday morning, for 24 hours a day, and it would still be playing the following Thursday,” he said. “That’s a particularly scary thought.”

Born in Bromley, then in Kent, George was one of the five children of Gwenda (nee Fenton) and Dick Howe. His father was a mechanical engineer, and had been a prisoner of war at Colditz in the second world war, where he helped to organise several escapes. His mother was a dancer and dance teacher, and both parents played instruments, his father the drums and his mother the piano.

George sang in church choirs as a boy, and started playing the electric guitar at age seven. The family’s chimney sweep, Brian Rudd, was also a musician, and gave George some early guitar lessons. He attended Carn Brea prep school, before going on to St Edward’s school in Oxford. At 12, he began studying the church organ, because “it beat all instruments in terms of loudness and colour”, with the school’s music teacher Peter Whitehouse, who Fenton would later describe as the most important figure in his musical life.

Deciding against going to university, he moved to London, where he took a variety of casual jobs and played in bands. He was a member of a group called Whistler when he answered a casting advert for a West End show. This resulted in him appearing in Bennett’s play 40 Years On, in 1968. It was then that he adopted his mother’s surname, Fenton, because the actors’ union Equity already had a George Howe on their books.

The following year he turned down a place at the Central School of Speech and Drama because he had been offered a record deal – his version of the Beatles’ song Maxwell’s Silver Hammer became a Top 10 hit in Sweden. He continued to find acting roles through the 1970s while composing and playing music, and for a year (1975-76) played Martin Gimbel in the ITV soap then called Emmerdale Farm.

His career took a decisive turn in 1974 when he was hired as composer and musical director for the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of Twelfth Night at Stratford-upon-Avon, the first of nine collaborations with the director Peter Gill. This brought Fenton to the attention of the National Theatre as well as regional companies, and he amassed a long list of theatre credits, among them the David Hare plays The Judas Kiss, Racing Demon and, more recently, Beat the Devil, as well as the stage version of Simon Gray’s memoir The Last Cigarette in 2009.

His first scoring job for the small screen was for the first of Stephen Poliakoff’s plays to be shown on television, Hitting Town (1976), directed by Gill. A deluge of TV commissions followed, including LWT’s Six Plays by Alan Bennett (four of which were directed by Frears), Bennett’s An Englishman Abroad, Malcolm Bradbury’s The History Man and many more.

It was while working at the RSC that he met Michael Attenborough, Richard’s son, and the company’s joint artistic director. He insisted on sending a tape of Fenton’s work to his director father, who then hired him for Gandhi.

Once he had established himself in film, he became the go-to composer for several major directors. As well as Frears, with whom he also worked on the 90s films Hero and Mary Reilly, and the 2013 TV movie Muhammad Ali’s Greatest Fight, in the 80s he scored The Company of Wolves, High Spirits and We’re No Angels for Neil Jordan, and he worked on all Hytner’s films from The Madness of King George to The Choral (2025), both collaborations with Bennett, as were The History Boys and The Lady in the Van in the 2000s. On the last of these, Bennett commented of Fenton that “his music, and the placing of the music, makes the film”. Fenton’s partnership with Loach began with Ladybird, Ladybird in 1994, stretched through to The Old Oak (2023), and included the 2006 Cannes Palme D’Or winner The Wind that Shakes the Barley.

Inevitably, Hollywood came calling, and the prolific Fenton scored Harold Ramis’s Groundhog Day (1993) and Nora Ephron’s You’ve Got Mail (1998), among others. Another regular client was Andy Tennant, with whom Fenton collaborated on Anna and the King (1999) and Sweet Home Alabama (2002), among many others.

In 2015, Fenton was given the World Soundtrack Awards’ lifetime achievement honour. He founded the Association of Professional Composers, which was later amalgated into what is now The Ivors Academy, of which Fenton was a fellow. He was made CBE in 2023.

His first marriage, to Jane, ended in divorce. He is survived by his second wife, Amanda, his daughters, Gemma, Grace and Bridget, and six grandchildren, Lola, Audrey, Alfred, George, Frank and Beatrice.

• George Fenton (George Richard Ian Howe), composer and musician, born 19 October 1949; died 5 October 2026