Monty Norman

Born Monty Noserovitch on April 4, 1928, in London, England, composer Monty Norman actually started his professional life in the Royal Air Force. During that time, he began to develop an interest in singing; soon he started working as a singer for various big bands in the 1950s and 60s; he sang for bandleaders such as Stanley Black, Ted Heath, Cyril Stapleton, and Nat Temple. He also started composing music for theater in the late 1950s and would go on to work on plays such as Make Me an Offer (1954) and Expresso Bongo (1958). Later on, he would work on plays such as Songbook, which was nominated for a Tony Award and won an Ivor Novello Award, and Poppy (1982), which won the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Musical. Throughout the course of the 1960s, Monty Norman worked on films such as The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll (1960) and The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961) and wrote the score for the first James Bond film, Dr. No in 1962. The accompanying soundtrack album, Dr. No (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack Album), along with its theme song "James Bond Theme," were a commercial success in 1963 and the song went on to become one of the most iconic and instantly recognizable pieces of music in cinema. He passed away on July 11, 2022, at the age of 94 after succumbing to an undisclosed illness.

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