Henry Mancini (born Enrico Nicola Mancini; April 16, 1924 – June 14, 1994) was an American composer, conductor, arranger, pianist, and flutist. He is often considered one of the greatest film composers in history. He won four Academy Awards, one Golden Globe Award, twenty Grammy Awards, and a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award given after his death in 1995.
His work includes the theme and soundtrack for the television series Peter Gunn, the music for the Pink Panther film series ("The Pink Panther Theme"), and "Moon River" from the movie Breakfast at Tiffany's. The music from Peter Gunn won the first Grammy Award for Album of the Year. Mancini worked closely with film director Blake Edwards for many years to create film scores. He also arranged and recorded a number one hit on the Hot 100 chart during the rock era: "Love Theme from Romeo and Juliet," which spent two weeks at the top, starting with the week ending June 28, 1969.
Early life
Henry Mancini was born Enrico Nicola Mancini in Cleveland, Ohio, and grew up in West Aliquippa, Pennsylvania. His parents were Italian immigrants. His father, Quintiliano "Quinto" Mancini, was originally from Scanno, Abruzzo, and worked as a laborer at the Jones and Laughlin Steel Company. He also played music as a hobby. His father moved to the United States as a teenager around 1910. His mother, Anna (born Pece), moved to the United States from Forlì del Sannio, Molise, when she was a baby.
At age eight, Mancini began learning to play the piccolo. He said that hearing Rudolph G. Kopp’s music in the 1935 film The Crusades inspired him to write music for movies, even though his father wanted him to become a teacher.
At age 12, Mancini started studying piano and how to arrange music for orchestras with Max Adkins, a pianist and conductor in Pittsburgh. He helped arrange music for the Stanley Theatre bands and wrote an arrangement for Benny Goodman, a bandleader. Mancini’s biographer, John Caps, noted that Mancini preferred arranging music over performing. He studied famous compositions to understand how music was structured.
After finishing high school in 1942, Mancini first went to the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) in Pittsburgh. Later that year, he moved to the Juilliard School of Music in New York City after passing an audition where he played a Beethoven sonata and improvised on "Night and Day" by Cole Porter. At Juilliard, he studied only piano in his first year because he could not take orchestration or composition classes until his second year. Caps described this time as difficult and different from the supportive environment he had with Adkins.
In 1943, when Mancini turned 18, he joined the United States Army Air Forces. During basic training in Atlantic City, New Jersey, he met musicians recruited by Glenn Miller. Because of a recommendation from Miller, Mancini was first assigned to the 28th Air Force Band. Later, he was sent overseas to the 1306th Engineers Brigade in France. In 1945, he helped free the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp in Austria.
Career
After leaving the military, Mancini began working in the music industry. In 1946, he became a pianist and arranger for the Glenn Miller Orchestra, which was led by Tex Beneke. After World War II, Mancini studied with composers Ernst Krenek and Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco to improve his skills in composition, counterpoint, harmony, and orchestration.
In 1952, Mancini joined Universal-International’s music department. Over the next six years, he created music for more than 100 movies, including Creature from the Black Lagoon, The Creature Walks Among Us, It Came from Outer Space, Tarantula, This Island Earth, The Glenn Miller Story (for which he received his first Academy Award nomination), The Benny Goodman Story, and Touch of Evil. His first popular song as a pop songwriter was "I Won’t Let You Out of My Heart," performed by Guy Lombardo and His Royal Canadians.
In 1958, Mancini left Universal-International to work as an independent composer and arranger. Soon after, he created the score for the television series Peter Gunn, written and produced by Blake Edwards. This partnership led to Mancini and Edwards working together on 30 films over 35 years. Along with other composers like Alex North, Elmer Bernstein, Leith Stevens, and Johnny Mandel, Mancini helped introduce jazz elements into film and TV scores during the late 1950s and 1960s. His scores for Blake Edwards included Breakfast at Tiffany’s (with the song "Moon River"), Days of Wine and Roses (with the title song), Experiment in Terror, The Pink Panther (and its sequels), The Great Race, The Party, 10 (including "It’s Easy to Say"), and Victor Victoria. He also worked with director Stanley Donen on Charade, Arabesque, and Two for the Road. Mancini composed music for other directors, including Howard Hawks (Man’s Favorite Sport?, Hatari!), Martin Ritt (The Molly Maguires), Vittorio de Sica (Sunflower), Norman Jewison (Gaily, Gaily), Paul Newman (Sometimes a Great Notion, The Glass Menagerie), Stanley Kramer (Oklahoma Crude), George Roy Hill (The Great Waldo Pepper), Arthur Hiller (Silver Streak), Ted Kotcheff (Who Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe?), and others. Mancini’s score for the Alfred Hitchcock film Frenzy (1972), which included a Bachian organ andante, was not used and was replaced by Ron Goodwin’s work.
Mancini created music for many TV movies, such as The Moneychangers, The Thorn Birds, and The Shadow Box. He also wrote themes for television shows, including Mr. Lucky, NBC Mystery Movie, Tic Tac Dough (1990 version), Once Is Not Enough, and What’s Happening!!. During the 1984–85 television season, four series featured original Mancini themes: Newhart, Hotel, Remington Steele, and Ripley’s Believe It or Not. Mancini also composed the "Viewer Mail" theme for Late Night with David Letterman. He created the theme for NBC Nightly News starting in 1975 and another theme, Salute to the President, used by NBC News for election coverage from 1976 to 1992. Salute to the President was published only in a school-band arrangement, though Mancini performed it often with orchestras on his concert tours.
Mancini’s music became a key part of the easy listening radio format from the 1960s to the 1980s. Advertisers used his style to represent the positive and welcoming spirit of American life. Many artists recorded Mancini’s songs, including Duane Eddy, Andy Williams, Paul Anka, Pat Boone, Anita Bryant, Jack Jones, Frank Sinatra, Perry Como, Connie Francis, Eydie Gorme, Steve Lawrence, Trini Lopez, George Maharis, Johnny Mathis, Jerry Vale, Ray Conniff, Quincy Jones, The Lennon Sisters, The Lettermen, Herb Alpert, Eddie Cano, Frank Chacksfield, Warren Covington, Sarah Vaughan, Shelly Manne, James Moody, Percy Faith, Ferrante & Teicher, Horst Jankowski, Andre Kostelanetz, Peter Nero, Liberace, Mantovani, Tony Bennett, Julie London, Wayne Newton, Arthur Fiedler, Secret Agent and the Boston Pops Orchestra, Peggy Lee, and Matt Monro. The Anita Kerr Quartet won a Grammy award (1965) for their album We Dig Mancini, which covered his songs. Lawrence Welk highly respected Mancini and often played his music on The Lawrence Welk Show (Mancini appeared on the show at least twice). Mancini briefly hosted his own TV show, The Mancini Generation, which aired in 1972–73.
Mancini recorded over 90 albums, including big band, light classical, and pop styles. Eight of these albums were certified gold by the Recording Industry Association of America. He had a 20-year contract with RCA Victor, producing 60 commercial albums that made him famous in the easy listening music world. His earliest recordings in the 1950s and early 1960s focused on jazz, but after the success of Peter Gunn, Mr. Lucky, and Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Mancini shifted to recording his own music for albums and film soundtracks. Compared to the amount of music he wrote for film and television, relatively little was written for recordings. Starting with his 1969 hit arrangement of Nino Rota’s A Time for Us (which became the No. 1 hit "Love Theme from Romeo and Juliet") and its accompanying album A Warm Shade of Ivory, Mancini began working more as a piano soloist and easy-listening artist, recording music written by others. During this time, two of his best-selling albums featured trumpet virtuoso Doc Severinsen,
Personal life and death
Mancini married singer Virginia "Ginny" O'Connor in 1947. She passed away on October 25, 2021, at the age of 97. Together, they had three children: Christopher, Monica, and Felice.
Mancini died from pancreatic cancer in Los Angeles on June 14, 1994. At the time of his death, he was working on the Broadway musical version of Victor/Victoria, which he did not get to see performed on stage.
Legacy
Henry Mancini often helped other composers, especially John Williams and Gary Stockdale. He created a scholarship at UCLA, and some of his work and library materials are stored in UCLA's music library. Additional items are kept at the Library of Congress.
In 1996, the Henry Mancini Institute, a school for young music professionals, was started by Jack Elliott in Mancini's honor. Patrick Williams, a composer and conductor, later led the institute. By the mid-2000s, the institute could no longer continue and closed on December 30, 2006. The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) Foundation has given the "Henry Mancini Music Scholarship" every year since 2001.
In 2005, the Henry Mancini Arts Academy opened as part of the Lincoln Park Performing Arts Center. The center is in Midland, Pennsylvania, near Mancini's hometown of Aliquippa. The academy offers evening and weekend classes for children from pre-K to grade 12, as well as some classes for adults. Programs include dance, singing, musical theater, and instrument lessons.
In 2017, the town of Scanno named a street after Mancini, calling it "Via Henry Mancini." The American Film Institute listed Mancini's song "Moon River" as No. 4 and "Days of Wine and Roses" as No. 39 on their "100 Years…100 Songs" list. His score for The Pink Panther was ranked No. 20 on their list of the greatest film scores. His scores for Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961), Charade (1963), Hatari! (1962), Touch of Evil (1958), and Wait Until Dark (1967) were also considered for the list.
Awards and nominations
Mancini received 72 Grammy Award nominations and won 20 awards. He received 18 Academy Award nominations and won four awards. He also won a Golden Globe Award and received two Emmy Award nominations.
In 1961, Mancini won two Academy Awards: one for "Moon River" in the category of Best Original Song and one for Best Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture for the movie Breakfast at Tiffany's. In 1962, he won Best Original Song again for "Days of Wine and Roses." In 1982, he won Best Original Song Score and Its Adaptation or Best Adaptation Score for the movie Victor/Victoria.
In 1989, Mancini received the Golden Plate Award from the American Academy of Achievement.
In 1997, Mancini was awarded an honorary doctorate of music from Berklee College of Music after his death.
On April 13, 2004, the United States Postal Service honored Mancini with a 37-cent commemorative stamp. The stamp, painted by artist Victor Stabin, shows Mancini conducting in front of a list of some of his film and television themes.
Discography
- Coffee House (1959), written for the Gene Kelly Show
Most of Mancini's musical scores were not released on vinyl records with music from movies. His music from television movies was not part of official movie soundtracks but instead had titles like "Music from …" or "Music from the Motion Picture …" Mancini kept the rights to his music. His contracts allowed him to create and release his own albums, where he rearranged the film music into versions better suited for listening outside of movies or plays. Actual film scores, which used musicians from Hollywood unions and were recorded under major studio agreements, were expensive to release on vinyl records (for example, the soundtrack for Our Man Flint, which was not composed by Mancini, cost $1 more than other vinyl records at the time). Many albums claimed to be "Original Soundtrack" recordings but were not the actual music used in films. These albums often used smaller orchestras than those used for the real film scores (for example, Dimitri Tiomkin's score for The Alamo). However, many Hollywood musicians performed on Mancini's albums recorded at RCA's Hollywood studios and on fake "Original Soundtrack" albums. Later, some of Mancini's scores and fake "Original Soundtrack" scores by other composers were released as limited edition CDs.