David Raksin was an American composer who scored more than 100 films and 300 television productions over a career spanning from the 1930s to the 1980s. Born in Philadelphia in 1912, he began his Hollywood career as an assistant and orchestrator on Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times in 1936. His most famous composition is the theme from the 1944 Otto Preminger film Laura, which Johnny Mercer later fitted with lyrics. The song became one of the most recorded pieces in American popular music, with more than 400 versions by artists ranging from jazz instrumentalists to pop vocalists, and it entered the Great American Songbook as a widely played jazz standard. Beyond Laura, Raksin composed scores for films including Forever Amber and Separate Tables, and wrote the theme for the television series Ben Casey. His writing style brought a melodic sophistication rooted in classical training to the demands of dramatic scoring. Raksin also taught film composition at UCLA and USC for many years. He died in 2004 at the age of 92.
