Leonard Rosenman, an Academy Award-winning composer who won Oscars for his work on "Barry Lyndon" and "Bound for Glory" and wrote the scores for the legendary James Dean films "East of Eden" and "Rebel Without a Cause:++The+Hunt," died Tuesday. He was 83.
Rosenman, who had suffered from frontotemporal dementia in recent years, died of a heart attack at the Motion Picture & Television Hospital in Woodland Hills, said his wife of 19 years, Judie Gregg Rosenman.
In a 46-year Hollywood career that began with "East of Eden," the 1955 film directed by Elia Kazan, the Brooklyn, N.Y.-born Rosenman scored about four dozen feature films and three dozen TV movies and miniseries.
He also contributed music to at least 14 TV series, including writing the theme music and scoring the pilot episode for "The Defenders," and composing all the music for "Combat!" and the vast majority of the music for "Marcus Welby, M.D."
For his television work, he won two Emmys -- for his music for "Sybil" (1976), which he shared with Alan and Marilyn Bergman; and for "Friendly Fire" (1979).
In addition to his Academy Awards for "Barry Lyndon" (1975) and "Bound for Glory" (1976), he also received Oscar nominations for "Cross Creek" (1983) and "Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home" (1986).
"The irony of his Oscar wins for 'Barry Lyndon' and 'Bound for Glory' was that he was adapting music from others, even though he spent the vast majority of his career writing original music for films," film music historian Jon Burlingame told The Times on Tuesday.
Rosenman also wrote scores for films such as "Hell Is for Heroes" (1962), "Fantastic Voyage" (1966) and "A Man Called Horse" (1970).
"The thing about Leonard is he was one of the new guys who came out here in the 1950s that sort of kick-started film music into a more contemporary mode," said Burlingame, who teaches film music history at USC.
"Most film music in the 1930s and '40s and into the 1950s was essentially 19th century romantic in idiom, so it was dramatic music," he said. But when Rosenman and composer Alex North "came out from New York to start writing film music in the '50s, they brought more modern techniques to movies."
"In particular, Rosenman liked to write sophisticated music, atonal music, serial music. These are all techniques that were unusual for Hollywood and, in fact, were rejected by many composers as being too intellectual for film."
