John Williams becomes first composer to win American Film Institute lifetime achievement award

9 October 2015, 16:10 | Updated: 10 October 2015, 13:20

Most successful film music composer of all time joins the likes of director John Ford and actress Elizabeth Taylor in receiving a lifetime achievement award from the AFI.

John Williams is to become the first composer to receive the American Film Institute’s lifetime achievement award.

Williams’s partnership with director Steven Spielberg has produced some of the most iconic film scores of the past 50 years, including Jaws, the Indiana Jones series and Jurassic Park. He has won five Oscars and been nominated 49 times.

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In 2005, his music for Star Wars - recorded, like many of his soundtracks, by the London Symphony Orchestra - was named the greatest film score of all time by the AFI.

"John Williams has written the soundtrack to our lives," said Sir Howard Stringer, chairman of AFI's board of trustees.

"Note by note, through chord and chorus, his genius for marrying music with movies has elevated the art form to symphonic levels and inspired generations of audiences to be enriched by the magic of the movies."

The lifetime achievement award will be presented to Williams in a ceremony on 9 June 2016.