Creating grand, sweeping, orchestral soundtracks for Hollywood movies 'Conan the Barbarian', 'RoboCob' and 'Free Willy', Basil Poledouris filled his music with epic drama and majestic ambience and was widely recognised as one of the most groundbreaking film score composers of the 1980s and '90s. Growing up in Kansas City, Missouri, Poledouris began taking classical piano lessons at the age of seven, and set his sights on becoming a concert pianist until he became disillusioned with the modern composition classes that he was taking at the School of Music at the University of Southern California, and switched his major to cinema studies. He soon fell in love with the film soundtracks of Miklos Rozsa ('The Four Feathers', 'Spellbound, 'Ben-Hur'), Alfred Newman ('Wuthering Heights', 'Camelot', 'All About Eve') and Henry Mancini ('Breakfast at Tiffany's', 'Peter Gunn'), and after creating music for several short films, his classmate John Milius became an up-and-coming director and hired Poledouris to score his surfing movie 'Big Wednesday' in 1978.
Most of the teen, surfer films of the time usually featured twanging, groovy pop music, but Poledouris used brooding orchestral grandness to capture the spirit of the crashing waves and foaming surf, and was hired to score cult survival drama 'The Blue Lagoon' two years later. His Greek Orthordox upbringing and the Gregorian choirs that he heard in church as a child were another key influence, and with lead actor Arnorld Schwarzenegger given very little dialogue, it was Poledouris' swooping operatic atmospherics that gave classic action fantasy 'Conan the Barbarian' much of its aura and presence. His futuristic, dystopian effects were also central to director Paul Verhoeven's sci-fi adventure 'Robocop' in 1987, and he won the Emmy Award for Outstanding Achievement in Music Composition for a Miniseries Or a Special (Dramatic Underscore) in 1989 for his work on TV series 'Lonesome Dove', before scoring major movies such as 'Free Willy', 'Lassie' and 'Starship Troopers' in the 1990s. He also created the music for the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in Atlanta, worked on comedy films with director John Waters and produced tracks with his daughter Zoe, before succumbing to cancer in 2006 at the age of 61.