by Randall D. Larson
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29 Jun, 2022
One of the finest orchestrators of Hollywood’s Golden Age was Hugo Friedhofer, who worked on hundreds of films since 1930 as orchestrator, composer, or co-composer, mostly without screen credit. He got his start in Hollywood in 1929, becoming a session player for Fox Studios, and later moved to Warner Bros as an orchestrator, deftly expanding treatments by Max Steiner and Erich Wolfgang Korngold into full orchestral scores. In 1946, Friedhofer extricated himself from the studio system and began to freelance; his score for RKO’s THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES (1946), about the homecoming of a trio of WW2 vets, won him an Oscar for best music; among eight other Oscar nominations he received during his career.