THE COMPOSER: Victor Young

Albert Victor Young (Aug 08, 1899 – Nov 10, 1956) was an American composer, arranger, violinist, and conductor.

At age 10, Young was sent to Poland to stay with his grandfather and study at Warsaw Imperial Conservatory. While still a teenager, he embarked on a career as a concert violinist with the Warsaw Philharmonic.

He returned to Chicago in 1920 and, the mid-1930s, moved to Hollywood where he concentrated on films, recordings of light music, and providing backing for popular singers.

He received 22 Academy Award nominations for his work in film, twice being nominated four times in a single year, but he did not win during his lifetime. He received his only Oscar posthumously for his score of Around the World in Eighty Days (1956). Thus, Victor Young holds the record for most Oscar nominations before winning the first award. His other nominated scores include Anything Goes (1936), For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943), A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1949), The Quiet Man (1952), and The Country Girl (1954).

His last scores were for the 1957 films Omar Khayyam, Run of the Arrow, and China Gate, which were released after his death. The last was left unfinished at the time of his death and was finished by his long-time friend Max Steiner.

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