Shirley Walker
Shirley Walker was born in Napa, California, United States on April 10th, 1945 and is the Composer. At the age of 61, Shirley Walker biography, profession, age, height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, measurements, education, career, dating/affair, family, news updates, and networth are available.
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Shirley Anne Walker (née Rogers, 1945 – November 30, 2006) was an American film and television composer and conductor.
She was one of Hollywood's few female film score composers.
Walker, one of the first female composers to receive a solo score credit on a major Hollywood motion picture (preceded by Suzanne Ciani, who produced the complete score to the film The Incredible Shrinking Woman in 1980, which was released January 1981), and the Los Angeles Times reports she was one of the first female composers to be recognized as a feminist film composer.
She has always planned and carried out her own scores. In 2014, the ASCAP Shirley Walker Award was named in her honor.
Life and career
Walker (née Rogers) was born in Napa, California, on April 10, 1945. Walker played piano soloists with the San Francisco Symphony in high school and then enrolled San Francisco State University on a piano scholarship. She studied music composition under Roger Nixon and piano studies with Harald Logan of Berkeley, California. She produced jingles and composed for commercial films for many years.
Walker's career in film began in 1979, when she was hired to play the synthesizers on Carmine Coppola's score in Apocalypse Now. Walker became one of the first female composers to receive a solo score on a major Hollywood motion picture in 1992 (for John Carpenter's Memoirs of an Invisible Man), one of Carpenter's few films in which he did not score himself – later joined Walker on Escape From Los Angeles. Shirley Walker was a composer on many projects, including films such as Willard, the first three Final Destination installments, and television series such as Falcon Crest, Space: Above and Beyond, China Beach, and The Flash. The Flash was one of Walker's many collaborations with composer Danny Elfman. She was his conductor on projects such as Scrooged and Batman.
She served as a Board Member (1986-1994) and Vice President (1988-1992) of The Society of Composers & Lyricists (SCL), often speaking out on behalf of composers and their working conditions. Shirley Walker of the SCL's publication The SCORE, a monthly magazine in print since 1986, contains articles and interviews about professional film/television/video game composers, songwriters, and lyricists, as well as where Shirley spoke out about.
Her involvement with DC Comics extended to television, where she appeared on television as a composer for Batman (1996–1999) and Batman Beyond (1999–2001), setting a high bar for the DC Animated Universe's musical tone.
Despite the fact that only a handful of female composers had worked in Hollywood at the time of her death, Walker was not recognized during the 79th Academy Awards' "In Memoriam" segment.
Danny Elfman appeared in many DC Comics films. She served as conductor for Batman: The Animated Series, scored the pilot and all of the episodes of The Flash (the main theme was written by Elfman), and scored Batman Beyond with Michael McCuistion, Lolita Ritmanis, and Kristopher Carter. Although her time in the DC Animated Universe came after Beyond, several of her themes will be used in Justice League and Justice League Unlimited.
Walker died in Reno, Nevada, on November 30, 2006, after a stroke she had suffered two weeks before. She died just eight months after her husband Don's death. Walker had more major-studio motion photographs at the time of her death than nearly every American woman. A memorial service was held at the Warner Bros. Eastwood Scoring Stage, and a plaque was unveiled in her honor.