Oliver Wallace
| Oliver Wallace | |
|---|---|
| Birth name | Oliver George Wallace |
| Born |
6 August 1887 London, England, United Kingdom |
| Died | 15 September 1963 (aged 76) Los Angeles, California, United States |
| Genres | Film score, musical theatre |
| Occupation(s) | Composer |
| Years active | 1911–63 |
Oliver George Wallace (August 6, 1887 – September 15, 1963) was a British-American composer and conductor. He was especially known for his film music compositions, which were written for many animation, documentary, and feature films from Walt Disney Studios.
Wallace was born on August 6, 1887, in London. After completing his musical training, he went to the United States in 1904, becoming a US citizen ten years later. He initially worked primarily on the West Coast as a conductor of theater orchestras and as an organist accompanying silent films. At the same time, he also made a name as a songwriter, writing tunes such as the popular "Hindustan". With the advent of the talking film era, he worked increasingly for Hollywood film studios in the 1930s.
In 1936 he joined Disney Studios, and quickly became one of the most important composers in the studio for animated short films. Wallace provided the music for 139 of these shorts. One of his best-known pieces is the song "Der Fuehrer's Face" from the 1942 Donald Duck propaganda cartoon. This parody of a Horst Wessel song was, mainly through the version by Spike Jones and His City Slickers, one of the biggest hits during the Second World War. Other shorts Wallace scored include Ben and Me (1953), about Benjamin Franklin and a mouse, and the Oscar-winning Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom (1953), the first cartoon to use the new Cinemascope process.
Walt Disney also had Wallace score full-length films for the studios. His first big success was Dumbo (1941), for which he, together with Frank Churchill, won his first and only Oscar in 1942. He went on to score Victory Through Air Power (1943), The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad (1949), Cinderella (1950) (Paul J. Smith also scored Cinderella), Alice in Wonderland (1951), Peter Pan (1953), Lady and the Tramp (1955), and White Wilderness (1958). Wallace also voiced the villainous Mr. Winkie in The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad. He received four other Oscar nominations for the music to Victory Through Air Power, Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland, and White Wilderness. A common characteristic of all these productions was the cooperation of several composers in the creation of the music. Wallace understood this and integrated leitmotiv-like elements from the individual songs into the film scores.
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