Hans Zimmer is a German composer and record producer. Since the 1980’s, he has composed music for over 150 films. Let’ s see some amazing facts and trivia about him!
1.His middle name is Florian.
2. He was born in Frankfurt am Main, Germani on September 12, 1957.
3. As a young child, he lived in Königstein-Falkenstein, where he played the piano at home, but had piano lessons only briefly as he disliked the discipline of formal lessons.
4. He moved to London as a teenager, where he attended Hurtwood House school.
5. In a speech at the 1999 Berlin Film Festival, Zimmer revealed that he is Jewish, and told about his mother’s escape to England in 1939.
6. Hans Zimmer began his career playing keyboards and synthesizers in the 1970s, with the band Krakatoa.
7. He worked with the Buggles, a new wave band formed in London in 1977 with Trevor Horn, Geoff Downes, and Bruce Woolley.
8. Zimmer can be seen briefly in the Buggles’ music video for the 1979 song “Video Killed the Radio Star”.
9. After working with the Buggles, he started to work for the Italian group Krisma, a new wave band formed in 1976 with Maurizio Acieri and Christina Moser.
10. He was a featured synthesist for Krisma’s third album, Cathode Mamma.
11. He has also worked with the band Helden (with Warren Cann from Ultravox).
12. Both Zimmer (on keyboards) and Cann (on drums), were invited to be part of the Spanish group Mecano for a live performance in Segovia (Spain) in 1984.
13. Two songs from this concert were included in the “Mecano: En Concierto” album released in 1985 only in Spain.
14. In 1985 he contributed to the Shriekback album Oil & Gold.
15. In 1980 Zimmer co-produced a single, “History of the World, Part 1,” with, and for, UK punk band the Damned, which was also included on their 1980 LP release, “The Black Album,” and carried the description of his efforts as “Over-Produced by Hans Zimmer.”
16. While living in London, Zimmer wrote advertising jingles for Air-Edel Associates.
17. In the 1980s, Zimmer partnered with Stanley Myers, a prolific film composer who wrote the scores for over sixty films. Zimmer and Myers co–founded the London–based Lillie Yard recording studio.
18. Together, Myers and Zimmer worked on fusing the traditional orchestral sound with electronic instruments.
19. Some of the films on which Zimmer and Myers worked are Moonlighting (1982), Success is the Best Revenge (1984), Insignificance (1985), and My Beautiful Launderette (1985).
20. Zimmer’s first solo score was Terminal Exposure for director Nico Mastorakis in 1987, for which he also wrote the songs.
21. Zimmer acted as score producer for the 1987 film The Last Emperor, which won the Academy Award for Best Original Score.
22. One of Zimmer’s most durable works from his time in the United Kingdom was the theme song for the television game show Going for Gold, which he composed with Sandy McClelland in 1987
23. A turning point in Zimmer’s career occurred with the 1988 film Rain Man. Hollywood director Barry Levinson was looking for someone to score Rain Man, and his wife heard the soundtrack CD of the anti-Apartheid drama A World Apart, for which Zimmer had composed the music.
24. Levinson was impressed by Zimmer’s work, and hired him to score Rain Man.
25. Zimmer’s score for Rain Man was nominated for an Academy Award in 1989, and the film won four Academy Awards including Best Picture.
26. A year after Rain Man, Zimmer was asked to compose the score for Bruce Beresford’s Driving Miss Daisy which, like Rain Man, won an Academy Award for Best Picture. Driving Miss Daisy’s instrumentation consisted entirely of synthesizers and samplers, played by Zimmer.
27. According to an interview with Sound On Sound magazine in 2002, the piano sounds heard within the score come from the Roland MKS–20, a rackmount synthesizer. Zimmer joked: “It didn’t sound anything like a piano, but it behaved like a piano.
28. For the 1992 film The Power of One, Zimmer traveled to Africa in order to use African choirs and drums in the recording of the score. On the strength of this work, Walt Disney Animation Studios approached Zimmer to compose the score for the 1994 film The Lion King.
29. This was to be his first score for an animated film.
30. Hans Zimmer said that he had wanted to go to South Africa to record parts of the soundtrack, but was unable to visit the country as he had a police record there “for doing ‘subversive’ movies” after his work on The Power of One.
31. Disney studio bosses expressed fears that Zimmer would be killed if he went to South Africa, so the recording of the choirs was organized during a visit by Lebo M.
32. Zimmer won numerous awards for his work on The Lion King, including an Academy Award for Best Original Score, a Golden Globe, and two Grammys. In 1997, the score was adapted into a Broadway musical version which won the Tony Award for Best Musical in 1998.
33. As of April 2012, the musical version of The Lion King is the highest grossing Broadway show of all time, having grossed $853.8 million.
34. In the 2000s, Zimmer has composed scores for Hollywood blockbuster films including three Ridley Scott films, Gladiator (2000), Black Hawk Down and Hannibal (2001), followed by The Last Samurai (2003), Madagascar (2005), The Da Vinci Code (2006), The Simpsons Movie (2007), Angels & Demons (2009) and Sherlock Holmes (2009).
35. While writing the score for The Last Samurai, Zimmer felt that his knowledge of Japanese music was extremely limited.
36. He began doing extensive research, but the more he studied, the less he felt he knew. Finally, Zimmer took what he had written to Japan for feedback and was shocked when he was asked how he knew so much about Japanese music.
37. For the 2010 film Inception, Zimmer used electronic manipulation of the song “Non, je ne regrette rien”. The horn sound in the score, described by Zimmer as “like huge foghorns over a city” became a popular feature in film trailers, with Zimmer commenting “It’s funny how that sort of thing becomes part of the zeitgeist. But I suppose that’s exactly what trailers are looking for: something iconic, lasts less than a second, and shakes the seats in the theater.
38. His first wife was model Vicki Carolin with whom he has a daughter, model Zoe Zimmer.
39. Zimmer lives in Los Angeles with his second wife Suzanne Zimmer, and has four children.
40. He has received four Grammy Awards, three Classical BRIT Awards, two Golden Globes, and an Academy Award. He was also named on the list of Top 100 Living Geniuses, published by The Daily Telegraph
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