Alex North

Alex North (born Isadore Soifer, December 4, 1910 – September 8, 1991) was an American composer best known for his many film scores, including A Streetcar Named Desire (one of the first jazz-based film scores), Viva Zapata!, Spartacus, Cleopatra, and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? He received fifteen Academy Award nominations for his work as a composer; while he did not win for any of his nominations, he received an Honorary Academy Award in 1986, the first for a composer. He wrote the music for Unchained Melody as the theme for the prison film Unchained (1955), It has become a standard and one of the most recorded songs of the 20th century, with over 1,500 recordings made by more than 670 artists, in multiple langu... ()