Died at 72
male
James Roy Horner (August 14, 1953–June 22, 2015) was an American film composer and conductor. He worked on more than 160 film and television productions between 1978 and 2015. He was known for the integration of choral and electronic elements alongside traditional orchestrations and for his use of motifs associated with Celtic music. Horner won two Academy Awards for his musical composition to James Cameron's Titanic (1997), which became the best-selling orchestral film soundtrack of all time. He also wrote the score for the highest-grossing film of all time, Cameron's Avatar (2009). Horner's other Oscar-nominated scores were for Aliens (1986), An American Tail (1986), Field of Dreams (1989), Apollo 13 (1995), Braveheart (1995), A Beautiful Mind (2001), and House of Sand and Fog (2003). Horner's other notable scores include Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982), Willow (1988), The Land Before Time (1988), Glory (1989), The Rocketeer (1991), Legends of the Fall (1994), Jumanji (1995), Casper (1995), Balto (1995), The Mask of Zorro (1998), Deep Impact (1998), The Perfect Storm (2000), How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000), Troy (2004), The New World (2005), The Legend of Zorro (2005), Apocalypto (2006), The Karate Kid (2010), and The Amazing Spider-Man (2012). Horner collaborated on multiple projects with directors including James Cameron, Don Bluth, Ron Howard, Joe Johnston, Edward Zwick, Walter Hill, Mel Gibson, Vadim Perelman, Jean-Jacques Annaud, Nicholas Meyer, Wolfgang Petersen, Martin Campbell, Phil Nibbelink, and Simon Wells; producers including Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, David Kirschner, Brian Grazer, Jon Landau, and Lawrence Gordon; and songwriters including Will Jennings, Barry Mann, and Cynthia Weil. Adding to his two Academy Awards wins, Horner also won six Grammy Awards, two Golden Globes, and was nominated for three BAFTA Awards. Horner, who was an avid pilot, was killed in a single-fatality crash while flying his Short Tucano turboprop aircraft. He was 61 years old. The scores for his final three films, Southpaw (2015), The 33 (2015), and The Magnificent Seven (2016), were all completed and released posthumously. Description above from the Wikipedia article James Horner, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.
A massive meteor shower destroys the orbiting Space Shuttle Atlantis, before entering the atmosphere and bombarding New York City. NASA discovers that the meteors were pushed out of the asteroid belt by a Texas-sized asteroid that will impact the Earth in 18 days, causing an extinction level event that will wipe out all life on the planet. NASA scientists plan to drill a deep shaft into the asteroid and plant a nuclear weapon into it that, when detonated, will split the asteroid into two halves that will fly safely past Earth. NASA contacts Harry Stamper, considered the best deep sea oil driller in the world, for assistance. Harry departs for Houston with his daughter Grace, where they are told about the asteroid and Harry agrees to participate in the mission, but explains that he will need his team as well, including Chick, Rockhound, Max, Oscar, Bear, Noonan and Grace's lover A.J. They also agree to help, but only after their unusual list of demands are met.
