Patrick Doyle COMPOSER by D'Lynn Waldron,PhD

PATRICK DOYLE COMPOSER OF MUSIC FOR THE MOVIES: BIOGRAPHY, PHOTOS, FILMOGRAPHY by D'Lynn Waldron,PhD ©2006

A PERSONAL REFLECTION ON PATRICK DOYLE by D’Lynn Waldron,PhD.

Patrick Doyle is a gifted composer, talented actor, and marvelous raconteur.

It is amazing to think that if Patrick Doyle had not decided to take piano lessons at the late ago of 12 when his younger sister did, he might never have become a composer.

Patrick Doyle was born on April 6th, 1953 in Uddingston, Scotland into a musical family. Once he began studying music he continued on to Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama.

At the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, Patrick Doyle studied both acting and music, with a major in voice because the instrument he had been playing in school would have cost several thousand pounds to buy. (Patrick Doyle sings beautifully, but has never made that a career focus.)

Patrick Doyle taught music for a year after leaving the Academy and began composing music for successful plays including Slab Boys which went from the Edinburgh Festival to the West End and Broadway

After doing British television Patrick Doyle joined Kenneth Branagh's Renaissance Theatre Company in 1987 as an actor, and then was given the chance to write the incidental music for the plays.

However, Patrick for a moment thought his composing career with Branagh was at an end when the first play he did, Twelfth Night, was premiered at a Royal Command Performance and the lampstand fell off his piano and the score went all over the floor. Patrick played from memory and both the performance and Patrick’s career survived.

The only film score job Patrick Doyle really went after was Branagh’s first major movie Henry V, in 1989, and that excellent score assured him the assignment to do Branagh’s subsequent Shakespearean movies Much Ado About Nothing in 1993, and Hamlet in 1996, for which Patrick Doyle was nominated for the Academy Award. Patrick’s other nomination was for Sense and Sensibility in 1995.

Along with Shakespeare and other costume pictures, Patrick Doyle has scored films ranging from gangster thrillers, to French language films, to light comedies, and animated features.

In 1998, just before starting the score for the animated feature Quest for Camelot, he was diagnosed with leukemia. The score was needed within a few weeks, but Patrick asked to see if he could do it.

For the first two weeks of intensive chemotherapy Patrick could not work, but then melody lines began to come to him and in the third week of his chemotherapy, in a isolation room with just a television to play the tapes and a keyboard, Patrick Doyle created the marvelous score for Quest for Camelot. That took a man of great talent and great courage. And of course he beat the leukemia.

Patrick Doyle comes from the theatre where putting on a play is a team effort, and he has brought that approach to his film scoring. where he considers himself one part of a collaboration.

The spotting for Secondhand Lions was a collaborative effort and then Patrick Doyle left it to the director and editor to make the final decisions at the dubbing.

I happened to be at the private screening where Patrick Doyle first saw the finished film and he was delighted to find that the director had moved one of his excellent themes from late in the film to also near the beginning where it would be very effective.

Patrick Doyle is a delightful man and great storyteller with a wonderful sense of humor. He is a very talented and versatile composer, and a team player in whom filmmakers find a gifted collaborator.

PATRICK DOYLE FILMOGRAPHY
Calendar Girl (2003)
Secondhand Lions (2003)
Killing Me Softly (2002)
Blow Dry (2001)
Bridget Jones's Diary (2001)
Gosford Park (2001)
Love's Labour's Lost (2000)
East West (1999),
Great Expectations (1998)
Quest for Camelot (1998)
Donnie Brasco (1997)
Hamlet (1996)
Mrs Winterbourne (1996)
A Little Princess (1995)
Sense and Sensibility (1995)
Une Femme
Française (1995)
Exit to Eden (1994)
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1994)
Carlito's Way (1993)
Much Ado About Nothing (1993)
Needful Things (1993)
Indochine (1992)
Into the West (1992)
L'Échange (1992)
Dead Again (1991)
Shipwrecked (1990)
Henry V (1989)
Look Back in Anger (1989

PATRICK DOYLE AWARDS
1996 Academy Awards - Nominee, Best Original Dramatic Score - Hamlet
1995 Academy Awards - Nominee, Best Original Dramatic Score - Sense and Sensibility