Leonard Rosenman, composer won Oscars, Emmy awards; 83

LEONARD ROSENMAN (Jack Manning/New York Times/File 1982)

LOS ANGELES - Leonard Rosenman, a composer who won Oscars for his work on "Barry Lyndon" and "Bound for Glory" and wrote the scores for the legendary James Dean films "East of Eden" and "Rebel Without a Cause," died Tuesday. He was 83.

Mr. Rosenman, who had suffered from frontotemporal dementia in recent years, died of a heart attack at the Motion Picture & Television Fund hospital, said his wife of 19 years, Judie Gregg Rosenman.

In a 46-year Hollywood career that began with "East of Eden," the 1955 film directed by Elia Kazan, the Brooklyn-born Rosenman scored about four dozen feature films and three dozen TV movies and miniseries.

He also contributed music to at least 14 TV series, including writing the theme music and scoring the pilot episode for "The Defenders" and composing all the music for "Combat!" and most of the music for "Marcus Welby, M.D."

For his television work, he won two Emmys: for "Sybil" (1976), which he shared with Alan and Marilyn Bergman; and for "Friendly Fire" (1979).

In addition to his Academy Awards for "Barry Lyndon" (1975) and "Bound for Glory" (1976), he also received Oscar nominations for "Cross Creek" (1983) and "Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home" (1986).

"The irony of his Oscar wins for 'Barry Lyndon' and 'Bound for Glory' was that he was adapting music from others, even though he spent the vast majority of his career writing original music for films," Jon Burlingame, a film music historian, told the Los Angeles Times on Tuesday.

Mr. Rosenman also wrote scores for films such as "Hell Is for Heroes" (1962), "Fantastic Voyage" (1966), and "A Man Called Horse" (1970).

"The thing about Leonard is he was one of the new guys who came out here in the 1950s that sort of kick-started film music into a more contemporary mode," said Burlingame, who teaches film music history at the University of Southern California.

"Most film music in the 1930s and '40s and into the 1950s was essentially 19th-century romantic in idiom, so it was dramatic music," he said. "But when Rosenman and [composer] Alex North came out from New York to start writing film music in the '50s, they brought more modern techniques to movies.

"In particular, Rosenman liked to write sophisticated music, atonal music, serial music. These are all techniques that were unusual for Hollywood and in fact were rejected by many composers as being too intellectual for film."

That's not all Mr. Rosenman wrote, said Burlingame.

"He could also write the old-fashioned traditional melodic stuff," he said. " 'East of Eden,' for example, contains as much traditional melodic music as it does the more complex, dissonant music that Rosenman was accustomed to writing in his concert hall material."

The son of a grocery store owner, Mr. Rosenman was born in Brooklyn, N.Y. on Sept. 7, 1924. While growing up, he thought of becoming a painter before turning his attention to the piano.

After serving in the Army Air Forces in the Pacific during World War II, he moved to California and studied with composers Arnold Schoenberg and Roger Sessions. In 1952, he received a fellowship to study with Italian composer Luigi Dallapiccola at Tanglewood Music Festival in the Berkshires.

By the early 1950s, Burlingame said, Mr. Rosenman was widely regarded as one of America's most promising young composers.

He was writing chamber music and teaching piano in New York when he met James Dean, who was acting on stage and television.

"We met at a party," Mr. Rosenman recalled in a 1997 interview with the Bergen County, N.J., Record. "He heard me play the piano, and about a month later, my doorbell rings about 11 o'clock at night.

"I open the door, and here's a guy I don't remember all dressed in leather, motorcycle stuff. I said, 'What can I do for you?' And he said, 'I'd like to study piano with you.' "

Mr. Rosenman and Dean wound up sharing an apartment together; it was Dean who brought Mr. Rosenman to the attention of Kazan.

The composer later said his Hollywood career had a disastrous effect on his concert career.

"The year I did my first film, I had five major performances in New York," he said in the 1997 interview. "The minute I did my first film, I didn't have a performance [there] for 20 years."

In addition to Judie, his fourth wife, Mr. Rosenman leaves a son, Jonathan; two daughters, Danielle Falk and Gabrielle Davis; and four grandchildren.