In Remembrance: Robert Farnon

     Robert Farnon, the composer who scored and or arranged music for 30 films in addition to arranging songs for Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett, has passed away Saturday, April 23, 2005 on Guernsey in Britain’s Channel Islands. He was 87.

     Born on July 24, 1917 in Toronto, Ontario, Cananda, Farnon’s first musical instruments were trumpet and drums. At age 11 Farnon was performing with the Toronto Junior Symphony Orchestra and by his teens had moved on to the first trumpet position in Percy Faith’s Canadian Broadcasting Company’s radio orchestra, in addition to arranging choral pieces for Faith. He also was a regular on the CBC’s popular radio series The Happy Gang between 1937 and 1943. Although he had little formal compositional training, Farnon composed his first symphony by the time he turned 21.

     In 1944, Farnon went to England as a captain in the Canadian Army to conduct the Canadian Band of the Allied Expeditionary Forces on Armed Forces Radio. At the end of the war, he elected to stay in England, as it offered more opportunity for recording and arranging than did Canada. He became a resident arranger for Decca Records and his Robert Farnon Orchestra performed regularly on BBC radio and on television.

     For Farnon’s first film work, he served as conductor for the theme music for the 1945 Rex Harrison comedy, I Live In Grosvenor Square (released in the United States as A Yank In London). He then worked on the musical arrangements for the musicals London Town (1946) and The Dancing Years (1948) as well as dramas like The Woman In The Hall and When The Bough Breaks (both 1947), before composing his first motion picture score for the 1948 comedy Just William’s Luck.

     Over the next three and a half decades, Farnon showed versatility by composing music for a variety of films including comedies like All For Mary and Gentlemen Marry Brunettes (both 1955), the westerns The Sherif Of Fractured Jaw (1958) and Shalako (1968) and thrillers like The Disappearance (1977). Farnon acknowledged that the score he composed for 1951’s Captain Horatio Hornblower R.N. starring Gregory Peck was perhaps his favorite of all his film work.

     In addition to film and recording work, Farnon also composed music for a variety of television series including Panorama (1953), The Prisoner (1967), The Champions (1968), Colditz (1972) and the 1979 miniseries A Man Called Intrepid.

     Farnon’s last film score was for the 1981 family film Friend Or Foe.