CIS Music and Drama

Composer Hans Zimmer was born September 12, 1957 in Frankfurt, Germany. As a young child, he played the piano at home, but had piano lessons only briefly as he disliked the discipline and structure of formal lessons. He moved to London as a teenager, where he attended Hurtwood House school. In an interview with Mashable in February 2013, he said of his parents "My mother was very musical, basically a musician, and my father was an engineer and an inventor. So, I grew up modifying the piano, shall we say, which made my mother gasp in horror, and my father would think it was fantastic when I would attach chainsaws and stuff like that to the piano because he thought it was an evolution in technology." In an interview with the German television station ZDF in 2006, he commented: "My father died when I was just a child, and I escaped somehow into the music and music has been my best friend."

Zimmer began his career playing keyboards and synthesizers in the 1970s. After relocating to London as a teen, he later wrote advertising jingles for Air-Edel Associates, and in 1980 collaborated with the Buggles on their LP The Age of Plastic and its accompanying hit "Video Killed the Radio Star." A stint with Ultravox followed before Zimmer next surfaced with the Italian avant-garde group Krisma; he then formed a partnership with film composer Stanley Myers, a prolific film composer who wrote the scores for over sixty films. Zimmer and Myers co–founded the London–based Lillie Yard recording studio. Together, Myers and Zimmer worked on fusing the traditional orchestral sound with electronic instruments.

In 1986 Zimmer joined David Byrne and Ryuichi Sakamoto on their Oscar-winning score to The Last Emperor; his work on the apartheid drama A World Apart was his first major solo credit, and led to his first Academy Award-nominated score for 1988's Best Picture-winning smash Rain Man. Zimmer mixed synthesizers with steel drums within the score of Rain Man, which won Best Picture in 1989. Zimmer scored his biggest commercial hit in 1994 with his work on Disney's The Lion King; the film's soundtrack garnered countless awards, including an Oscar, a Golden Globe, and two Grammys. Later adapted for the Broadway stage, The Lion King took home the 1998 Tony for Best Musical as well. 

In 1995, Zimmer also earned a Grammy for his work on Crimson Tide, which was honored as Best Original Score Written for a Motion Picture. Another Academy Award nomination followed for 1996's The Preacher's Wife; that same year, he earned BMI's prestigious Richard Kirk Award for lifetime achievement. 1997 saw Zimmer earn another Oscar nomination for his work on the James L. Brooks comedy As Good as It Gets, repeating the feat for the third consecutive year in 1998 with his score for the Terrence Malick masterpiece The Thin Red Line. His contributions to The Prince of Egypt also earned a Golden Globe bid earlier that same year. 

The 2000s marked an auspicious time in the composer's career, as he continued scoring the biggest A-list films of the season, averaging two or three blockbusters a year, including Hannibal, Gladiator, The Last Samurai, and The Da Vinci Code. In 2007, Silva Screen Records released Film Music of Hans Zimmer, a double-disc set highlighting his achievements as a movie music-maker. Later in 2007, he reworked Alf Clausen's zany Simpsons theme into a traditional symphonic film score on The Simpsons Movie.

As the 2000s came to a close and the 2010s began, Zimmer's name remained synonymous with blockbusters as he scored later installments in the Gore Verbinksi's Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy and Christopher Nolan's Batman franchises, including Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, and The Dark Knight Rises. For the soundtrack of The Dark Knight, Zimmer decided to represent the character of The Joker by a single note played on the cello. Zimmer commented "I wanted to write something people would truly hate." The scores for these films were disqualified from receiving Academy Award nominations for Best Original Score due to too many composers being listed on the cue sheet. Zimmer succeeded in reversing the decision not to nominate The Dark Knight in December 2008, arguing that the process of creating a modern film score was collaborative, and that it was important to credit a range of people who had played a part in its production. score to Christopher Nolan's 2010 film Inception was nominated for an Oscar for Best Music and Original Score, and also earned a Saturn from the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Films for Best Music. Zimmer also composed the score for The Dark Knight Rises, the final installment of Christopher Nolan's Trilogy. The film was released in July 2012. Zimmer described himself as "devastated" in the aftermath of the 2012 Aurora shooting, which occurred at a screening of the film, commenting "I just feel so incredibly sad for these people." He recorded a track entitled "Aurora", a choral arrangement of a theme from the soundtrack, to raise money for the victims of the shooting.

Zimmer works with other composers through his company Remote Control Productions, formerly known as Media Ventures. His studio in Santa Monica, California has an extensive range of computer equipment and keyboards, allowing demo versions of film scores to be created quickly. His colleagues at the studio have included Mark Mancina, John Powell, and Klaus Badelt.

Zimmer lives in Los Angeles with his wife Suzanne, and has four children. His upcoming film's include Christopher Nolan's Interstellar and Marvel's The Amazing Spiderman 2.