Hugo Friedhofer

Despite the fact that he came to prominence in the heyday of Hollywood's great film scores, Hugo Friedhofer never achieved the recognition enjoyed by his contemporaries Miklos Rozsa, Alfred Newman, Bernard Herrmann, and Franz Waxman. This may have been a result of the fact that he tended to score movies that were more noted for their stars than their dramatic content. Hugo Wilhelm Friedhofer was the son of a cellist from Dresden. He quit school at the age of 16 to take a job as an office boy, and studied art at night at the Mark Hopkins Institute in San Francisco. He'd start...