Composer George Fenton (76) has died, the man behind the music for Gandhi and Planet Earth

British composer and conductor George Fenton has died at the age of 76. According to a statement from his family, his death was unexpected, and no cause of death has been given. Fenton leaves behind a wife, an ex wife, three children and six grandchildren, and, according to the family, "a life full of music" too.

Fenton was born George Howe in Bromley, Kent. As a child he played guitar and studied the organ. As a young man he first pictured himself on stage, either as a musician or as an actor. He recorded a cover of Maxwell's Silver Hammer that became a top ten hit in Sweden. In 1968 he landed a part in Alan Bennett's first West End production, Forty Years On, taking the stage name George Fenton at that point. By the mid seventies he also had a recurring role in the soap Emmerdale Farm.

The turning point came when he began working in the theatre as an arranger and musical director alongside his acting. In 1974 he was commissioned to write the music for a Royal Shakespeare Company production of Twelfth Night, the start of a long run of collaborations with that company. In 1976 he moved into television music with Stephen Poliakoff's Hitting Town. Two years later he began working with director Stephen Frears, with whom he ended up making eleven productions, including the films Dangerous Liaisons, Hero, Mary Reilly and Mrs Henderson Presents. He received an Oscar nomination for Dangerous Liaisons.

His first Oscar nomination had come earlier, for 1982's Gandhi, the first film he made with director Richard Attenborough. He shared the score with Ravi Shankar. Attenborough's Cry Freedom brought two more nominations, for best original score and best original song, the title track, which he shared with Jonas Gwangwa. Fenton sang on it and performed the song live at the Oscars ceremony. He later described it as "like some bad waking dream": by his own account he stood there rigid with nerves, singing for well over a billion viewers, without even a piano to hide behind. He also wrote the music for Attenborough's Shadowlands, In Love and War and Grey Owl. A fifth nomination came for Terry Gilliam's The Fisher King.

He was never short of regular collaborators. With Ken Loach he made eighteen films, including the Palme d'Or winner The Wind That Shakes the Barley and Looking for Eric, about Eric Cantona. He scored every feature film by director Nicholas Hytner, from The Madness of King George to The History Boys and The Lady in the Van. With Neil Jordan he worked on films including The Company of Wolves, and with Nora Ephron on You've Got Mail and Bewitched. He also provided the score for Andy Tennant's big American crowd pleasers, such as Sweet Home Alabama and Hitch, as well as for Groundhog Day. In total he worked on more than a hundred feature films.

His music was also everywhere outside the cinema. For David Attenborough he composed the music for nature series like The Blue Planet, Planet Earth and Frozen Planet, and later developed live concert versions of them. In Britain he also wrote the signature tunes for BBC news programmes, including Newsnight and the Radio 4 programme PM. For listeners in the Netherlands, that means his work has probably been heard more often than his name is known, from nature documentaries to the film classics that keep turning up on television here.