Polish composer Jan A.P. Kaczmarek, who won a 2004 Oscar for “Finding Neverland,” died Tuesday in Krakow, the Polish Music Foundation announced. He was 71 and had suffered from Multiple System Atrophy (MSA) in recent years.
Also among Kaczmarek’s 50-plus film and television scores, mostly from the 1990s and 2000s, were “Unfaithful,” “Bliss,” “Aimee and Jaguar,” “The Visitor” and “Get Low.” He also scored the lavish four-part French-Italian miniseries of “War and Peace” in 2007.
Kaczmarek had one of the most unusual backgrounds of any film composer of his time. Born in Konin in 1953, he was educated as a lawyer. But he abandoned a planned career as a diplomat to compose music for an experimental theater company, headed by avant-garde theater director Jerzy Grotowski, in Poznan during the 1970s.
He formed his own ensemble, the Orchestra of the Eighth Day, which toured Europe in the late 1970s and early 1980s, releasing an LP, “Music for the End,” in 1982. Performing on piano, synths, percussion and the zither-like fidola, he was a five-time winner of Europe’s Jazz Forum magazine poll during this period.
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Kaczmarek settled in America in 1989, writing music for Chicago’s Goodman Theatre and L.A.’s Mark Taper Forum. He won a Drama Desk Award for his music for the New York Shakespeare Festival’s 1992 off-Broadway revival of “Tis Pity She’s a Whore” with Val Kilmer and Jeanne Tripplehorn.
He began a long collaboration with Polish director Agnieszka Holland in 1995 with “Total Eclipse,” continuing with “Washington Square,” “The Third Miracle,” and for television, “Shot in the Heart” and “A Girl Like Me: The Gwen Araujo Story.” “I loved her working style,” Kaczmarek told an interviewer. “[She] wasn’t worried at all about being commercial. She wasn’t looking for easy sounds or conventional scores.”
His music for Marc Forster’s J.M. Barrie biopic “Finding Neverland” struck a chord with millions of filmgoers. “Innocence is the clue to this film, and my music is delivered in a very different way than in any other,” Kaczmarek said. “It was like an introspection into the world of children. I wanted innocence to be the very soul of the score.” He won the Oscar and was nominated for a BAFTA and Golden Globe.
Discussing his approach to film, he said in another interview: “Instant response to the image is essential. “When I see a movie I respond, and this is the most important moment. Then of course you work on the structure and revise things, but the essence of finding a good theme or the nature of the music usually happens in that first moment of contact.”
In the early 2000s, inspired by the Sundance Institute, he founded Instytut Rozbitek for the development of new work in the areas of film, theater, music and new media. He later founded and served as creative director of the Transatlantyk Poznan International Film and Music Festivals of 2011 and 2012.
He received Poland’s Knight’s Cross, Order of Polonia Restituta in 2015 for promoting Polish culture abroad, and in 2023 received a lifetime achievement award from the Polish Film Academy.
Survivors include his wife, Alexandra, and three children.
