Wojciech Kilar (; 17 July 1932 – 29 December 2013) was a Polish classical and film music composer. One of his greatest successes came with his score to Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula in 1992, which received the ASCAP Award and the nomination for the Saturn Award for Best Music. In 2003, he won the César Award for Best Film Music written for The Pianist, for which he also received a BAFTA nomination. Biography Kilar was born on 17 July 1932 in Lwów (then Poland; since 1945 Lviv in UkrSSR, now Ukraine). His father was a gynecologist and his mother was a theater actress. Kilar spent most of his life from 1948 in the city of Katowice in Southern Poland, married (from April 1966 to November 2007) to Barbara Pomianowska, a pianist. Kilar was 22 years old when he met 18-year-old Barbara, his future wife. Education After studying piano under Maria Bilińska-Riegerowa and harmony under Artur Malawski, he moved from Kraków to Katowice in 1948, where he finished his music middle school in the class of Władysława Markiewiczówna, after which he went to the State College of Music (now the Music Academy) in Katowice where he studied piano and composition under Bolesław Woytowicz, graduating with top honours and the award of a diploma in 1955 He continued his post-graduate studies at the State College of Music (now the Music Academy) in Kraków from 1955 to 1958. In 1957 he took part in the International New Music Summer Course in Darmstadt. In 1959–60 a French government scholarship enabled him to study composition under Nadia Boulanger in Paris. Music career Kilar belonged (together with Bolesław Szabelski, his student Henryk Górecki and Krzysztof Penderecki) to the Polish Avant-garde music movement of the Sixties, sometimes referred to as the New Polish School. In 1977 Kilar was one of the founding members of the Karol Szymanowski Society, based in the mountain town of Zakopane. Kilar chaired the Katowice chapter of the Association of Polish Composers for many years and from 1979 to 1981 was vice chair of this association's national board. He was also a member of the Repertoire Committee for the "Warsaw Autumn" International Festival of Contemporary Music. In 1991 Polish filmmaker Krzysztof Zanussi made a biographical film about the composer titled Wojciech Kilar. Having received critical success as a classical composer, Kilar scored his first domestic film in 1959, and went on