George Fenton, Composer of Gandhi and Planet Earth, Dies at 76
British composer George Fenton has died aged 76.
His family described the death as "unexpected". No cause was given. The announcement came from his management company, CMG. Reports published on 6 October 2026 noted he had died on a Monday. The Herald
The family statement listed survivors including his wife Amanda, ex-wife Jane, children Gemma, Grace and Bridget, and grandchildren including Lola, Audrey, Alfred and George. The Independent The same statement said he was also survived by "a life of music". The Guardian
Fenton was born George Howe in Bromley, Kent, in 1949. He took the stage name George Fenton when appearing in Alan Bennett's 1968 West End production Forty Years On. West End means London's main theatre district. Pop music came first. He recorded a cover of Maxwell's Silver Hammer that became a Top 10 hit in Sweden. He later had a recurring role on the television soap Emmerdale Farm in the mid-1970s.
In 1974 he was asked to write original music for a Royal Shakespeare Company production of Twelfth Night. That job opened a working life that would span more than 100 feature films plus documentary, theatre and television.
His first work with director Richard Attenborough was Gandhi in 1982. A film score is music written to fit a story on screen. It works like lighting for feeling, shaping mood without covering dialogue. It brought his first Oscar nomination, a shortlisting for the Academy Awards, shared with Ravi Shankar. He earned five Oscar nominations in total for film scores including Gandhi and Dangerous Liaisons. For Cry Freedom he received two nominations at once, for best original score and for best original song for its title track, shared with Jonas Gwangwa. He shared vocals on that title song and performed it at the Academy Awards.
He worked on 11 productions with Stephen Frears, including the features Dangerous Liaisons, Hero, Mary Reilly and Mrs Henderson Presents. He also scored many films for Ken Loach, including The Wind That Shakes the Barley and Looking for Eric.
He composed music for natural-history television, which means documentaries about wildlife and wild places. His credits include The Blue Planet, Planet Earth and Frozen Planet. The Philharmonia Orchestra later performed his Frozen Planet score in Frozen Planet in Concert. He also composed the music for the BBC series Wild Isles. George Fenton In another stage project, he set Pam Ayres' poems from "Who Are You Calling Vermin?" to music.
The broader context here is range without splitting apart. Fenton moved between large orchestral film writing, spare music for Loach's social-realist stories, short pieces written to fit plays, and long stretches of music for nature documentaries — each with different timing, group size and recording needs. His habit of changing the amount of music and melody to fit the story helps explain why he stayed in demand across cinema, broadcast documentary and concert performance.
