Nicholas Hooper

Nicholas Hooper is a British film and television composer and guitarist. He has scored the award-winning BBC productions Land of the Tiger and Andes to Amazon, as well as the TV movies The Girl in the Café and My Family and Other Animals among others. Hooper won a BAFTA Award and an Ivor Novello Award for Original Score in 2004 for The Young Visiters and a BAFTA for Best Original Television Music in 2007 for Prime Suspect: The Final Act. He studied at the Royal College of Music in the early 1970s where he scored his first films. His highest-profile scores were for Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, for which he reunited with old friend director David Yates, with whom he had worked before on The Tichborne Claimant, The Way We Live Now, State of Play, The Young Visiters and The Girl in the Café. These were Hooper's most notable works on blockbuster films. For Half-Blood Prince, he was nominated for a Grammy. However, he chose not to return for the final two installments, which were composed by French composer & conductor Alexandre Desplat. Hooper then scored the soundtrack to the Disney documentary African Cats, which was chosen as one of the 97 original scores eligible for a nomination at the 84th Academy Awards in 2011. Hooper is also a performing guitarist.