Franz Waxman (December 24 1906 - February 24 1967) was a Jewish German American composer, known for his bravura Carmen Fantasie for violin and orchestra, based on musical themes from the Bizet opera Carmen, and for his musical scores for films.

Franz Waxman (Wachsmann) pursued his dream of a career in music despite his family's misgivings. He worked for several years as a bank teller and paid for piano, harmony, and composition lessons with his salary. He later moved to Berlin where he continued his to study and progress as a musician. He was able to supporting himself by playing and arranging for a popular German jazz band Weintraub Syncopaters of the late 1920s. Frederick Hollander, who had written some music for the Weintraubs, gave Waxman his first chance to move into movie scoring by hiring him to orchestrate and conduct Hollander's score (an arrangement of Mozart) for the classic movie that launched Marlene Dietrich, The Blue Angel (1930), directed by Josef von Sternberg. During 1932 Waxman, a Jew, joined many others leaving Germany as the Nazi vice closed irrevocably on free society. He continued working with German film makers in France. Waxman did musical arranging and co-scoring, usually with 'Allen Gray', for some fifteen European movies (his first independent score was in 1932). The "Angel" producer Erich Pommer liked Waxman's work and offered him the composing job for Liliom (1934), directed by Fritz Lang in France. Pommer decided to do Music in the Air (1934, a Jerome Kern musical, which meant going to Hollywood. Waxman was asked to come along to do the arranging. Having more than one reason for leaving the darkening state of Europe, Waxman began a new chapter in Hollywood film music history. He had some fortunate spare time to study with Arnold Schoenberg after coming to Los Angeles, but he was soon talking to another new arrival, English director 'James Whale' about music for Bride of Frankenstein (1935) for Universal. Waxman gave him what he wanted - an unusual score to fit the quirky, somewhat over-the-top content of the film. In fact some of this score was used in other movies later. As Waxman worked for Universal through the 1930s, he found himself in assembly line mode, sometimes sharing scoring credit - and doing a lot of arranging stock music. The latter, usually for the studio's large output of serials, cranked up Waxman's yearly films to an average of twenty or more per year through 1940. But by then he was composing original music scores for other studios, beginning with: the romantic music for Selznick Studio's Rebecca (1940), the first Hollywood film for 'Alfred Hitchcock', and whimsical fare for MGM's Philadelphia Story, The (1940). In 1941 he was doing more work for MGM with Honky Tonk (1941) and his second Hitchcock score, for Suspicion (1941) from RKO. By 1943 and through the rest of decade Waxman was usually scoring for Warners Bros., starting with Destination Tokyo (1943) and including music for some of the studio's classics of the period, such as, To Have and To Have Not (1944) with Humphrey Bogart. Through the decade he was nominated seven times for Best Film Score. Waxman moved on to Paramount through the first half of the 1950s and garnered his two Oscars in back to back wins for Sunset Blvd. (1950) and Place in the Sun, A (1951). This recognition finally underscored what was at the heart of all of Waxman's music: seriously focused attention to relaying a film's story through the content of the music. He would continue his movie scoring work for several studios into the 1960s with three more nominations. Some of his music in the 1950s was recycled from his previous scores, as in the case of his third assignment for Hitchcock, Rear Window (1954) which contained used music. Waxman was also active in contemporary classical music. In 1947 he founded the Los Angeles International Music Festival and, as Music Director and Conductor, brought the premieres of works by world renowned contemporary composers to the Los Angeles cultural scene. Among his own output of such music was his popular "Carmen Fantasy" for violin and orchestra. Waxman also composed for TV's "Gunsmoke", The Fugitive", "Peyton Place" (for which he had composed the film music), and others. Waxman died relatively young, and even so only fellow emigrant; Max Steiner (who was nearly twenty years older and also had a high early film music output that entailed over two hundred arrangements of stock music, rather than original scores), was a more prolific early Hollywood composer.