John Williams: A Composer's Life by Tim Greiving: Which of these blockbuster movie scores did John Williams NOT compose? A) Jaws B) Harry Potter C) Indiana Jones D) Star Wars ... He did them all and there is a heartbreaking truth behind their magic

In 1969, a 23-year-old wannabe film director in a record store picked up the soundtrack of a movie called The Reivers because it had Steve McQueen on the cover.

He hadn’t seen the film or heard of the composer but he bought the album anyway. He loved it so much that he wore it out and he decided that if he ever got the chance to make a movie, he wanted this fellow to write the music.

Just three years later, a nervous Steven Spielberg took John Williams to a fancy Beverly Hills restaurant and persuaded him to score The Sugarland Express.

The composer says that the day he met Spielberg was ‘one of the luckiest days of my life’.

Williams has provided the music for most of Spielberg’s films and all of the best ones. Sugarland Express was

followed in the summer of 1975 by Jaws, which featured one of the most recognisable musical motifs in history. When Stanley Kubrick wanted to scare the child star of The Shining on the set, he played him the Jaws music. It won Williams an Academy Award.

Afterwards came Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, E.T., Jurassic Park, Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan. Harrison Ford joked that he could never escape Williams’ music for Raiders Of The Lost Ark: ‘They play it every time I walk on a stage, every time I walk off a stage… It was playing in the operating room when I went in for my colonoscopy.’ If Williams had written nothing else, he would still be revered, but he has written much, much more.

Spielberg recommended Williams to his friend George Lucas when Lucas was making a science fiction romp called Star Wars. According to the film’s star Mark Hamill, after Lucas, Williams was the person ‘most singularly responsible for the enormous impact’ Star Wars had. Williams wrote the music for Home Alone, Born On The Fourth Of July and the first three Harry Potter films. He earned his 50th Academy Award nomination at 83 for The Force Awakens.

Where does this apparently inexhaustible supply of indelible melody come from? He doesn’t know. ‘Days can go by and I’ll think it is never going to come. Then I’ll sit down at the piano and it sort of pops into my mind,’ he says. ‘After two weeks of frustration it just appears out of nowhere. Other times I might think about a theme for a character and get it straight off. It is a strange and mysterious and frustrating process, almost impossible to describe.’

The very private Williams is something of an enigma himself. In his introduction, author Tim Greiving, an arts journalist, writes: ‘John Williams remains a mystery to me, and he will likely remain a mystery when you finish reading this book.’ That’s not what you want to hear when setting out on a 640-page book. However Williams, now 93, eventually gave hours of interviews to Greiving and does seem to have opened up to him.

John Towner Williams was born on February 8, 1932, in Long Island, New York. His father was a musician who moved his family to Los Angeles when he got a job at 20th Century Fox.

Williams joined the orchestra at his school and played trombone before switching to piano. He gave serious thought to becoming a concert pianist.

He had never harboured any ambition to write music for film or TV yet that was the profession he drifted into after a four-year stint in the air force. He scored his first feature film in 1959, a B-movie called Daddy-O. He wrote the main theme for the 1960s science fiction series Lost In Space. His first Oscar nomination was for Valley Of The Dolls. He won his first Academy Award at the age of 40 for adapting Fiddler On The Roof.

Williams also writes concert music and Greiving offers a commentary on all his major compositions. Happily, he is a sharp writer with a vivid turn of phrase – he describes one piece as ‘a bath bomb of orchestral beauty’ – and the only time I put the book down was to seek out online whatever music he was describing.

This is a serious work, light on Hollywood gossip, but there are some good anecdotes. Frank Sinatra asked

Williams to conduct at a show he was singing in. A rehearsal for the 8pm performance finished at 5pm and Sinatra summoned Williams to his room.

‘John, you know the last tune we did?’

‘Yes, Frank.’

‘Tonight it has to be a half tone lower.’

Williams objected. All 85 musicians would need new sheet music – there was no time. Sinatra stared at him with what Williams described as ‘assassin eyes’ and said: ‘John, you don’t understand. Tonight it has to be a half tone lower.’ It was a half tone lower.

The director Oliver Stone brought a gun with him to the scoring session for Born On The Fourth Of July, quipping that it was in case the recording didn’t go well. Williams wondered if the filmmaker was going to shoot him but Stone said, ‘No, I’ll shoot myself.’

When Williams and Spielberg sat down to watch Schindler’s List together for the first time, Williams said to him, ‘You need a better composer than I am.’ ‘You’re right,’ Spielberg replied, ‘But they’re all dead.’

If you want Williams trivia, this is the place. He scored None But The Brave, the only movie directed by Sinatra. He is obsessed by The White Goddess, a strange book written by I, Claudius author Robert Graves. He plays the piano on the Henry Mancini theme music from Peter Gunn. Think you don’t know it? Google it. You know it.

Greiving suggests Williams never fully got over the sudden death of his first wife, actress Barbara Ruick, from an aneurysm in 1974, a tragedy that left ‘a cosmic wound’ at the core of his life. He had just turned 42. He didn’t talk about it, not even to their three children.

‘This,’ writes Greiving, ‘was the moment when his guard fully went up, and he became a man of intense privacy.’ Williams later said: ‘As a composer, I felt suddenly so much stronger. I don’t know why that is. What I used to tell myself is that she was helping me from someplace else, and that I felt a new assurance, and a new power, and a new... something.’

Wherever his gift comes from, he has given the world so much joy. The conductor Leonard Slatkin called him the most influential composer of the 20th century. For a man who once claimed ‘I never go to the movies’, his contribution to them is immeasurable.