Oscar-winning film composer James Horner died in a plane crash Monday morning near Santa Barbara, Calif., according to multiple reports. He was 61.
Variety confirmed the news of Horner's death late Monday, and Sylvia Patrycja, identified by the Hollywood Reporter as Horner's assistant, wrote in a Facebook post that "we have lost an amazing person with a huge heart and unbelievable talent. He died doing what he loved."
Horner wrote many prominent scores, including those for Titanic, Avatar and Braveheart. He was nominated nine times for Academy Awards, winning twice in 1998 for My Heart Will Go On and his Titanic score.
The Los Angeles-born composer was piloting the small aircraft that went down about 60 miles north of Santa Barbara — the Los Angeles CBS affiliate reported that Santa Barbara County Fire responded to a call Monday morning to an area where the crash had sparked a brush fire.
After working on Roger Corman movies in the 1970s including Battle Beyond the Stars, Horner had his first breakthrough in the Hollywood film-music scene scoring Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan in 1982. By the end of the decade, he had several notable movies under his belt including Cocoon, Aliens, Glory, Field of Dreams and Somewhere Out There, which garnered Oscar nods for score and original song.
Other notable scores in his career included The Rocketeer (1991), Apollo 13 (1995), A Beautiful Mind (2001), House of Sand and Fog (2003), but he was best known for his work on director James Cameron's blockbuster Titanic.
The Celine Dion power ballad My Heart Will Go On, which Horner co-wrote with Will Jennings, was the world's best-selling single of 1998, won four Grammy Awards and ranks No. 14 on the American Film Institute's list of the 100 greatest movie songs.
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Horner told USA TODAY in 2012 that when the song and the soundtrack album were rising to the top of the Billboard charts, "I think it was sort of at that point that I realized that the music had just transcended being film music and that Titanic was really taking a place in history as an important cinema marriage, as opposed to being another run-of-the-mill movie."
The composer also found a kindred spirit in Cameron: "He likes filmmaking where he takes a lot of risks, as do I. That is what's most important. We talk about the fact that we like to be way out on a branch where you can hear it cracking, taking a risk rather than playing it safe and being further back on the tree."
Two of Horner's final projects come out this year: The Jake Gyllenhaal boxing film Southpaw (in theaters July 24) and the survival drama The 33 (out Nov. 13) starring Antonio Banderas.
Actors and filmmakers such as Ron Howard, Seth MacFarlane and Russell Crowe took to Twitter to pay tribute to Horner's memory, and Josh Groban tweeted a video of Remember Me, a track that Horner penned for the 2004 movie Troy, along with the message "He wrote me a song that has such special meaning to me. We'll always remember you, James. RIP. #genius."
