- Talented, prolific and versatile film composer Charles Bernstein was born on February 28, 1943 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He conducted his own orchestral music at age sixteen and studied composition with Vitorio Giannini and Vincent Persichetti at Juilliard. Bernstein also attended the University of California; he received an Outstanding Graduate of the College Award, a Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship and a Chancellor's Doctoral Teaching Fellowship while working with American composer Roy Harris. His impressively eclectic musical style ranges from comedy to drama to action to horror. Bernstein has supplied the scores for a bunch of enjoyably down'n'dirty 70's drive-in exploitation features: he turned up the funk with "That Man Bolt," went all-out groovy for the "Invasion of the Bee Girls," and kicked out the tuneful swinging country jams on "White Lightning" (a snippet of this score was used in the "Kill Bill Vol. 1" soundtrack), "Gator," "A Small Town in Texas," and "Nightmare in Badham County." Bernstein's scores in the horror genre are especially chilling and effective: Among his finest fright film scores are "Hex," "Sweet Kill," "The Entity" (this is one of Bernstein's most inspired, inventive and underrated scores; it was nominated for a Saturn Award for Best Music), "Cujo," Wes Craven's terrifying classic "A Nightmare on Elm Street," and "April Fool's Day." Moreover, Bernstein has done scores for a large number of made-for-TV movies. He won an Emmy Award for his score for the "Little Miss Perfect" episode of the "CBS Schoolbreak Special." His scores for "Enslavement" and "The Sea Wolf" were nominated for Emmy Awards while his score for "The Man Who Broke A 1,000 Chains" received a Cable ACE Award nomination for Original Score. Outside of his substantial film and television work, Bernstein has also done music for Off-Broadway theater, modern dance, and the World Festival of Sacred Music, played jazz in the cellars of Paris, and danced and played folk music with the Greeks and gypsies from the Balkans. Moreover, Bernstein has written the acclaimed books "Film Music and Everything Else - Volume 1: Limitations" and "Movie Music: An Insider's View." He won an ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for his writing on music. Bernstein is a member of the Board of Governors of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the Board of Directors of the Society of Composers and Lyricists, and the Board of Directors of the ASCAP Foundation. In addition, Charles Bernstein has taught on the graduate film scoring faculty at USC and holds an annual film scoring seminar in the summer at UCLA Extension.- IMDb Mini Biography By: woodyanders
- SpouseGeorgianne Bernstein(? - present)
- Elected Vice President of the Motion Picture Academy by the Academy's Board of Governors in 2007, a position he shares with actor Tom Hanks. He has also chaired the Academy Awards Rules Committee since 1998.
- Member of the Board of Governors of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (Music Branch) since 1995.
- If a picture is worth a thousand words, just think of all the emotions a piece of music is worth.
- Our lives are probably all those things that we leave out of our biographies.
- We all make fun of awards in Hollywood, but who doesn't love to receive one!
- The most beautiful music and the greatest films ever made are only a click away; what a miraculous time we live in.
- I think that listening to and loving music is a gift that we are all naturally born with.
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