Hildur Guðnadóttir

Composer Hildur Guðnadóttir is the first Icelander to win an Oscar, the only woman ever to win an Academy Award for Best Original Score and the recipient of Golden Globes, Emmys and multiple Grammys. Not bad for someone who admits that she “never made a conscious decision to become a film composer”. Born in Reykjavik in 1982 to musician-parents, Guðnadóttir trained as a cellist and composer in Iceland and Berlin. The cello remains at the heart of much of her music, which ranges from avant-garde solo projects, concert hall commissions from ensembles and soloists including pianist Vikingur Ólafsson and the BBC Symphony Orchestra, to soundtracks for film, television and gaming. After establishing her distinctive style—a hazy, slow-phase minimalism blending acoustic and electronic elements—in a sequence of solo albums, starting with 2006’s brooding Mount A and moving though the shadowy, drone-anchored soundscapes of Second Childhood (2007) and Without Sinking (2009), Guðnadóttir made the transition into film with scores for Denis Villeneuve’s Sicario (2015) and Arrival (2016) as well as Alejandro González Iñárritu’s The Revenant. The breakthrough year was 2019, as Guðnadóttir’s soundtracks for Todd Phillips’ The Joker and HBO series Chernobyl received 14 awards between them, including the composer’s first Oscar (for The Joker). She went on to score Todd Field’s Tár and Sarah Polley’s Women Talking. Guðnadóttir’s style is fluid, encompassing the evocative “found sounds” she layers to haunting effect in Chernobyl to the brooding lyricism of The Joker and the spare, ominous clarity of Tár.