Rachel Portman

Rachel Mary Berkeley Portman (born 11 December 1960) is a British composer. She was the first female composer to win the Academy Award for Best Original Score (for Emma), and was nominated two further times (for The Cider House Rules and Chocolat). She has composed more than one hundred scores for film, television and theatre, and has collaborated with the BBC on several projects, including an opera based on The Little Prince and a choral symphony called A Water Diviner's Tale. Portman's career in music began with writing music for drama in BBC and Channel 4 films such as Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Mike Leigh's Four Days in July and Jim Henson's Storyteller series. Her success in her profession derives from "a natural affinity for the particularities of a film's narrative" and "her ability to forge a comprehensive articulation of a film's emotional thesis via her gift for colour and storytelling. Her acute career choices complement her compositional gifts, and she has carved out a unique niche as a composer of human-size stories, an increasing rarity in the box office-dominated film world of the 2000s and 2010s." She was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 2010, and is an honorary member of Worcester College, Oxford. Portman is a Fellow of the Royal College of Music. She was made an honorary fellow in a ceremony at the RCM, where Prince Charles (now King Charles III), then President of the RCM, presented the award.