Jan AP Kaczmarek, composer who won an Oscar for his playful Finding Neverland score – obituary

Jan AP Kaczmarek, who has died aged 71, won an Oscar for his charmingly nostalgic score to Mark Forster’s biographical fantasy Finding Neverland (2004), starring Johnny Depp, Kate Winslet and Julie Christie in an exploration of JM Barrie’s friendship with the family who inspired Peter Pan.

The music’s resonance was remarkable given that Barrie’s work barely featured in the composer’s childhood. “I was aware of it, but it had more of an exotic value, and that’s why I became attracted to it,” he said. He soon got the idea, using the theme of innocence as a leitmotif throughout the score.

The commission did not come easily. Kaczmarek’s music was considered dark and other composers had eyes on the project. Determined to demonstrate his playful side, he wrote a three-minute work for symphony orchestra and boys’ choir and recorded it at his own expense. The filmmakers were convinced, although the demo piece did not make the final cut.

Finding Neverland, which saw off competition from John Williams’s music for Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban at the Academy Awards, also picked up Bafta and Golden Globe nominations. Yet it was only one of more than 70 scores written by Kaczmarek for films and documentaries.

He had already composed for the vampire film Pale Blood (1990), the Drew Barrymore horror flick Doppelgänger (1993) and the police action movie Felony (1994). But his big break came after meeting the Polish director Agnieszka Holland at Francis Ford Coppola’s home.

She invited him to produce a delicate score for her erotic drama Total Eclipse (1995) starring Leonardo DiCaprio as the French poet Arthur Rimbaud. They also collaborated on Washington Square (1997) and The Third Miracle (1999). “She wasn’t looking for easy sounds or conventional scores,” he said.

Lance Young’s erotic drama Bliss (1997) carried more risks. “Notions such as vagina or orgasm demand a very emotional music, emotional chords,” he explained. By contrast he brought a religious perspective to Janusz Kaminski’s supernatural horror Lost Souls (2000), assembling members of the London Symphony Orchestra, the Sinfonia Varsovia and choirs from Poland, Ukraine and Britain at Abbey Road studios.

Back in his native Poland he wrote politically charged concert music including Cantata for Freedom (2005), an expansive work celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Solidarity movement, and Oratorio 1956 (2006), marking the 50th anniversary of the anti-communist uprising in Poznan.

A bearded and thoughtful figure with a large forehead, Kaczmarek insisted that there was no formula to his music. “I simply attach myself to the creative process,” he explained. “I go and hunt a music that floats invisible in many places. It doesn’t get out of my mind, it just penetrates into my irrational self.”

Jan Andrzej Pawel Kaczmarek, who used his middle initials AP, was born on April 29 1953 in Konin, Poland, where he was schooled in classical piano by Eastern European taskmasters until, despairing of his creativity, they encouraged him to pursue another calling.

After studying law at Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan, he intended to join the diplomatic service, but that too did not suit. “I quickly understood that to be a diplomat in a Communist country was very unromantic,” he told the Los Angeles Times.

Instead, he started composing for the avant-garde Teatr Laboratorium run by the director Jerzy Grotowski. He also formed the Orchestra of the Eighth Day, a jazz-folk duo that became part of the Polish anti-government movement. They performed at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, in 1988.

Arriving in Los Angeles a year later, Kaczmarek sought work through the many contacts he had been given by friends back home. He overstretched himself, however, with Tower of Babel, his multimedia stage show that was dismissed by the LA Times as “simply a woolly disaster … pretentious”. The only salvageable material, the review added, was his “eerily insinuating music”. Thereafter he stuck to composition, including for an off-Broadway revival of ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore.

In 2004 Kaczmarek founded the Instytut Rozbitek, near Poznan, an Eastern European version of Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute that helps with the development of new work in film, theatre, music and new media. He continued to compose for the big screen, including music for the biblical drama Paul, Apostle of Christ (2018) and Valley of the Gods (2019) with John Malkovich.

His first marriage, in 1977 to Elzbieta Bieluszko, was dissolved and in 2016 he married the architect Aleksandra Twardowska. She survives him with their son and four children from his first marriage.

Jan AP Kaczmarek, born April 29 1953, died May 21 2024