Biography
Shirley Walker (1945–2006) was an American film and television composer, conductor and orchestrator. She began her career writing jingles and music for industrial films, later working as a synthesist on Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979). She studied piano at San Francisco State University on a scholarship and composition with Roger Nixon.
Walker provided music for episodes of the television series Cagney & Lacey (1981–1988) and composed the score for the animated feature Batman: Mask of the Phantasm (1993). She scored numerous other films including Memoirs of an Invisible Man (1992), the first three Final Destination films (2000–2006) and Black Christmas (2006), and contributed to animated series such as Batman: The Animated Series and Batman Beyond. She also worked extensively as orchestrator and conductor, notably with Danny Elfman and Hans Zimmer.
Walker received two Daytime Emmy Awards for her work on animated series. She was one of the few women scoring major Hollywood films during her career and earned a solo credit on a studio feature with Memoirs of an Invisible Man.
