John Williams Faced Dark Days Before ‘Jaws’ and ‘Star Wars’ Changed Everything

John Williams’s musical life has mostly been allegro: quick and cheerful. He’s become beloved as a pop culture and classical music icon over the course of his 92 years, and his scores for Star Wars, Jaws, Superman, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Harry Potter (for starters), are known by heart around the world. But just before his greatest musical achievements, the composer’s life spiraled into a devastating period that can only be compared to an elegy. Jaws and Star Wars helped pull him out of it, marking the start of his professional crescendo.

The new documentary Music by John Williams, from Five Came Back filmmaker Laurent Bouzereau, explores how a middle-aged artist, struggling to break through in his profession and grappling with being a widower while raising three teenage children, evolved into the most celebrated composer of his age. Getting the notoriously modest Williams to discuss such personal history in the film (out on Disney+ on November 1) was a challenge. “We could talk, John and I, about the intimate and about the ups and downs, but my approach to those moments was through music,” Bouzereau says. “That, to me, was a key to making him feel comfortable. It was always done as an entry point into a musical phrase, almost.”

By the mid 1960s, Williams had been toiling for nearly a decade in Hollywood as a piano player and increasingly frequent composer. His father, John Sr., had been a jazz drummer whom his son often heard on live radio broadcasts, getting an early lesson in composition by listening carefully to pick out his dad among the performers. After a stint in the Air Force, Williams gradually established himself as a versatile writer of TV and movie music, working almost obsessively to break through from a more workmanlike approach to higher levels of orchestration. At one point, he even changed his professional credit from “Johnny” to “John” to be taken more seriously in the industry. It began to work. In 1972, he won his first Oscar for the score to Fiddler on the Roof.

The composer conducts a scoring session in the documentary Music By John Williams.Travers Jacobs

Bouzereau describes the composer’s work prior to that time as “that of a really hard-, hardworking student. You can already sense the talent, but it’s in certain films or television series that are not as memorable as the music perhaps. If you asked him that question, I think he would say he’s still studying.”

The filmmaker, who has been making documentaries and writing books about Hollywood for decades, sees Williams’s story as a testament to old-school resilience and dues paying in an era when insta-success is mythologized. “There is a sense in society today that you can obtain everything so fast, and by the time you’re 25 you’ll be so rich you don’t even have to work anymore. I mean, we all know the reality of that kind of fame,” the filmmaker says. “For someone wanting to be a musician, or an actor, a director, or a writer, seeing that someone like John Williams took his time to get there is mega inspiring in a world where you feel that your career and your life can be as quick as a swipe on an Instagram page.”

The John Williams story also shows that even legends have setbacks and heartaches. Just as the composer was beginning to truly earn the musical moniker of “maestro” in his early 40s, his personal life took a startling and painful turn.

Williams had married singer and actress Barbara Ruick in 1956, the same year she appeared in her most memorable role in the film version of the Rodgers & Hammerstein musical Carousel—playing Carrie Pipperidge, the young woman who sings of marrying a hardworking local man and having a full house of children. Ruick found her own version of that, performing roles only sporadically over the years as she and Williams raised three children and he worked tirelessly on his musical projects. In the documentary, Williams notes that he often did his composing in the relative quiet of soundstage offices rather than their noisy kid-filled home. Like many fathers in that era, he prioritized his professional work over household duties, and his daughter, Jennifer Williams, recalled sliding notes under his door to get his attention when he would be “scribbling away” at home. Sometimes he brought the kids into his process, like when he composed the theme to the 1965–1968 TV series Lost in Space on a souvenir-store ukulele during a family vacation to Hawaii.

“There’s no doubt that John was an amazing father, but it’s absolutely true that when you’re devoting yourself to an art form, and one that’s very demanding…it’s a choice. And it’s a hard one,” Bouzereau says. “That type of achievement doesn’t come for free. I wouldn’t necessarily call them sacrifices. I would call them choices that impact your personal life. I don’t think it’s unique to John. It’s anyone who is dedicated to a career that is not only feeding the family, but feeding your soul. When you’re a creator, I think that it’s very hard to disconnect and say, ‘Well, I’m not going to do anything for two weeks,’ because you’re always in the process of creating or wanting to create. He says that it’s his oxygen.”

Barbara also felt the need to get back to her own work as a performer. In March 1974, when the kids were all teenagers, she left home to go on location in Reno, Nevada, to appear in her first onscreen role in over a decade—a scene-stealing part as a feisty cowgirl barkeeper in Robert Altman’s comedy California Split. She never returned home. While away on the production, a brain aneurysm caused her death at the age of 41. A heartsick Williams abandoned music to focus on consoling his family while grieving. “I didn’t work for a long time,” he says in the documentary. “I just didn’t want to deal with films and stories and characters and so on.”

Even decades later, Williams says that it’s difficult for him to talk about. “There’s been some pain in his life. When you get past a certain point, he gets quiet,” his grandson, Ethan Gruska, says in the film. “I think he expresses himself through music.”

Inevitably, Williams picked up his composer’s pen and found refuge in his work, writing a violin concerto not for a movie or TV series, but simply for Barbara. “Her father was a violinist. She loved the violin. She always wanted me to write something for her, which I never did until she passed,” he says in the documentary.

How did Bouzereau get Williams to open up about that time? “I said to him, ‘John, I love the first violin concerto. Where did this come from?’ And he said, ‘I lost my wife,’ and went into a monologue about it. So I approached him through music.”

Looking at his filmography, it’s hard to detect when the break came. Williams has credits on the disaster movies Earthquake and The Towering Inferno at the end of 1974. It may merely be that his priorities flipped, and the work of being a single father took over. “In his mind, he took a break,” Bouzereau says. “He couldn’t do anything for a long time, is what he says. What it felt to me is that time stopped, and even if he was working, I don’t know that he was processing it in the same way.”

The following year, the composer who frequently had four to five credits per year worked on just two films: the Clint Eastwood climbing thriller The Eiger Sanction and the second feature film from a young director he had befriended. The movie was about a shark.

As Williams returned to work after reconnecting with his children and reorienting his life, he established a close friendship with two young filmmakers who were about to revolutionize pop culture. It may be no coincidence that Steven Spielberg and George Lucas seemed like kids to him too. At a joint appearance last year to discuss their five decades of work together, Williams kept referring to Spielberg as a “teenager” when they first met. “I have to correct you,” Spielberg teased him. “I was 24.”

“You certainly didn’t look it,” Williams replied.

Bouzereau says the composer was galvanized by their “wild energy and their wild ideas,” but also appreciated their respect for the musical traditions he had spent his life perfecting. They were more interested in reviving and adjusting the classical style rather than tearing it down completely. “Those guys are changing cinema [but] they were like, ‘Let’s make changes, but stay the lovers of the cinema that we grew up on,’” the filmmaker says.

The bond between the 40-something composer and the 20-something director was not a patriarchal one, Bouzereau adds. “I’ve never heard Steven refer to John as a father figure. He’s more an older brother. They’re not all the same age, but fatherhood means an air of superiority, and that has never been what that collaboration is all about.”

His first collaboration with Spielberg was the Goldie Hawn chase comedy The Sugarland Express, which debuted in early April of 1974. That release came just a month after Barbara’s death, so musical work on that was largely complete by the time of her unexpected passing. It had been a happy experience for Williams, and when he was ready to throw himself back into making music for films again, Spielberg’s projects marked a renaissance for him. The pair made Jaws in 1975, and Williams’s dread-filled score earned him his second Oscar. The next year, when Williams was offered a choice between working on the prestigious, star-studded World War II epic A Bridge Too Far or a peculiar-seeming space adventure called Star Wars, it was Spielberg who talked him into taking a chance on Lucas.

“It was literally John trusting Steven and saying, ‘You know what? I’m going to go with your advice—brotherhood,’” Bouzereau says.

Had Williams not come back for Jaws, and subsequently not taken Star Wars, it’s easy to imagine a completely different filmography for the composer. Many of the themes moviegoers know might not exist, and the landscape of movies for the next half-century might be unrecognizable. “This is like It’s a Wonderful Life,” Bouzereau says. “It would be a very different Hollywood. And a very different Star Wars.”

Everything changed for Williams after that, and things might have gone very differently for Spielberg and Lucas if not for the elevating power his scores had on their imagery. But the Williams who worked on those movies was not the same composer as the man who had been plugging away in the decades before. “Prior to my mom’s death, my father, although a brilliant composer, was more of a journeyman,” his daughter, Jennifer, says in Music by John Williams. “But after she died, there was a kind of feeling that he had. She was by his side.”

“I felt like she was helping me,” Williams says in the film. “It’s just a funny kind of feeling that I had. And I still have it.” He married again in 1980, and he and his wife Samantha Winslow have now been together for 44 years, but his earlier loss continued to shape him. “I think in some way I grew up artistically or gained some kind of energy or penetrated what I was doing a little more deeply,” Williams says in the movie. “The busiest, most successful period of my life in film started immediately thereafter.”

In Music by John Williams, the sequence about her impact on his work led Spielberg himself to offer Bouzereau a suggestion about a photograph he had of the couple: “His only note, actually, was, ‘When John says, “I felt she was helping me,” you need to [start] closer to her and pan out or zoom out and reveal John.’”