James Horner's plane crashes: A look at the composer's most famous work

A plane belonging to Oscar-winning composer James Horner has crashed and the fate of Mr. Horner is currently unknown. 

According to The Associated Press, a plane belonging to Horner crashed on June 22 and the pilot was killed. The identity of the pilot has not yet been made public. Meanwhile, Jay Cooper, who works as an attorney for Horner, told the AP, “It was his plane and if he wasn't in it, he would've called.”

Horner’s various acclaimed soundtracks include those for 1982’s “Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan,” the 1989 film “Field of Dreams,” the 1995 movie “Braveheart,” 1995’s “Apollo 13,” the 2001 film “A Beautiful Mind,” and the 2009 film “Avatar.” Other recent work includes the 2010 remake of “The Karate Kid,” 2012’s “The Amazing Spider-Man,” and the upcoming film “Southpaw,” which is coming to theaters this July. He frequently worked with directors such as Ron Howard and James Cameron. 

Horner is likely most known for his work on Cameron’s 1997 film “Titanic.” In addition to the movie becoming a pop culture phenomenon and winning Best Picture as well as Best Director for the year, Horner won the Best Original Score Oscar for the soundtrack and the Best Original Song Oscar with lyricist by Will Jennings for Celine Dion’s song “My Heart Will Go On.” 

Certain movie soundtracks can hit it big, especially those from movie musicals – according to Billboard, the soundtrack to “West Side Story,” to name one example, spent 54 weeks in the number one spot on the Billboard 200, a record that still holds today. But the “Titanic” soundtrack stands among the biggest soundtrack successes ever in terms of both sales and how dominant a part of pop culture it became at the time. USA Today writer Brian Truitt wrote that “’My Heart Will Go On’ grew as big as ‘Titanic’ itself.” “I think it was sort of at that point [when the song and album performed well on the Billboard charts] that I realized that the music had just transcended being film music and that 'Titanic' was really taking a place in history as an important cinema marriage, as opposed to being another run-of-the-mill movie,” Horner himself told USA Today. Billboard writers Brad Wete and Jason Lipshutz noted of “Heart” and the movie soundtrack album, “The sweeping romance [movie] also produced an unsinkable (see what we did there?) pop single that highlighted its blockbuster soundtrack… Despite being the only song on the soundtrack with vocals, ‘My Heart Will Go On’ propelled the ‘Titanic’ soundtrack to sales of 10.2 million, according to Nielsen SoundScan.”