Biography
Hubert Clifford was one of the busier music talents at work in
Alexander Korda's postwar London Film Productions. Born in Australia in 1904, Clifford was both a music and a science student, simultaneously pursuing a degree in chemistry at the University of Melbourne and in music at the Melbourne Conservatory of Music. His music training won out, and by the late '20s he was already on his way to becoming well established as an operatic conductor in his native country. He later emigrated to England on the advice of his composition teacher, and once there studied with
Ralph Vaughan Williams, the dean of mid-20th century composers. Clifford later held a position with the BBC in addition to working as a music teacher, and began writing major works for the concert hall in the mid-'30s. He continued to work for the BBC during the war, and afterward went to work for Korda as the music director at London Films. Often credited onscreen as Dr. Hubert Clifford, his work mostly consisted of supervising and commissioning the scores for dozens of movies, as varied as
Anna Karenina (1948),
The Third Man (1949), and
Wonder Boy (1951) -- the latter was an unusually involving project for him as its plot concerned a ten-year-old musical prodigy, and required that Clifford serve as music advisor as well as director. His other notable film credits included the drama
The Winslow Boy (1949), the mystical fantasy
Pandora and the Flying Dutchman, the pioneering nuclear doomsday thriller
Seven Days to Noon,
Zoltan Korda's 1951 version of
Cry the Beloved Country, and the drama
The Fallen Idol (1948), all of which featured markedly different styles and types of musical scoring. Clifford returned to the BBC in the mid-'50s as the director of light music, though he continued to work in films until 1958, the year before his death. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide