Anne Dudley has always had a close relationship to pop music. No sooner had she graduated from London's Royal College of Music than she got a job as a session keyboardist working for producer Trevor Horn. In her early career she helped to arrange material for a number of groups, and contributed the prominent keyboard parts to ABC's "The Book of Love" and Frankie goes to Holliwood's "Two Tribes". Her career then took a more innovative turn when, along with Gary Langan and Paul Morley, she formed the experimental group "The Art of Noise". This collaborative effort initially specialised in taking various sound samples and moulding them into distinctive techno tracks, and then looked for inspiration from other genres including Jazz and World Music. The group split up for a while and then released a late comeback album called "The Seduction of Claude Debussy".
Meanwhile Dudley had quietly established herself as a composer for film and television. There, her solid classical training and wide experience in popular music has enabled her to demonstrate a versatility which has kept her talents in demand. Her Oscar win for "The Full Monty" (one of very few women to have achieved that recognition in film music) has naturally added to her stature in the industry. Since her Oscar win Dudley has continued to work very hard indeed. For Television she has scored a number of one-off dramas and at least two notable Mini-Series. In the UK she scored "Crime Traveller" and in the US she scored the longer running "The 10th Kingdom", which brought her music to a new young audience as the series established something of a cult following. She has also continued to work on several movies per year, and her filmography now includes more from the fantasy genre such as "Monkeybone", the "Human Body" documentary, the thriller "The Gathering", "Bright Young Things" for Stephen Fry and recent A-list movies "Tristan & Isolde" and "Black Book".
Anne Dudley was seen at the Royal Albert Hall conducting the BBC Concert Orchestra for a show called "Bill Bailey's Remarkable Guide to the Orchestra" which mixed classical music, some education and comedy. The show then went on to tour a number of venues across the UK. The most high profile of Dudley's recent work was to provide the orchestrations for the film version of "Les Misérables", whose original music was by Claude-Michel Schönberg. This was quite a complex task given that they recorded the singers' vocals at the same time as their performances and then had to add the orchestra at a later stage. The excellent end result was definitely worth this painstaking effort. Dudley is now busy composing the music for the 2015-2017 series of "Poldark" based on the novels by Winston Graham, with Paul Verhoven's Elle hitting screens in late 2016.
Here is a CD cover signed by Anne Dudley. Our thanks to Petr Kocanda for permission to use his collection of autographed CDs. Click the thumbnail below to see the image full size in a separate window.
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