Owing to a recommendation by Miller, I was first assigned to the 28th Air Force Band, before being reassigned overseas to the 1306th Engineers Brigade in France.

In 1945, I helped liberate the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp in Austria.

After the war, I entered the music industry. In 1946, I became a pianist and arranger for the newly re-formed Glenn Miller Orchestra, led by Tex Beneke.

In 1952, I joined Universal-International's music department. During the next 6 years, I contributed music to several movies, including Creature from the Black Lagoon, It Came from Outer Space, Tarantula, The Glenn Miller Story (for which I received my first Academy Award nomination), and Orson Welles' Touch of Evil.

During this time, I also wrote some popular songs. My first hit was a single by Guy Lombardo and His Royal Canadians titled “I Won't Let You Out of My Heart.”

Henry Mancini?

Yes!!! It’s Enrico Nicola Mancini. When I researched him, I already knew he had scored the jazzy Peter Gunn TV series, written the Pink Panther Theme, and composed the song Moon River, which was featured in the movie Breakfast at Tiffany’s. But I didn’t know the full extent of his vast credits as a film composer, songwriter, and orchestra conductor (as evidenced by some of the credits in my many remaining clues below).

I left Universal to work as an independent composer/arranger in 1958. Along with a handful of my peers, I was a pioneer of the inclusion of jazz elements in the late romantic orchestral film and TV scoring prevalent at the time.

In the late 1950s, soon after becoming a free-lance writer, I scored the music for an American private eye TV series set in a gloomy waterfront city.

My movie scores include Charade, Arabesque, Two for the Road, The Molly Maguires, Sometimes a Great Notion, The Glass Menagerie, Oklahoma Crude, Victor Victoria, The Great Waldo Pepper, and Silver Streak.

However, my 1972 score for the Alfred Hitchcock film Frenzy -- for organ and string orchestra -- was rejected and replaced by another composer's work.

I also scored many TV movies, including The Moneychangers, The Thorn Birds, and The Shadow Box. I wrote many television themes, including Mr. Lucky, NBC Mystery Movie, Once Is Not Enough, and What's Happening!!

In the 1984–85 television season, four series featured my original themes: Newhart, Hotel, Remington Steele, and Ripley's Believe It or Not. I also composed the "Viewer Mail" theme for Late Night with David Letterman, as well as the theme for NBC Nightly.

Some of the artists who have recorded my songs include Andy Williams, Paul Anka, Pat Boone, Frank Sinatra, Perry Como, Connie Francis, Trini Lopez, Johnny Mathis, Ray Conniff, Quincy Jones, and Sarah Vaughan.

I recorded over 90 albums, in styles ranging from big band to light classical to pop. Eight of these albums were certified gold by the Recording Industry Association of America.

Among my orchestral scores are Lifeforce, The Great Mouse Detective, Sunflower, The Hawaiians, Experiment in Terror, The White Dawn, Wait Until Dark, and The Night Visitor.

I was also a concert performer, conducting over fifty engagements per year, resulting in over 600 symphony performances during my lifetime. I conducted nearly all of the leading symphony orchestras of the world.

Shortly before my death in 1994, I made a one-off cameo appearance in the first season of the sitcom series Frasier, as a call-in patient to Dr. Frasier Crane's radio show. I voiced the character Al, who speaks with a melancholy drawl and hates the sound of his own voice, in the episode "Guess Who's Coming to Breakfast?" Moments after my cameo ends, Frasier's radio broadcast plays "Moon River".

As a fan of vintage 1950s sci-fi movies, I knew of Mancini’s uncredited contributions to the music scores of classics like CREATURE and TARANTULA. After Universal became Universal-International, it seems that they stopped crediting the actual individual musicians who scored their films, instead indiscriminately giving all screen credit to the head of the studio’s music department — who may not have written a single note of the score for which he was solely credited. (I guess it simplified matters when he’d assigned a single film’s score to multiple staff composers, who each contributed various bits and pieces to the final score.)

Typical of company "big-wigs," isn't it? I guess it happens in all spheres of life.

I was born in 1892 to British parents in Johannesburg, South Africa.

I died suddenly of a heart attack in 1967 (at age 75) in New York, NY.

At age 3, my family and I fled to Britain, where I eventually rose to early prominence as a Shakespearean stage actor.

I served in the British Army during WWI, in a regiment that also included such future acting contemporaries as Claude Rains and Ronald Colman.

I was twice the British Army Fencing Champ, a skill that would serve me well in movies and allow me to even teach actors Errol Flynn and Tyrone Power the finer art of swordsmanship.

I was once arrested (in 1926) along with every other member of the cast of “The Captive,” a play in which my character's wife left me for another woman. Though the charges were eventually dropped, I was very angry about the censorship, because I believed that homosexuality needed to be brought into the open.

Basil Rathbone?

Checkmate from Chessman!

Didn’t even get to SON OF FRANKENSTEIN or the many SHERLOCK HOLMES movies…!

Yer up!

I was only familiar with 1 clue, but when I read it, I was pretty sure it was Mr. Rathbone - the fencing skill along with the teaching Errol Flynn reference (which brought back memories of "Captain Blood" and "Robin Hood").

Ok, let me see....I haven't been following this topic, so am not aware of most of the subjects under discussion...

I was born in 1928. I'm an actor, have been in a whole bunch of films and a whole lot of TV...mostly guest starring, but also a short-lived series of two here and there.

In my prime, I had a tough and cool persona...like some of my colleagues...but what made me a bit unique was that my tough and cool was mixed with a heaping helping of 'very laid back'. I was in some of the biggest pics of my time, but mostly my name appeared just after the movie title, not before it, if you know what I mean.

Severe rheumatoid arthritis limited my appearances as I reached my mid-50's.

I had a big interest in fast cars.

Not sure if he was considered "laid back," but Steve McQueen did like fast cars ...

You are warm, and in the correct time period, but it is not Steve McQueen. Odd you would say Steve M, as he and the mystery guest had the same self-defense instructor.

James Franciscus

You're half right!

James Coburn?

James Coburn, it is! You're up, oh greak karnak!

(The aforementioned “self-defense instructor” would, of course, have been none other than Bruce Lee.)