Some of his most famous scores include Wuthering Heights, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Mark of Zorro, How Green Was My Valley, The Song of Bernadette, Captain from Castile, All About Eve, Love is a Many Splendored Thing, Anastasia, The Diary of Anne Frank, How The West Was Won, The Greatest Story Ever Told, and his final score, Airport, all of which were nominated for or won Academy Awards.

Newman was also highly regarded as a conductor, and arranged and conducted many scores by other composers, including George Gershwin, Charlie Chaplin, and Irving Berlin.

[4][5] Newman was born on March 17, 1900, in New Haven, Connecticut, the eldest of ten children to Russian-Jewish parents who emigrated shortly before his birth.

His father, Michael Newman (born Nemorofsky), was a produce dealer and his mother, Luba (née Koskoff), took care of the family.

[8] His talent led virtuoso Ignacy Jan Paderewski to arrange a recital for him in New York,[8] where Sigismund Stojowski and Alexander Lambert, at different periods, took him as a pupil.

She greatly admired his ability to play Mendelssohn, Chopin, Liszt, Wagner and other composers, and with equal skill, in her opinion, as Paderewski.

[10] When he was nineteen, he began conducting full-time in New York City, the beginning of a ten-year career on Broadway as the conductor of musicals by composers such as George Gershwin, Richard Rodgers, and Jerome Kern.

[4]: 27 [16] Soon after Newman arrived in Hollywood in 1930 and finished directing the score for Reaching for the Moon, producer Samuel Goldwyn offered him a contract to continue on as a movie composer.

[18] The theme is also used in Gentleman's Agreement, I Wake Up Screaming, The Dark Corner, Cry of the City, Kiss of Death, and Where the Sidewalk Ends.

[20] He described Newman's ability to carefully synchronize the music to scenes, such as the factory sequence, where Chaplin throws the place into confusion.

[6]: 74  He scored numerous adventure stories and romances, historical pageants and swashbuckling epics, as did his contemporary, Erich Wolfgang Korngold.

[24] His score was unique in the way it included different musical themes and created different motifs for the key actors, which helped frame the action.

[6]: 80  Among the films were The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939), starring Charles Laughton,[26] and in subsequent years, The Song of Bernadette (1943), The Robe (1953), and The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965).

In 1933, while he was still under contract at United Artists, Newman was commissioned by Darryl F. Zanuck of Twentieth Century Pictures to compose a fanfare to accompany the production logo appearing at the start of the studio's films.

[27][28] In 1940, Newman began a 20-year career as music director with 20th Century-Fox Studios, composing over 200 film scores, nine of which won Academy Awards.

He wore many hats at the studio depending on the need, acting as composer, arranger, music director and conductor for various films.

The effects of this style of music created a forceful but less jarring score which connected the entire story, thereby keeping the film's theme more easily understood by viewers.

[6]: 81  Newman's interpretation added the sound of the wind and blowing leaves to give the music an ethereal quality that augmented Bernadette's visions.

[8] In 1947, he composed the music for Captain from Castile, which included the famous "Conquest march", an impassioned score for the Spanish conquistadors.

[41][42] The dramatic score for The Snake Pit, a 1948 film set in a lunatic asylum, was accentuated by Newman's careful use of effects to intensify the discomfort and fear portrayed by the actors, primarily its star Olivia de Havilland.

[6]: 85 In 1954, Newman wrote additional music for his 20th Century-Fox fanfare, extending it with several bars of warm, soaring strings in order to promote the studio's adoption of the new CinemaScope presentation.

Although based on the true-life tragic story of a young girl during World War II, Newman's score focuses on her optimistic personality, which as her diary attests, she continued to believe that people were good at heart.

[6]: 87 [47] In contrast to Newman's use of uplifting violins and a hopeful old European sound for the girl, the score for the Nazis was an "oppressive march in half time" to create a fearsome effect.

[17] Music historian Christopher Palmer says that the score is one of Newman's finest, which because of its style, elegance and integrity, the emotions portrayed by the actors can be physically "felt" by the audience.

Other composers had to help reconstitute musical segments, and Newman's two choral finales were replaced by the familiar "Hallelujah Chorus" of George Frideric Handel.

Newman's longtime associate and choral director, Ken Darby, described the experience in Hollywood Holyland: The Filming and Scoring of "The Greatest Story Ever Told" (Metuchen, New Jersey: Scarecrow Press, 1992).

Arriving in Hollywood just as talking pictures were getting more technically sophisticated, he contributed to creating the musical sound of the era and was at the heart of the studio system at its peak...The passing of Newman was symbolic of the end of a golden age.

[10][53] Newman was one of those rare Hollywood souls who generously nurtured the talents and careers of many other men who became legends in the field of film composition—including Bernard Herrmann, David Raksin and John Williams.

[57] Between 1930 and 1970, Alfred Newman wrote music for over 200 films of every imaginable type, including a score for the newsreel made from the World War II footage of the Battle of Midway.

He married Martha Louise Montgomery (born December 5, 1920, Clarksdale, Mississippi - died May 9, 2005, Pacific Palisades, California), a former actress and Goldwyn Girl; they had five children.