English-born Rolfe Kent has had no formal classical music training and is self-taught. He began his music career while earning a degree in psychology at the University of Leeds in Yorkshire. His first produced work was the music for Gross, a stage play produced at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. He then wrote an original stage musical, Air and Opportunity, that was produced in Los Angeles, before beginning work as a composer for films and television, frequently conducting the orchestras in the recordings of his scores.
In composing music for feature films, he has enjoyed long collaborations with directors Jason Reitman, on Up in the Air, for which he was a Satellite Award nominee, Thank You for Smoking, Young Adult, and Labor Day; Richard Shepard, on Dom Hemingway, The Matador, The Hunting Party, Oxygen, Mexico City, and Mercy, which Mr. Kent also produced; Mark Waters, on The House of Yes, Freaky Friday, Mean Girls, Just Like Heaven, Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, and Mr. Popper's Penguins; and Alexander Payne, on Citizen Ruth, Election, About Schmidt, and Sideways, for which he received Golden Globe and Critics' Choice Movie Award nominations.
Among the other movies that he has scored are Paul Greengrass' The Theory of Flight; Neil LaBute's Nurse Betty; Peter Chelsom's Town & Country; Robert Luketic's Legally Blonde, for which Mr. Kent was a Satellite Award nominee, and Killers; Daniel Waters' Happy Campers and Sex and Death 101; James Mangold's Kate & Leopold; Grant Heslov's The Men Who Stare at Goats; Burr Steers' 17 Again and Charlie St. Cloud; and David Dobkin's blockbuster Wedding Crashers.
He received an Emmy Award nomination for composing the main title theme to the television series Dexter. Over the years, his film and television scores have earned him 10 BMI [Broadcast Music, Inc.] Awards.
In 2012, Mr. Kent was honored with the BMI Awards' Richard Kirk Career Achievement Award.
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