He was born in Hillingdon of suburban London, England into a family of industry professionals, including his father Andrew Pryce Jackman, a keyboardist and arranger who's worked with the likes of Yes, Barbra Streisand, and Nanci Griffith. His uncle Gregg Jackman is a sound engineer and producer for artists such as Barclay James Harvest, Seal, and Enya, and his grandfather Bill Jackman played woodwinds for, among others, the King's Singers. Jackman himself grew up with formal music study, culminating in time at St. Paul's Cathedral Choir School, Eton, and Oxford University in the '90s, a period that also found the young musician inspired by the underground rave scene. He soon found work as a producer or programmer for musicians as diverse as Mike Oldfield, Coolio, Alphaville, and the Art of Noise, and he released his own ambient electronic work in the 2000s. His first solo album, Utopia, was issued by West One in 2003. It was followed by 2005's Transfiguration and 2007's Acoustica, both on KPM. Jackman's voyage in film music took off when Hans Zimmer offered him work assisting on scores (programming, additional music) at his post-production company in Los Angeles. After contributing to movies such as The Da Vinci Code (2006), Kung Fu Panda (2008), and The Dark Knight (2008), he earned his first main-composer credit on a feature-length film with the 2009 animated picture Monsters vs. Aliens. Able to work with both symphonic and electronic palettes, Jackman continued to accumulate composing credits at a pace of several movies a year. A few of his early films were Gulliver's Travels (2010), X-Men: First Class (2011), Wreck-It Ralph (2012), and Captain Phillips (2013), a Tom Hanks biographical thriller that earned Jackman a BAFTA nomination. Other high-profile works to follow included 2014's Big Hero 6 and Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and 2016's Captain America: Civil War. ~ Marcy Donelson