Jerry Goldsmith, who died on Wednesday aged 75, was one of the most prolific and versatile composers for Hollywood films and television shows; his 300 or so scores, which ranged from films such as Chinatown, Patton, Planet of the Apes and Basic Instinct and programmes from Gunsmoke, The Twilight Zone, The Man from UNCLE, Dr Kildare and The Waltons to Star Trek: Voyager, brought him 17 Academy Award nominations.

Goldsmith was particularly adept at dissonant music for action, horror and science fiction pictures, but his flexibility made him equally capable with romances, comedies and mainstream dramas. He won only one Academy Award - for his menacing score for The Omen in 1974, and in particular the song Ave Satani - but his work has been a regular fixture of the awards; his Fanfare for Oscar has been used at every ceremony since 1998.

Jerrald Goldsmith was born on February 10 1929 in Los Angeles. His father, Morris, was a violinist and his mother Tessy played the piano, which young Jerry took up at the age of six.

He was not, however, of an academic bent, and when he was nine, his father removed him from school and hired tutors to educate him at home. Jerry went to several of the best music teachers in Los Angeles, including Jakob Gimpel for piano and the composer Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco for lessons in theory and counterpoint, and practised five hours a day.

He had intended to study for a career in classical music, but after seeing Hitchcock's Spellbound, Jerry was so impressed by Miklos Rozsa's score that he enrolled in his classes in film composition at the University of Southern California. Goldsmith also attended Los Angeles City College, though he did not take a degree.

In 1950, he joined the music department of CBS as a clerk, but was soon given a chance to compose, writing one score each week for the radio programmes Romance and CBS Radio Workshop. He soon moved into television work, producing music for Hallmark Television Playhouse (1951) and General Electric Theatre (1953) before scoring the Westerns Gunsmoke (1955), Have Gun Will Travel (1957) and Wagon Train (1957).

That year, he produced his first credited score for a cinema release, the Western Black Patch, though his debut for the big screen had, unacknowledged, come with the score for Marilyn Monroe's 1952 film Don't Bother to Knock.

In 1960, Goldsmith was hired by the composer Alfred Newman to provide scores for television thrillers at Revue Studios and, two years later, he wrote the cinema score for Lonely Are the Dead, an unusual Western starring Kirk Douglas. The same year, Goldsmith also received his first Oscar nomination for John Huston's Freud, in which Montgomery Clift played the psychiatrist.

Thereafter, Goldsmith was in demand in Hollywood, and produced an average of six scores a year during the next decade; of them, he received Oscar nominations for A Patch of Blue (1965), with Elizabeth Hartman and Sidney Poitier; The Sand Pebbles (1966), with Steve McQueen, Richard Attenborough and Candice Bergen; and Planet of the Apes (1968). For the last, Goldsmith insisted on wearing a monkey mask while working on the music, and emphasised the other-worldly aspect of the plot by getting the brass players to dispense with the mouthpieces on their instruments, and by asking the bass clarinettist to play his part without blowing the notes, leaving only the clicking of his fingers.

It was typical of the experimental techniques which Goldsmith was to use on subsequent pictures. Steel mixing bowls, glass rods, bells submerged in water and a 15ft-long percussion device known as a blaster beam were all dragged into service in his work, and during the early 1970s he was amongst the first composers to explore the use of the synthesiser - though he always retained the ability to write for large orchestras.

Planet of the Apes was the first of his collaborations with the director Franklin Schaffner, with whom he later worked on Patton, in which George C Scott played the general; Papillon, an account of Henri Charriere's prison experiences, with McQueen and Dustin Hoffman; and The Boys from Brazil, a preposterous thriller about an attempt to clone Hitler, starring Gregory Peck and Laurence Olivier.

In 1974, his haunting music for Roman Polanski's Chinatown - in which many of the most dramatic moments were economically accompanied by bass piano chords - won him another Oscar nomination, as did his music for John Milius's Wind and the Lion the following year. After The Omen and Logan's Run (both 1976), Goldsmith was practically never out of work. In 1979 he wrote the score for Alien, Ridley Scott's first-rate science fiction movie (memorably summarised as "Jaws - in space") and also began working on Star Trek, producing the music for the first of the films based on the television series. He wrote four more, and won an Emmy for his theme for the television series Star Trek: Voyager in 1995.

In the 1980s, he wrote music for more than 40 films, of which the most distinguished were Poltergeist; Twilight Zone: The Movie; Gremlins; Legend; Under Fire and Lionheart; he also turned out the scores for the Rambo films. During the 1990s he was more industrious, producing the soundtracks to The Russia House and Total Recall (both 1990); Not Without My Daughter and Sleeping with the Enemy (both 1991); the absurd but amazingly popular thriller Basic Instinct (1992); Malice and the thoughtful adaptation of John Guare's play Six Degrees of Separation (both 1993); First Knight (1995); the highly-regarded film noir LA Confidential (1997); the high-octane Harrison Ford vehicle Air Force One (1997) and the successful CGI romp The Mummy (1999), among some 50 or so scores.

Goldsmith also wrote a cantata, Christus Apollo, with words by the science fiction novelist Ray Bradbury, and was commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic for Fireworks: A Celebration of Los Angeles (1999). He was often a guest composer with notable orchestras. He lectured at UCLA's Music Department and adapted three ballets from his music: Othello (1971), now in the repertoire of the National Ballet of Australia; A Patch of Blue (for San Francisco Ballet, 1970) and Capricorn One (for BalletMet, Colombus, Ohio, 1989).

He received seven Emmys for his television work and had more than 200 recordings to his name. He received numerous honours and his manuscripts were donated to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Jerry Goldsmith married, first, the singer Sharon Hennigan, with whom he had three daughters and a son, Joel, also a film composer. He married, secondly, the lyricist Carol Sheinkopf, by whom he had a son.