A work in constant progress (and occasional regress).
Birthplace:
London, England, UK
Born:
October 14, 1958
Thomas Morgan Robertson is an English musician, producer, entrepreneur and educator. Born on October 14, 1958, in London, England, Dolby is a self-taught musician, and his early musical experiences were with choral singing, guitar and then piano. His adopted last name of Dolby was a reference to the audio noise-reduction process invented by Dolby Laboratories, inspired by his fascination with technology and taken on to differentiate him from popular musician Tom Robinson. In 1979, Dolby formed the Camera Club with Bruce Woolley and later performed with Lene Lovich, penning her hit New Toy. He also worked as a session musician with several artists, including Thompson Twins, Foreigner and Def Leppard, before embarking on his solo career. His debut album, The Golden Age of Wireless, was released in 1982 and was later reconfigured to include his follow-up hit single She Blinded Me With Science, a major success in the US and Canada whose music video was a staple of early MTV. He migrated to Los Angeles and released three more albums, featuring the hits Hyperactive!, Airhead and Close But No Cigar. Dolby performed as part of David Bowie's band at the Live Aid festival in 1985 and produced albums by Joni Mitchell and Prefab Sprout. In 1986, Dolby composed songs for the film Howard the Duck and the score for the film Gothic. In 1988, he married actress Kathleen Beller, with whom he has three children. In the 1990s, Dolby migrated to the San Francisco bay area, and in 1993 he co-founded Headspace, Inc., an interactive audio company who produced small sound files for websites and cell phone ringtones. From 2001 to 2012, Dolby supervised the music for the annual TED Conferences held in Monterey and Long Beach, California. In 2006, he reignited his solo career with the Sole Inhabitant Tour, and in 2010 he released three EPs of new music concurrent with a multiplayer online game, A Map of the Floating City, followed in 2011 by an album of the same name. In 2012, he filmed the documentary The Invisible Lighthouse, which won the DIY Film Festival Award for Best Picture. He became Homewood Professor of the Arts at John Hopkins University in 2014, and starting in 2017, he led the four-year degree program Music for New Media at the Peabody Institute.
Director:
1983 Thomas Dolby - Live Wireless
Music:
1983 Summer School
1983 Thomas Dolby - Live Wireless
Musician:
1983 Summer School
1983 Thomas Dolby - Live Wireless
1985 Duck Rock
2010 Everything In-Between: The Story of Ellipse
Original Music Composer:
1983 Summer School
1983 Thomas Dolby - Live Wireless
1985 Duck Rock
1985 Fever Pitch
1987 Gothic
1994 The Gate to the Mind's Eye
2010 Everything In-Between: The Story of Ellipse
Songs:
1983 Summer School
1983 Thomas Dolby - Live Wireless
1985 Duck Rock
1985 Fever Pitch
1986 Howard the Duck
1987 Gothic
1992 FernGully: The Last Rainforest
1994 The Gate to the Mind's Eye
2010 Everything In-Between: The Story of Ellipse
Writer:
1983 Summer School
1983 Thomas Dolby - Live Wireless
1985 Duck Rock
1985 Fever Pitch
1986 Howard the Duck
1987 Gothic
1992 FernGully: The Last Rainforest
1994 The Gate to the Mind's Eye
2010 Everything In-Between: The Story of Ellipse
Most data and links to images for the Movies section come from TheMovieDB (TMDB).
Additional data for Film Titles come from The Open Movie Database (OMDb).
At least one plug-in comes from IMDb.
Data are -- hey, it's a plural -- subject to the limitations of their sources. (For example, TMDB search results currently max out at 20.) I am limiting myself to free data sources for now. (No, a "free trial" is not free.)
While much of the above data are retrieved directly from outside APIs and other such sources, data from American Film Institute (AFI) and British Film Institute (BFI) were manually entered the old fashioned way into a MySQL database. Re BFI I took the following liberties:
Regarding profile removals and data corrections:
Filtering is applied here to film projects flagged as "adult" by TheMovieDB. Pending "popular demand" I am contemplating a login and profile system with preferences (such as whether to allow adult images to appear) and permissions (such as data entry).
Whereas the overall purpose of this website is to serve as a personal demo/portfolio/workshop of web and data skills, this Movies section is not meant to compete with or substitute for far more definitive movie websites.
Whether or not he still clings to an award which he won in 1986 as a film critic for his college's newspaper, Jeffrey Hartmann is not responsible for the texts of overviews and biographies supplied by external data sources.