SIR Malcolm Arnold, the prolific composer whose troubled personal life earned him the sobriquet “rogue genius” died in hospital last night aged 84. He had been suffering from a chest infection, writes Brendan Bourne.

Arnold wrote nine symphonies, two operas, more than 20 concertos, suites and overtures, seven ballets and 132 film scores, including the haunting theme to Whistle Down the Wind. But it was his soundtrack to The Bridge On the River Kwai that made him the first British composer to win an Oscar.

His tremendous output was achieved despite suffering from alcoholism and schizophrenia which meant he spent much of his life in psychiatric hospitals.

Some regard him as the last of the great British composers in the tradition of Elgar and Vaughan Williams.

Born into a prosperous Northamptonshire family, he started learning the trumpet aged 12 after meeting Louis Armstrong on a family holiday. He won a scholarship to the Royal College of Music and joined the London Philharmonic Orchestra. Throughout the 1940s he composed prestigious orchestral works that led to his writing for film.

Physically imposing at 18 stone, he could consume several dozen oysters, steaks and three bottles of wine “before ending up on the floor having sex with a waitress”, according to his biographers Anthony Meredith and Paul Harris. “He would then go home, and attack his wife with a knife, who would have him sectioned. The next morning, between electrotherapy sessions, he might pen a mesmerising guitar concerto.”

Twice married, and the father of three children, he spent his last years living in Attleborough, Norfolk, with Anthony Day, a former hairdresser.

The cellist Julian Lloyd Webber described him as “a total genius but a very badly behaved genius, but then so was Mozart”.

Explore UK News

• Crime News

• Education News

• Health News

• Scotland News

Times Recommends

• A vicar’s wife: ‘There is no one to fight for us’
• Every little helps at the supermarket
• Ugg or Fitflop? The battle of the boots