Kenneth Thorne (born 26 January 1925) is a British television and film score composer. Thorne was born in East Dereham, a town in the English county of Norfolk. Thorne began his musical career as a pianist with the big bands of England during the 1940s, playing at night clubs and the dance halls. At age 27, Thorne decided to seriously study composition with private tutors at Cambridge and later studied the organ for five years in London. Thorne began composing scores for films in 1948. Thorne was considered Richard Lester's composer of choice since their first work together on Help!. When Henry Mancini was scoring Blake Edwards' The Party with Peter Sellers, Thorne composed the soundtrack to Inspector Clouseau. He was hired for Richard Lester's films Superman II and III with instructions to reuse the music by John Williams and recompose them for the sequels, also adding some original work. He also did the music score for The Monkees movie Head. Since the 1980s, Ken Thorne has mainly focused his work for TV.