Stephen A. Hope on AllMovie

Though he began his career as a film editor, Stephen A. Hope would ultimately find his niche in Hollywood as a music editor. Hope's prolific output during the 1980s ensured that some of the most popular films of the decade would be music to audiences ears. A Hollywood native and the son of Oscar-winning art decorator Frederic Hope, young Stephen harbored a love for music from the age of four. Educated at Cal State Long Beach, he subsequently went on to enlist in the Air Force. Though Hope would find work as a film editor at Desilu Studios in the 1950s (where he would also meet future wife Mary Elizabeth Hughes), his lifelong love of music led him to found a music editorial company, and in 1976 he received his first feature credit with the film The Seven-Per-Cent Solution. Though he would round out the decade with work on both National Lampoon's Animal House (1978) and The Prisoner of Zenda (1979), it was in the following decade that Hope truly began to shine. His work on such films as Mr. Mom (1983), The Right Stuff (also 1983), and all of the Karate Kid films of the '80s ensured increasing work into the next decade; and through the late '90s, Hope would be credited on Son of the Pink Panther (1993) and The Arrival (1996), among others. Hope's final screen credit would be for the 1997 film Dangerous Ground. On June 8, 2003, Stephen A. Hope died of heart and renal failure in Burbank, CA.