John Ernest Hollingsworth was an accomplished conductor, and as early as 1937 was conducting the London Symphony Orchestra. In 1954, he replaced Frank Spencer as musical director at Hammer Studios where he worked on some of Hammer's best-known films, such as The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and Horror of Dracula (1958). He also occasionally free-lanced for other studios, involved in such notable films as The Wrong Arm of the Law (1963), the Peter Sellers comedy Heavens Above! (1963) and Joseph Losey's The Damned (1962).