A native of Nottingham, England, Bill Oaks first made his reputation in New York as head of Robert Stigwood’s record company, RSO. With a roster of artists that included Eric Clapton and the Bee Gees, RSO quickly became America’s most successful independent label.But it was Hollywood that soon beckoned, in the form of two groundbreaking movies, Saturday Night Fever and Grease. As music supervisor, the albums he created for these films remain the two best-selling soundtracks of all time. Bill won a Grammy Award® for Saturday Night Fever and an American Music Award for Grease. He also supervised soundtracks for (among others) Alan Parker’s Fame and George Lucas’s The Empire Strikes Back.
As a producer, Bill’s film credits include, for Robert Stigwood, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Grease 2 and Staying Alive, again with John Travolta, directed by Sylvester Stallone, and Universal’s The Little Rascals, which he made for Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment.
Bill’s screenwriting credits include Life and Soul (Granada TV), Chromium Blue (Showtime) and FAB (his film about the Beatles) and he is currently writing Trafalgar, a feature film about Horatio Nelson. For the stage, he is adapting Jonathan Livingston’s Seagull, and collaborating on Glam!, a musical celebration of the glam-rock era.
