Ray Dolby will posthumously receive the 2,540th star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame today for his pioneering work in noise reduction and surround sound that led to the development of many state-of-the- art technologies.
Oscar-winning director and screenwriter Francis Ford Coppola and former Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences President Sid Ganis are scheduled to speak at the late-morning ceremony in front of the Dolby Theatre.
Dolby’s widow, Dagmar, will receive the star. The ceremony is being held four days after the 82nd anniversary of Dolby’s birth.
Dolby held more than 50 U.S. patents. Dolby Laboratories, which he founded in 1965, received 10 Oscars and 14 Emmys for its groundbreaking achievements. He received a technical Grammy in 1995.
Born in Portland, Oregon, and raised on the San Francisco Peninsula, Dolby began working at Ampex Corp. when he was 16 years old, becoming the chief designer of all electronic aspects of the first practical videotape recording system.
Dolby received a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Stanford in 1957 and a doctorate in physics from Cambridge in 1961. Following a two-year appointment as a United Nations adviser in India, Dolby returned to England in 1965, founding Dolby Laboratories that year in London.
Dolby moved in 1976 to San Francisco where the company established its headquarters, laboratories and manufacturing facilities.
“Though he was an engineer at heart, my father’s achievements in technology grew out of a love of music and the arts,” Dolby’s son, Tom, said upon his death in 2013 at the age of 80. “He brought his appreciation of the artistic process to all of his work in film and audio recording.”
