Preview: Music from the movies, Royal Albert Hall, London

The film composer Patrick Doyle has scored the music for box-office hits including Sense and Sensibility, Calendar Girls and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.

Now Kenneth Branagh is directing a charity concert, Music from the Movies, of Doyle's film soundtracks at the Royal Albert Hall, to benefit leukaemia research.

Stars including Dame Judi Dench, Emma Thompson, Richard E Grant, Sir Derek Jacobi, Alan Rickman, Robbie Coltrane, Celia Imrie and Catherine Deneuve will announce the soundtracks to the movies, which will be performed by the London Symphony Orchestra and the London Symphony Chorus.

The music, to be conducted by Dirk Brossé, will include pieces from Branagh's Hamlet, Much Ado About Nothing and Henry V, as well as from Carlito's Way, Gosford Park, Indochine and Bridget Jones's Diary.

Doyle says: "My job as a composer is to heighten the performances and draw attention to the storyline and the narrative. If you have a gift for melody you are halfway there. You also need an astute sense of drama. In a sense, the writer has a blank page and the composer has a blank page. So it is a tough job."

Doyle has composed the soundtracks for about 40 films since 1989, when he got his break scoring Henry V. He had already collaborated with Branagh in 1988, when he scored the latter's theatre production of Twelfth Night, starring Richard Briers.

"I've composed the scores for about two-and-a-half movies a year for the last 18 years," says Doyle. "It can take up to six months to create the score. But Robert Altman asked me to write and compose the music for Gosford Park in less than five weeks.

"Sometimes I have to write the music in advance of filming – such as when Kate Winslet plays a melody on the piano in Sense and Sensibility," he adds.

Doyle, who was himself diagnosed with leukaemia in 1997, says that he is doing the concert to raise money for other sufferers.

28 October (020-7589 8212; www.musicfrommovies.co.uk)