Maurice Jarre was a remarkably gifted film music composer, writes Michael Dwyer, Film Correspondent
MAURICE JARRE, who died at the age of 84 in Los Angeles on Sunday, composed over 150 film and television scores during the second half of the 20th century. He demonstrated his versatility and range as he moved with ease between different genres, from comedies to romances to thrillers.
Jarre worked with some of the greatest film directors, but he will be remembered primarily for his outstanding contributions to the epics directed by David Lean, and in particular for their first two collaborations, Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and Doctor Zhivago (1965). Jarre received Academy Awards for both films, and for Lean’s swansong, A Passage to India, in a career that brought him nine Oscar nominations.
Born in Lyons in France in 1924, Jarre discovered music in his late teens. Against his father’s wishes, he enrolled at Conservatoire de Paris. He made his film debut in 1952 when director Georges Franju invited him to write the music for his short documentary, Hotel des Invalides. Jarre worked on several feature films for Franju before he received his first Academy Award nomination for the Oscar-winning 1962 French drama, Sundays and Cybele. He followed that with what is arguably his greatest screen composition, his lush, sweeping score which provided such an effective counterpoint to the striking visual images of David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia. Jarre’s score for Lean’s next film, Doctor Zhivago, proved his biggest popular success and spawned a hit soundtrack album.
Lean was a famously difficult and demanding director, but to Jarre he was “a great friend” who “gave me the best pictures”, and they went on to work on Lean’s last two films, the Irish epic, Ryan’s Daughter (1970), and A Passage to India (1984), based on the EM Forster novel.
Jarre forged close relationships with some other prominent directors, working on four films with John Frankenheimer; three with John Huston, most memorably on The Man Who Would Be King (1975) and five with Peter Weir, beginning with Jarre’s adventurous, richly atmospheric accompaniment for The Year of Living Dangerously (1982) and including his Oscar-nominated soundtrack for Witness (1985).
A disciplined composer with a remarkably prolific output, Jarre often produced four or five film scores in a single year, and the quality of his work inevitably varied. His many notable scores included William Wyler’s The Collector (1965), Luchino Visconti’s The Damned (1969), Alfred Hitchcock’s Topaz (1969), Volker Schlondorff’s The Tin Drum (1979), George Miller’s Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985), Adrian Lyne’s Fatal Attraction (1987), Michael Apted’s Gorillas in the Mist (1988) and Jerry Zucker’s Ghost (1990). His final film score was for Hugh Hudson’s I Dreamed of Africa (2000).
Married four times, Jarre was the father of three children. One son, Jean-Michel, became a pioneering composer and performer of electronic music, while another, Kevin, is a Hollywood screenwriter who scripted the western, Tombstone, and the thriller, The Devil’s Own, featuring Brad Pitt as an IRA gunman hiding out in New York. Jarre’s daughter, Stéfanie, is a production designer on French television series.
Maurice Jarre’s final public appearance was at the Berlin International Film Festival last month, when he was presented with a lifetime achievement award. Paying tribute to him yesterday, his fellow countryman, President Nicolas Sarkozy, described Jarre as “a great composer” who produced “majestic and full-bodied works”. He said: “Working with the world’s greatest filmmakers, he showed that music is as important as visual image in the success of a film. The works to which he contributed so masterfully are part of cinema history forever.”