Maurice Jarre

He was awarded a Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6505 Hollywood Boulevard in Hollywood, California on February 3, 1994.

He collaborated with Lean again on Ryan's Daughter (1970) and A Passage to India (1984) for which he received a third Academy Award. He was set to score Lean's next movie, 'Nostromo', but the director became ill and died before the film could ever get made.

His second collaboration with David Lean on Doctor Zhivago (1965) earned him another Oscar and obtained a level of success rarely achieved by a film score.

He also worked for directors as diverse as William Wyler (The Collector (1965)); John Huston (three films); Franco Zeffirelli (Jesus of Nazareth (1977)); Volker Schlöndorff (The Tin Drum (1979) [The Tin Drum] and Circle of Deceit (1981) [Circle of Deceit]); Peter Weir (four films); Michael Apted (Gorillas in the Mist (1988)) and Alfonso Arau (A Walk in the Clouds (1995)). Mainly perceived as a symphonist and known for his prominent use of percussions, Jarre often integrated ethnic instruments in his orchestrations like cithara on 'Lawrence of Arabia' or fujara (an old Slovak flute) on 'The Tin Drum'.

He has contributed with the soundtrack of eight films that were nominated for the Best Picture Oscar: The Longest Day (1962), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Doctor Zhivago (1965), A Passage to India (1984), Witness (1985), Fatal Attraction (1987), Dead Poets Society (1989) and Ghost (1990). Of those, only Lawrence of Arabia (1962) is a winner in the category and Jarre won Oscars for Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Doctor Zhivago (1965) and A Passage to India (1984).

Jarre's career took a spectacular turn in 1961 when producer Sam Spiegel asked him to work on David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia (1962). Initially, three composers were supposed to write the score, but for various reasons, Jarre ended up writing all the music himself and won his first Oscar.

His first full-length feature, again directed by Georges Franju, was Head Against the Wall (1959) followed by Franju's best known film, Les yeux sans visage (1960).

In 1951, filmmaker Georges Franju asked him to write the music of his 23 minutes documentary Hôtel des Invalides (1952), Jarre's first composition for the movie screen.

Unlike many musicians who started to learn music while still in their childhood, Maurice Jarre was already late in his teens when he discovered music and decided to make a career in that field. Against his father's will, he enrolled at Conservatoire de Paris where he studied percussions, composition and harmonies. He also met and studied under Joseph Martenot, inventor of the Martenot Waves, an electronic keyboard that prefigured the modern synthesizer. After leaving the Conservatoire, Jarre played percussion and Martenot Waves for a while at Jean-Louis Barrault's theater. In 1950, another actor-director, Jean Vilar , asked Jarre to score his production of Kleist's 'The Princess of Homburg', the first score Jarre wrote. Shortly after, Vilar created the 'Théâtre National Populaire' and hired Jarre as permanent composer, an association that lasted 12 years.

His first wife Francette Pejot was a Resistance heroine. She was born in Lyon, France on October 17, 1914 and died on April 23, 2010. She married Maurice Jarre in April 1946 and they were divorced in 1951.