MICHEL LEGRAND

(24 February 1932 - 26 January 2019)

The French film composer, jazz musician and conductor Michel Legrand, who has died aged 86, was born into a musical family. At age ten he studied at the Paris Conservatoire under Nadia Boulanger and other celebrated musicians and began composing and also playing piano and several other instruments. From 1947 he became interested in jazz and worked as an accompanist for many French singers. His first album, I Love Paris, sold over eight million copies. More albums followed and he managed to persuade musicians of the calibre of Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Stan Getz, Sarah Vaughan, Ray Charles, Diana Ross and Stephane Grappelli to work with him. Legrand became involved in French cinema at the time of the Nouvelle Vague with the likes of directors Jean-Luc Godard and Jacques Demy. He came to fame with Demy’s Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (aka The Umbrellas of Cherbourg) (1964) in which the whole film was sung, earning him three Oscar nominations, including best original song for ‘I Will Wait for You’, which was subsequently taken up by many popular singers. Moving to Hollywood, he won his first (of three) Academy Awards for ‘The Windmills of Your Mind’ from The Thomas Crown Affair. His other Oscars were for Summer of ’42 and Yentl. In his long career in writing for films and television, Legrand notched up over two hundred soundtrack scores in some sixty years from 1955 right up until he died. His last film, Morning Shine, awaits release. Many of the early films, such as those from the 1950s, never reached the UK. However, he became a global name from the time of Demy’s Lola (1961), Bay of Angels, Les Parapluies de Cherbourg and Les Demoiselles de Rochefort, and through his work on Godard’s Une Femme est une Femme and Vivre sa Vie and Agnès Varda’s Cleo de 5 ă 7. In Hollywood, he made his mark with Sweet November, The Thomas Crown Affair, Ice Station Zebra, Play Dirty, The Happy Ending (in which his song was ‘What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?’, written with Alan and Marilyn Bergman), Summer of ’42, The Go-Between, Le Mans, A Time for Loving, Portnoy’s Complaint, Lady Sings the Blues, Bequest to the Nation, A Doll’s House, 40 Carats, F for Fake (with Orson Welles), Gable and Lombard, The Other Side of Midnight, The Hunter, Yentl, Atlantic City, Never Say Never Again, Prêt-ẚ-Porter, Les Misḗrables – the list goes ever on – right up to The Other Side of the Wind, the recently completed ‘lost’ Orson Welles  film. He was nominated for several Grammy awards, Emmy awards and won a Tony award for his theatre musical Amour on Broadway in 2002. He premiered his musical Marguerite, written with Alain Boublil, Claude-Michel Schőnberg and lyricist Herbert Kretzmer in London in 2008. Michel Legrand was married three times and has three children.

MICHAEL DARVELL