Maurice Jarre

Percussion was Jarre's study at the Paris Conservatoire, after an abandoned start in engineering. He spent more than a decade as music director of Jean Vilar's Théâtre National Populaire. Then came David Lean — Lawrence of Arabia in 1962, Doctor Zhivago in 1965, A Passage to India in 1984 — each of which brought him an Academy Award. Other scores included The Longest Day, The Professionals, The Man Who Would Be King, Witness, Gorillas in the Mist and Dead Poets Society. From the 1980s he worked increasingly with synthesisers, including in Witness, Gorillas in the Mist and Ghost. Born in Lyon in 1924, he died in 2009. Honegger was among his teachers at the Conservatoire, and the turn came in 1961 with Sam Spiegel's commission for Lawrence of Arabia. He scored more than a hundred and fifty film and television projects and worked for Hitchcock, Visconti, Huston, Frankenheimer and Peter Weir, collecting nine Academy Award nominations, four Golden Globes, BAFTAs for Witness and Dead Poets Society, a Grammy and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. His ballets include Notre-Dame de Paris, staged at the Paris Opera in 1965 with choreography by Roland Petit, designs by René Allio and costumes by Yves Saint Laurent.