French composer wrote Love Story score then turned his back on Hollywood
When Francis Lai was asked to fly to Hollywood to score the film Love Story, he answered by borrowing a word forever associated with his country’s president, Charles de Gaulle.
‘‘Non!’’ he told them. There was no way he was getting on an aircraft to Los Angeles because he was afraid of flying.
‘‘Non!’’ he said again, for he had never been a particular admirer of American cinema, preferring the work of European art-house directors. And ‘‘Non!’’ he told them a third time. He was about to take his annual holiday on the Riviera and nothing was going to get in the way of spending time on the beach with his family.
Hollywood, however, is not accustomed to being refused. After Arthur Hiller, the film’s director, had asked the French actor Alain Delon to call Lai and plead with him to delay his holiday, Robert Evans, the head of production at Paramount, flew to Paris with a print of Love Story, hoping to give Lai a private screening. When he found that the composer had left for the Cote d’Azur, Evans flew to Nice to show Lai the film.
The final scene, in which Ryan O’Neal utters the memorable line ‘‘Love means never having to say you’re sorry’’ after the death of his on-screen wife, played by Ali MacGraw, was enough to break the composer’s resistance. ‘‘I came out of the screening incredibly moved. I went straight home, sat at my keyboard and wrote the theme that very night,’’ said Lai, who has died aged 86.
His piano-led, string-laden theme, heard in the film’s opening and closing scenes, not only had one of the most yearningly romantic melodies to grace a film, but it also made the charts in its own right.
For several weeks in 1971 it was almost impossible to turn on the radio without hearing Lai’s plaintive tune. Then, with words added by the lyricist Carl Sigman – ‘‘Where do I begin?/ To tell the story of how great a love can be/ The sweet love story that is older than the sea’’ – Lai’s tune charted several more times in vocal versions by Tony Bennett, Shirley Bassey and, most successfully of all, Andy Williams. In France it became a hit as Une histoire d’amour, sung by Mireille Mathieu, whom Lai sometimes accompanied on accordion when she performed the song in concert.
Many critics regarded Hiller’s film, Erich Segal’s screenplay and Lai’s score as too sentimental, and reviews were mixed. Yet Love Story, which cost US$2.2 million to make, took $136m at the box office and was nominated for seven Academy Awards. On the night of the Oscars Hiller, Segal, MacGraw and O’Neal were all unsuccessful in their respective categories, and Lai was the film’s only winner, picking up the award for best music, original score.
For once he overcame his fear of flying and, looking every inch the central casting stereotype of a dapper Frenchman auditioning for a Gauloises advert, he turned up to accept the award, apologising for his lack of English and offering his thanks in his native tongue. He also won a Golden Globe.
After Love Story, he found himself in huge demand in Hollywood. Yet while other French film composers such as Maurice Jarre and Michel Legrand worked prolifically in the US, Lai ‘‘remained deaf to America’s siren songs’’, as Le Monde put it.
He worked for several British directors, including Peter Hall on Three into Two Won’t Go and for Bryan Forbes on International Velvet. Yet, steeped in the traditions of chanson, his aesthetic was quintessentially French. He wrote songs for most of the great French singers of his age, including Edith Piaf, Juliette Greco and Yves Montand. A third of the 100 films for which he wrote the music were made by the French ‘‘new wave’’ director Claude Lelouch, who helped to launch his career with the score for his 1966 film Un Homme et Une Femme (A Man and a Woman). At the time of Lai’s death, the pair were working on a reboot.
Francis Albert Lai was born in 1932 in Nice, where his parents, Gavino and Angele Lai, were market gardeners of Italian descent. He taught himself to play the piano. When he was 6 years old a cousin showed him an accordion, which was almost as big as him. By 16 he was playing in cabarets and casinos on the Cote d’Azur.
Unconvinced that popular music was a respectable career, his father insisted he enrol in an accountancy course. He had no interest in the subject, but was a diligent student. ‘‘My parents found an effective method to motivate me,’’ he said. ‘‘As soon as I got good grades, they bought me a better accordion.’’
In the 1950s he moved to Paris, where his songwriting brought him to the attention of Piaf, who employed him as her accordionist and sang his compositions, including L’Homme de Berlin, the last song she recorded before her death in 1963. He later composed the score for Lelouch’s 1983 film Edith et Marcel, which told the story of Piaf’s affair with the boxer Marcel Cerdan.
Lai married Dagmar Puetz in 1968 and spent the rest of his life with her. The couple had three children.
The family had homes near the Trocadero in Paris, with a magnificent view of the Eiffel Tower, and in Nice, where he was a keen supporter of the local football club, OGC Nice. He also played tennis and skied in the Alps well into his eighties.
He will be remembered for the sensuality of his music, which perhaps owed something to his inability to compose in daylight hours. Throughout his life he began work only after nightfall. ‘‘I have always been a romantic. If you feel good in one universe, why go to another?’’ – The Times
Film composer b April 26, 1932 d November 7, 2018
‘‘I have always been a romantic. If you feel good in one universe, why go to another?’’