Musical polymath who won three Oscars for his film scores
Michel Legrand 1932-2019
As a young man, the composer, conductor, arranger and pianist Michel Legrand said his dream was to “do it all”. He wanted “to touch on every possible musical discipline”. And largely, he succeeded, said The Times. Legrand, who has died aged 86, worked with everyone from Édith Piaf and Miles Davis to Diana Ross and Iggy Pop. He recorded the piano works of Aaron Copland, and conducted the world’s finest orchestras. But it’s his film and TV scores for which he’ll best be remembered. Having written some 250 of them, he once joked that he had probably worked on more films than he could ever have found time to watch. They included The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964), The Thomas Crown Affair (1968), which won him an Oscar for best original song for The Windmills of Your Mind, and Yentl (1983), which earned him his second Oscar for best original score. He’d won the first for the 1971 box office hit Summer of ‘42.
Legrand was born in Paris in 1932. His father, a musician named Raymond Legrand, abandoned the family when Michel was three, leaving his mother, Marcelle, struggling both to support him and his sister, and to control him. “By instinct I knew that I didn’t want to waste my time learning things that I didn’t give a shit about,” he recalled. “So I said to my mother, ‘I will never go to school.’” He lay on the floor and screamed until she gave in; thereafter he was left to his own devices in their flat. He spent his time at the piano, and by the age of six had taught himself to compose, said The Daily Telegraph. At ten, he was accepted to study at the Paris Conservatoire, despite a minimum admission age of 13. There, under the famed Nadia Boulanger, he learnt to play every orchestral instrument “so nobody could bullshit me when I was conducting”.
In his teens, he found acclaim in France as an arranger and composer; then when he was 22, an American label offered him $200 (but no royalties) to write an instrumental album of Parisian songs. I Love Paris sold eight million copies, and put Legrand in a position to pick and choose his work, and collaborate with whomever he pleased. He eventually made the move to Hollywood, where his peers envied the way music seemed to stream out of him: given two months to write a score, he’d spend the first seven weeks sailing, then deliver an array of melodies for the director to choose from. He continued to perform into old age – he played the Royal Festival Hall with the Royal Philharmonic last year – and had shows booked throughout 2019. His ambition, he once said, was simply to live a life “completely surrounded by music”. He is survived by his third wife, the actress Macha Méril, and his four children.