Vangelis, Oscar-winning Chariots of Fire composer, dies aged 79
VANGELIS, the Greek composer who won an Oscar for his rousing Chariots Of Fire theme, has died at the age of 79.
His lawyers say he was being treated at a French hospital for an unknown illness when he died earlier this week.
The burly, humorous larger-than-life musician with long flowing hair also wrote scores for the hit films Blade Runner and Missing.
Greek premier Kyriakos Mitsotakis called him ‘a pioneer of the electronic sound’ whose death is ‘sad news for the entire world’.
After playing in bands and launching a solo career, he won worldwide acclaim with the score for 1981’s Chariots Of Fire, which told the story of two British runners in the 1920s.
His hard-to-forget theme tune went on to form the musical background to endless slow-motion parodies on the internet.
Born Evangelos Odysseas Papathanassiou on March 29, 1943, near the city of Volos in central Greece, he started playing the piano at four but never had formal training and claimed he never learned to read music. ‘Orchestration, composition – they teach these things in music schools, but there are some things you can never teach,’ he once said. ‘You can’t teach creation.’ At 20, he and three friends formed the band Forminx and scored several Greek hits. He later became a founding member, along with singer Demis Roussos, of the progressive rock group Aphrodite’s Child. Going solo in the 1970s, he became a one-man electronic orchestra to conjure up semi-classical soundscapes. He also had hits with Yes singer Jon Anderson under the name Jon And Vangelis.
After Chariots Of Fire he refused many other offers for film scores, saying: ‘Half of the films I see don’t need music. It sounds like something stuffed in.’
His interest in science and space exploration led to compositions linked with Nasa and European Space Agency projects.
And when British theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking died in 2018, Vangelis composed a musical tribute for his funeral that the ESA broadcast into space.
In a lasting tribute, a microplanet spinning between Mars and Jupiter called 6354 Vangelis will forever bear his name.