Jarre, Maurice

Jarre, Maurice (1924- ), French composer of film music. Born in Lyon, Maurice Jarre worked in the French National Theatre in the 1950s, a post that allowed him to do a great deal of musical experimentation with regard to methods of using music to underpin dramatic action. This led him into composing music for films later in the decade. His career spans more than 100 films and he has worked with directors from all parts of the world. Early on he became widely known following an Academy Award (Oscar) for his music for the David Lean classic Lawrence of Arabia (1962). This collaboration continued for three more of Lean’s films: Doctor Zhivago (1965), which spawned the highly popular “Lara’s Theme” and gave Jarre his second Oscar; Ryan’s Daughter (1970); and A Passage to India (1984), for which he won a third Oscar.

In the mid-1960s Jarre emigrated to the United States and since then has had collaborative relationships with several other directors: from 1965 to 1968 he scored four films for John Frankenheimer; he worked for Alfred Hitchcock on Topaz in 1969, and from 1972 to 1975 on three films of John Huston. For the German director Volker Schlöndorff he scored The Tin Drum (1979) and Circle of Deceit (1981), and wrote music for the Hollywood films Fatal Attraction (1987) and Jacob’s Ladder (1990) for British director Adrian Lyne. Since 1983 he has worked on nearly all of the American films of Australian director Peter Weir: The Year of Living Dangerously (1983), Witness (1985), The Mosquito Coast (1986), Dead Poets Society (1989), and Fearless (1993). The 1980s saw him increasingly use electronics, rather than the orchestra, as a basis for his music. Other successful scores include the Oscar-nominated scores of Gorillas in the Mist (1988) and Ghost (1990), and the Golden Globe-winning score for A Walk in the Clouds (1995). In recent years he has composed music for Sunshine (1999), I Dreamed of Africa (2000), and Uprising (2001).

Jarre’s television output includes the Franco Zeffirelli epic Jesus of Nazareth (1977). He is the father of the composer and performer Jean-Michel Jarre.