Maurice Jarre Biography Quotes 12 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Maurice-Alexis Jarre was born on 13 September 1924 in Lyon, France. Drawn to sound and rhythm from a young age, he initially set out on a more conventional path before committing fully to music. At the Conservatoire de Paris he studied percussion, harmony, and composition, and he became an early master of the ondes Martenot, working closely with the instrument's inventor, Maurice Martenot. This grounding in both orchestral craft and pioneering electronic timbres would become a hallmark of his style.

Theater Foundations and French Cinema
Jarre's formative professional years were spent in the theater. Under the visionary director Jean Vilar, he served as music director of the Theatre National Populaire, composing and arranging for productions that played to large audiences and the Avignon Festival. The theater's demands sharpened his instinct for dramatic timing and economical, memorable thematic writing. As French cinema embraced new voices in the late 1950s, Jarre moved into film scoring. His partnership with Georges Franju yielded striking early work, including La Tete contre les murs (1959) and the indelible Les Yeux sans visage (Eyes Without a Face, 1960), whose eerie modernism announced a composer with an ear for atmosphere and psychological nuance.

International Breakthrough
Jarre's international career took flight when producer Sam Spiegel and director David Lean sought a fresh musical voice for Lawrence of Arabia (1962). Jarre, hired under great time pressure, delivered a sweeping, rhythmically propulsive score whose surging main theme and vivid percussion captured both the grandeur of the desert and the film's complex inner currents. The work earned him his first Academy Award and began his celebrated collaboration with Lean. Doctor Zhivago (1965) followed, with its unforgettable "Lara's Theme", which became the popular song "Somewhere, My Love" with lyrics by Paul Francis Webster and a hit rendition by Ray Conniff. Jarre's partnership with Lean continued through Ryan's Daughter (1970) and culminated decades later in A Passage to India (1984), which brought him a third Oscar.

Prolific Work Across Directors and Genres
By the mid-1960s Jarre had become a globally in-demand composer. He wrote muscular, propulsive scores for John Frankenheimer's The Train (1964) and Grand Prix (1966), and brought ceremonial gravitas and melancholy lyricism to Rene Clement's Is Paris Burning? (1966). He ventured into political thrillers and espionage, contributing to Alfred Hitchcock's Topaz (1969), and navigated adventure and empire with John Huston's The Man Who Would Be King (1975). Jarre's range extended beyond cinema to prestige television: his music for Franco Zeffirelli's Jesus of Nazareth (1977) and the miniseries Shogun (1980) revealed his gift for long-form narrative architecture and culturally sensitive color without resorting to cliche.

Electronics, Experimentation, and the 1980s
While anchored in orchestral tradition, Jarre embraced electronics as they matured. His 1980s scores often fused synthesizers with acoustic ensembles, creating sleek textures that served contemporary stories without losing melodic integrity. His fruitful collaboration with Peter Weir spanned The Year of Living Dangerously (1982), Witness (1985), and Dead Poets Society (1989), each marked by spare, evocative motifs and carefully sculpted sonorities. With Adrian Lyne on Fatal Attraction (1987) he honed psychological tension. He gave Roger Donaldson's No Way Out (1987) a cool electronic pulse and wrote radiant, ecological lyricism for Michael Apted's Gorillas in the Mist (1988). For George Miller's Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985), Jarre's score intertwined with songs performed by Tina Turner, illustrating his flexibility in a franchise shaped by pop iconography. In the next decade he delivered tender romantic and supernatural shading for Ghost (1990), reinforcing his instinct for melody that could live independently of the screen.

Style, Craft, and Collaborations
Jarre's craft rested on clear, memorable thematic profiles; incisive rhythms; and timbral imagination. A trained percussionist, he often built cues around rhythm and color rather than thick counterpoint, enhancing clarity under dialogue and action. He was unafraid of unusual instrumentation: balalaikas lent a folk authenticity to Doctor Zhivago, exotic percussion gave propulsion to Lawrence of Arabia, and the ondes Martenot and later synthesizers added translucence and modernity when needed. His rapport with directors was central to his success. With David Lean he shaped scores around vast landscapes and moral introspection. With Peter Weir he refined a contemplative, pared-down approach. Collaborations with John Frankenheimer, John Huston, Alfred Hitchcock, Rene Clement, George Miller, Adrian Lyne, Roger Donaldson, and Franco Zeffirelli underscored his versatility and his reputation as a collaborator who listened closely and wrote purposefully.

Family and Personal Life
Jarre's personal life intersected with notable figures in arts and cinema. He married Francette (France) Pejot, a member of the French Resistance; their son, Jean-Michel Jarre, became a pioneering electronic musician whose global success reflected, in a different idiom, the family's musical drive. Jarre later married actress Dany Saval, with whom he had a daughter, Stephanie Jarre, who pursued a career in design for stage and screen. His marriage to American actress Laura Devon brought him into Hollywood social circles; he adopted her son, Kevin Jarre, who became a successful screenwriter known for works such as Glory and Tombstone. In later years he married Fong F. Khong, who remained his partner through his final decades. His move to the United States during his peak film years placed him at the heart of the industry, yet his artistic identity remained firmly rooted in a European conception of melody, form, and dramatic proportion.

Awards and Recognition
Jarre received three Academy Awards, all for films with David Lean: Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago, and A Passage to India. Beyond the Oscars, he earned multiple Golden Globes, BAFTAs, and other international honors, and he was celebrated by film music organizations and festivals for a career that balanced commercial impact with artistic individuality. The endurance of themes like "Lara's Theme", and the immediate recognizability of his desert fanfares and ceremonial marches, attest to his rare ability to craft music that resonates both within and beyond the cinema.

Later Work and Enduring Influence
In his later years Jarre continued to compose for film and television while appearing at concerts, retrospectives, and recording sessions devoted to his earlier scores. As digital technology evolved, he remained open to new tools, but always subjugated technique to drama. Younger composers frequently cited his economy of means, clarity of gesture, and instinct for the right instrumental color as a model. The intergenerational dialogue in his own family, with Jean-Michel Jarre's electronic innovations echoing the elder Jarre's curiosity about new sound worlds, mirrored broader shifts in film music that Maurice Jarre helped to catalyze.

Death and Legacy
Maurice Jarre died on 28 March 2009 in Los Angeles, California, after an illness with cancer, at the age of 84. He left behind a body of work that reshaped expectations for the film score's narrative role and sonic palette. His collaborations with David Lean mapped the possibilities of epic storytelling; his 1980s experiments showed how electronics could carry emotion without sacrificing melody; his command of theater's discipline kept his film writing focused and dramatically clean. Remembered by colleagues, directors, and audiences, Jarre stands among the essential composers of the screen era, a musician who could summon the sweep of history or the hush of a private epiphany with equal fidelity and grace.

Our collection contains 12 quotes who is written by Maurice, under the main topics: Music - Movie - Family - Career.

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