Biography for
Maurice Jarre More at IMDbPro »

Date of Birth

13 September 1924, Lyon, Rhône, France

Date of Death

29 March 2009, Malibu, California, USA (cancer)

Birth Name

Maurice-Alexis Jarre

Mini Biography

Unlike many musicians who started to learn music while still in their childhood, Maurice Jarre was already late in his teens when he discovered music and decided to make a career in that field. Against his father's will, he enrolled at Conservatoire de Paris where he studied percussions, composition and harmonies. He also met and studied under Joseph Martenot, inventor of the Martenot Waves, an electronic keyboard that prefigured the modern synthesizer.

After leaving the Conservatoire, Jarre played percussion and Martenot Waves for a while at Jean-Louis Barrault's theater. In 1950, another actor-director, Jean Vilar, asked Jarre to score his production of Kleist's 'The Princess of Homburg', the first score Jarre wrote. Shortly after, Vilar created the 'Théâtre National Populaire' and hired Jarre as permanent composer, an association that lasted 12 years.

In 1951, filmmaker Georges Franju asked him to write the music of his 23 minutes documentary Hôtel des Invalides (1952), Jarre's first composition for the movie screen. His first full-length feature, again directed by Georges Franju, was La tête contre les murs (1959) followed by Franju's best known film, Les yeux sans visage (1960).

Jarre's career took a spectacular turn in 1961 when producer Sam Spiegel asked him to work on David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia (1962). Initially, three composers were supposed to write the score, but for various reasons, Jarre ended up writing all the music himself and won his first Oscar. His second collaboration with David Lean on Doctor Zhivago (1965) earned him another Oscar and obtained a level of success rarely achieved by a film score. He collaborated with Lean again on Ryan's Daughter (1970/I) and A Passage to India (1984) for which he received a third Academy Award. He was set to score Lean's next movie, 'Nostromo', but the director became ill and died before the film could ever get made.

He also worked for directors as diverse as William Wyler (The Collector (1965)); John Huston (three films); Franco Zeffirelli ("Jesus of Nazareth" (1977)); Volker Schlöndorff (Die Blechtrommel (1979) [The Tin Drum] and Die Fälschung (1981) [Circle of Deceit]); Peter Weir (four films); Michael Apted (Gorillas in the Mist: The Story of Dian Fossey (1988)) and Alfonso Arau (A Walk in the Clouds (1995)).

Mainly perceived as a symphonist and known for his prominent use of percussions, Jarre often integrated ethnic instruments in his orchestrations like cithara on 'Lawrence of Arabia' or fujara (an old Slovak flute) on 'The Tin Drum'. During the eighties, he incorporated synthetic sounds in his music, writing his first entirely electronic score for The Year of Living Dangerously (1982). His son Jean-Michel Jarre is a well-known popular musician.

IMDb Mini Biography By: François Leclair

Spouse

Fong Fui Khong	(6 December 1984 - 29 March 2009) (his death)
Laura Devon	(30 December 1967 - 14 March 1984) (divorced)
Dany Saval	(30 January 1965 - 1967) (divorced) 1 child
France Pejot	(April 1946 - 1953) (divorced) 1 child

Trivia

Father, with Francette Pejot, of Jean-Michel Jarre; with Dany Saval of Stéfanie Jarre and with Laura Devon of Kevin Jarre.

Known for his prominent use of percussion.

His first wife France Pejot was a Resistance heroine. She was born in Lyon on October 17, 1914 and died on April 23 2010. She married Maurice Jarre in April 1946 and they were divorced in 1951.