Michel Legrand

Michel Legrand (24 February 1932 – 26 January 2019) was a French composer, arranger, conductor, jazz pianist, and singer born in Paris, France. His father, Raymond Legrand, was a conductor and composer, and his mother, Marcelle Der-Mikaëlian, was the sister of conductor Jacques Hélian. His maternal grandfather was Armenian. Legrand began formal music training at the Conservatoire de Paris at age eleven, studying under Nadia Boulanger among others, and graduated with top honors in both composition and piano.

His international profile rose sharply at age twenty-two when his 1954 album I Love Paris became an unexpected hit. He further built his reputation in the United States through collaborations with jazz musicians including Miles Davis and Stan Getz. Over the course of his career he composed more than two hundred film and television scores, won three Academy Awards from thirteen nominations, and received five Grammy Awards.

Legrand's work with French New Wave director Jacques Demy produced some of his most celebrated film scores. His music for The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) and The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967) earned him his first Academy Award nominations. The song "The Windmills of Your Mind," written for The Thomas Crown Affair (1968), won him his first Oscar for Best Original Song. He subsequently won the Academy Award for Best Original Dramatic Score for Summer of '42 (1971) and the Academy Award for Best Original Song Score and Its Adaptation for Yentl (1983), the latter featuring Barbra Streisand. Among his many other film credits were Joseph Losey's Eva (1962), Ice Station Zebra (1968), The Go-Between (1971), Clint Eastwood's Breezy (1973), Orson Welles's F for Fake (1974), Louis Malle's Atlantic City (1980), and Welles's posthumously released The Other Side of the Wind (2018). His instrumental arrangement of the theme from Brian's Song reached number fifty-six on Billboard's pop chart in 1972.

His Grammy wins included Best Instrumental Composition for "Theme from Summer of '42 (The Summer Knows)" (1971), Best Arrangement Accompanying Vocalist for an arrangement of "What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?" performed by Sarah Vaughan (1972), Best Instrumental Composition for "Brian's Song" (1972), and both Best Instrumental Composition and Best Jazz Performance by a Big Band for "Images" (1975). He also received an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Achievement in Music Composition for the television film A Woman Called Golda (1982).

Legrand appeared as a performer in Agnès Varda's film Cléo from 5 to 7 (1961) and had a Broadway performing credit in 1974, as well as the production Andy Williams with Michel Legrand. His Broadway composing career began when his musical Le Passe-muraille, with a book by Didier Van Cauwelaert, which had premiered in 1997, was translated into English by Jeremy Sams, retitled Amour, and opened on Broadway in 2002 under the direction of James Lapine. The production earned Legrand both a Tony Award nomination for Best Original Score and a Drama Desk Award nomination for Outstanding Music, both in 2003. He also composed the score for Marguerite, a musical by Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg with lyrics by Herbert Kretzmer, set in German-occupied Paris during World War II and inspired by Alexandre Dumas fils's La Dame aux Camélias. Marguerite premiered at the Haymarket Theatre in London in May 2008, directed by Jonathan Kent.

His sister Christiane Legrand was a member of The Swingle Singers, and his niece Victoria Legrand is a member of the band Beach House. Legrand died of sepsis on the night of 25–26 January 2019 at the American Hospital of Paris in Neuilly-sur-Seine, where he had been hospitalized for two weeks with a pulmonary infection. His funeral was held on 1 February 2019 at the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral in Paris, and he was interred at Père Lachaise Cemetery.