Michel Legrand, three-time Oscar winner and composer of such classic film songs as “The Windmills of Your Mind,” “I Will Wait for You,” “You Must Believe in Spring” and “What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?,” along with the groundbreaking musical score for “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg,” has died at the age of 86, reports Variety.
Legrand died at his home early Saturday in Paris, his publicist told Agence France-Presse. His wife, French actress Macha Meril, was at his side.
His most recent film score was “The Other Side of the Wind,” composed for Orson Welles’ last film, which was finally completed and released in 2018. Decades ago, after their 1974 collaboration on “F for Fake,” the legendary director had asked for another Legrand jazz score. “I take it as a gift from Orson, through the clouds,” he said early last year.
The Paris-born Legrand was active in all musical fields, composing classical works, stage musicals, arranging and recording albums, playing jazz piano and conducting orchestras in concert, as well as scoring for movies and television. He once said, “I’ve never settled on one musical discipline. I love playing, conducting, singing and writing, and in all styles.”
His approximately 150 scores include Jacques Demy’s 1964 classic “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg,” a landmark film in which all of the dialogue is sung and which is believed to mark the only instance in Oscar history in which a composer was nominated in all three music categories for the same film (best song, best original score, best musical adaptation). The songs “I Will Wait for You” and “Watch What Happens,” both of which became standards, emerged from the “Cherbourg” score.
Legrand earned 13 Oscar nominations in all. He won for the song “The Windmills of Your Mind” (1968), the score “Summer of ’42” (1971) and the song score for “Yentl” (1983). In addition to the three “Cherbourg” nominations, others included score nominations for “The Thomas Crown Affair” and “The Young Girls of Rochefort” (both 1968) and song nominations for “What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?” (1969), “Pieces of Dreams” (1970), “How Do You Keep the Music Playing?” (1982) and two songs from “Yentl” that have also gone on to standard status: “Papa, Can You Hear Me?” and “The Way He Makes Me Feel.”
His best-known scores are from the 1960s and ’70s, including “Ice Station Zebra,” “The Go-Between,” “Le Mans,” “Lady Sings the Blues,” “The Three Musketeers,” Orson Welles’ “F for Fake” and “The Other Side of Midnight.” His 1980s scores included Louis Malle’s “Atlantic City,” the James Bond film “Never Say Never Again” and his sole film as writer-director as well as composer, 1989’s semi-autobiographical “Five Days in June.” In the 1990s he collaborated with trumpeter Miles Davis on the score for “Dingo” and with director Robert Altman on “Ready to Wear.”
“Cherbourg” was one of ten films Legrand made with Demy. They began with “Lola” (1961) and “Bay of Angels” (1962) and went on to do the musicals “The Young Girls of Rochefort” and “Peau d’Ane” (1970) and other films including “Lady Oscar” (1979).
Legrand worked occasionally in television, earning Emmy nominations for his music for the telefilms “Brian’s Song” (1971) and “A Woman Called Golda” (1982). He scored a dozen more TV movies and miniseries in the ’70s and ’80s including “The Adventures of Don Quixote,” “Cage Without a Key,” “The Jesse Owens Story,” “Crossings” and the Richard Chamberlain version of “Casanova.”
His most famous work, “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg,” was adapted into a stage musical in 1979 and received stagings in both New York and Paris. His other musicals included “Le Passe-Muraille” (1997) for the Paris stage which became the Tony-nominated “Amour” on Broadway (2002); and the West End production of “Marguerite” (2008). He also wrote a ballet, “Liliom” for the Hamburg Ballet in 2011, and an opera, “Dreyfus,” that debuted in Nice in 2014.
Legrand won five Grammy Awards, including Song of the Year in 1972 (“The Summer Knows” from “Summer of ’42”) with longtime collaborators, lyricists Marilyn and Alan Bergman. Legrand penned dozens of songs with the Bergmans, notably the songs for “Yentl” plus “Windmills,” “What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?” and “How Do You Keep the Music Playing?”
Read more of this report from Variety.
See also this profile and interview with Michel Legrand, published last September in The Guardian.