The French composer Maurice Jarre, who has died of cancer, aged 84, won three Academy awards for best movie score - Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Dr Zhivago (1965) and A Passage to India (1984) - and nominations for six others in the course of more than 150 soundtracks, in addition to incidental music for the theatre and concert works.
The Lyon family that Jarre was born into had no existing musical connections. His parents urged him to study engineering, but after entering the Sorbonne, he switched to a music degree at the Paris Conservatoire, where his teachers included Arthur Honneger and Louis Aubert. During his military service, Jarre played percussion in a naval band, and his initial success came as a composer for the stage.
In 1950, Jean Vilar relaunched the Théâtre Nationale Populaire, based at the Palais de Chaillot, and engaged Jarre as composer of incidental music for an immensely influential series of stagings of the classics. "It was the best time of my life, the most difficult, the most interesting, the most exciting," Jarre recalled. A three-CD set of his stage music was later released, including scores for plays by Shakespeare, Molière, Beaumarchais, De Musset and Merimée. Jarre also composed music for Jean-Louis Barrault and Madeleine Renaud's company, and a ballet for Roland Petit, Notre-Dame de Paris, with costumes by Yves Saint Laurent, at the Palais Garnier in 1965. By then, Jarre was a world-famous film composer.
It was the young Georges Franju who first engaged him to compose a film score, for his short documentary Hôtel des Invalides (1952). Over the next decade, Jarre wrote scores for several other films directed by Franju, including La Tête Contre les Murs, Les Yeux sans Visage (Eyes Without a Face in the UK), Pleins Feux sur l'Assassin, Thérèse Desqueyroux and Judex. Jarre's work with other French directors, including Jacques Demy, Alain Resnais, Jean-Pierre Mocky, Marcel Camus and Pierre Chenal, led to him being considered the logical successor to the composers of the previous generation - Maurice Jaubert, Maurice Thiriet and Joseph Kosma - who seemed to represent the spiritual quality of French cinema. Once Jarre obtained international fame through his scores for large-scale Hollywood films, there was some hostility among French critics, who objected to his success.
Jarre's first American film was Richard Fleischer's Crack in the Mirror (1960), followed by the same director's The Big Gamble a year later. Work on Darryl Zanuck's D-day epic, The Longest Day (1962), led to the commission for what remains Jarre's most celebrated movie score, for David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia. Jarre and Lean struck up an immediate rapport, the composer recalled: "In that long sequence, when Lawrence enters the desert to rescue a lost man, Lean listened to the music I wrote, and wanted to extend the scene, to let my work stay complete."
Doubts were expressed as to whether Jarre's style, which had proved so successful in the desert, would suit the snowy wastes of Russia, but Dr Zhivago proved equally effective, even though Lean was exasperated by the pop success of Lara's Theme (as Somewhere My Love, it was a UK top 20 hit for the Mike Sammes Singers), considering that the over-familiarity of the tune would ultimately detract from the film's impact. Lean's Ryan's Daughter (1970) supplied another favourite pop song, It Was a Good Time, but it was A Passage to India, Lean's last film, that won Jarre's third Oscar.
By then, he had taken up residence in the US, where he composed scores for a wide variety of films. Directors include Fred Zinneman (Behold a Pale Horse, 1963), Alfred Hitchcock (Topaz, 1969), Paul Newman (The Effects of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds, 1972), John Huston (Mackintosh Man, 1973 and The Man Who Would Be King, 1976), Elia Kazan (The Last Tycoon, 1977), Adrian Lyne (Fatal Attraction, 1987), Michael Apted (Gorillas in the Mist, 1988), Jerry Zucker (Ghost, 1990), and Jon Avnet for his final film (Uprising, 2001).
Jarre continued to work occasionally in Europe, notably for Luchino Visconti (The Damned, 1968), Terence Young (Soleil Rouge, 1971), Franco Zeffirelli (Jesus of Nazareth, 1977) and Volker Schlöndorff (The Tin Drum, 1979).
After Lean, the director whose work he is most closely associated with is Peter Weir (Witness, 1984; Mosquito Coast, 1986; Dead Poets Society, 1989;p and Fearless, 1993). Jarre's sense of humour must have endeared him to many. For instance, he said: "If a film is bad, there is always an executive who gets more nervous than usual and thinks that if they change the music, the film will become a masterpiece."
In the 1980s Jarre started to use electronic instruments. In Witness, for example, he employed a group of 10 synthesists, each one working on sections of the score at the same time, while Jarre conducted them as if for a chamber ensemble. For Mad Max Beyond Thunderdrome (1985) he added to the basic symphony orchestra with "four grand pianos plus a pipe organ, digeridoo, fujana, a battery of exotic percussion and three ondes martenots".
Jarre had little time to compose for a conventional symphony orchestra, but his other works include Armide (1953), Mouvements en Relief (1954) and a Passacaille (1964) in memory of his teacher Honneger. In 2000 his cantata Giubelio was performed at the Vatican for Pope John Paul II. Consisting of three movements, Yesterday-Today-Always, it concludes with a choir of 70 intoning the word "peace" in 33 languages.
One of his last works was a Concerto for EVI (electronic valve instruments) in four movements on "aspects of our life" - Creation, Evolution, Pollution and Liberation. Jarre said: "I wanted to underline how threatened we are, not only by chemical pollution, but also by sound pollution."
He recently joked that when he had told a movie executive that he was thinking of weaving two themes by Bach into a score, the man enquired what Bach's latest hit had been. "Then I knew I no longer had a place in cinema." Jarre was married four times, to Francette Pejot, the mother of his eldest son, the composer Jean-Michel Jarre; to Dany Saval, mother of his daughter Stephanie; and to Laura Devon, mother of his younger son Kevin, now a scriptwriter. He is survived by his children and his fourth wife, Fong F Khong, whom he married in 1984.
Maurice Alexis Jarre, composer, born September 13 1924; died 28 March 2009