Vangelis, Oscar-Winning Composer on ‘Chariots of Fire,’ Dies at 79
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Vangelis, the Greece-born composer and electronic music pioneer who won an Academy Award for his synthesizer-laden score for the Oscar best picture winner Chariots of Fire, has died. He was 79.
Vangelis died Tuesday at a hospital in Paris, his assistant, Lefteris Zermas, told The Washington Post. No cause of death was revealed.
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Vangelis, who began playing piano at age 3 but never learned to read or write music, also produced the dystopian score for Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), then reteamed with the director on 1492: Conquest of Paradise (1992).
His other big-screen work included Costa-Gavras’ Missing (1982), the Japanese film Antarctica (1983), Roger Donaldson’s The Bounty (1984), Roman Polanski’s Bitter Moon (1992) and Oliver Stone’s Alexander (2004).
He turned down many other movie offers: “Half of the films I see don’t need music. It sounds like something stuffed in,” he once said.
Vangelis’ music, Spin magazine wrote in 1985, “inhabits a world that is not quite rock (though his earliest support came from rock fans), not really classical (despite the lush, almost symphonic quality of his synthesizers), and certainly not jazz (even if he does employ improvisation).”
His iconic, space-age theme to Chariots of Fire (1981) spent four weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart; sold 3 million copies within a year; was nominated for record of the year at the Grammys; and served as background music during the winners’ medal presentation ceremonies at the 2012 Summer Olympics in London.
“Nobody believed the film would be so successful,” he said. “When I wrote the score, I didn’t write it to be No. 1; I did it because I liked the people I was working with. It was a very humble, low-budget film.”
In a radical idea at the time, Chariots of Fire director Hugh Hudson chose Vangelis, a friend, to come up with the music for his feature that was set during the 1924 Summer Olympics in Paris.
“It was a risky idea, but we went with it rather than have a period symphonic score. It’s become iconic film music — perhaps in the top 10 famous soundtracks of all time — which is good because the music is about 30 percent of a film,” Hudson said in a 2011 interview.
Vangelis was born Evángelos Odysséas Papathanassíou in Volos, Greece, on March 29, 1943. In the late ’60s, he found success as a member of the Greek rock band Forminx and then with the progressive group Aphrodite’s Child, which had hits with the single “Rain and Tears” in 1968 and the influential album 666 in 1972.
He enjoyed a partnership with Yes lead singer Jon Anderson, and they released four albums as Jon & Vangelis from 1980 through 1991. (He had been asked to join Anderson’s prog rock band in the wake of keyboardist Rick Wakeman’s departure but declined.)
Vangelis also received Grammy noms for best new age album for Oceanic in 1998 and Rosetta in 2017.
His 2001 choral symphony Mythodea was used by NASA as theme music for the Mars Odyssey mission that year, and he composed music for physicist Stephen Hawking’s memorial in 2018. More recently, his 2021 album, Juno to Jupiter, was inspired by another NASA mission.
He always shunned the spotlight. “I’ve always been anti-success,” he said. “Normally, after the success of Chariots of Fire, I would have immediately rushed to the States and started doing a big number with video programs, tours and concerts and such. I didn’t do any of that.”
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