Georges Delerue

Verified Timeline

Lore & Background

Delerue was born on 12 March 1925 in Roubaix, France, to Georges Delerue and Marie Lhoest. He was raised in a musical household; his grandfather led an amateur chorale group and his mother sang and played piano at family gatherings. By the age of 14, he was playing clarinet at the local music conservatory. In 1940, he was forced to abandon his studies at the Turgot Institute in order to work at a factory to help support his family. He continued playing clarinet with local bands, eventually transitioning to piano under the instruction of Madame Picavet-Bacquart. He studied Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, and Grieg, and was particularly inspired by Richard Strauss. After a long convalescence, having been diagnosed with scoliosis, Delerue decided to become a composer. In 1945, following his studies at the Roubaix conservatory, Delerue was accepted into the Conservatoire de Paris, where he studied fugue with Simone Plé-Caussade and composition with Henri Büsser. To help support himself, he took jobs playing at dances, baptisms, marriages, and funerals—even performing jazz in the piano bars near the Paris Opera. In 1947, he received an honorable mention for the Rome Prize, and the next year he won the Second Grand Rome Prize. That year at the Theater Festival of Avignon, Delerue conducted a performance of Scheherazade. In the 1949 Rome Prize competition, he won the First Second Grand Prize, and the First Prize for Composition. He began writing stage music during the late 1940s, including for the Théâtre National Populaire, Comédie-Française and the company of Jean-Louis Barrault. He also became friends with Maurice Jarre and Pierre Boulez. By the early 1950s, Delerue was composing music for short films and writing theatrical music for the Théâtre Babylone and the Opéra Comique. He began collaborating with Boris Vian on a number of projects during this time, including theatrical adaptations of The Snow Knight and The Builders of Empire, an oratorio A Regrettable Incident, and a ballet The Barker. In 1952, Delerue began directing the orchestra of the Club d'Essai for French National Radio and Television, and scored his first television drama, Princes du sang. In 1954, he wrote his first compositions for historical spectacles of light and sound, Lisieux and The Liberation of Paris. In 1955, he composed his Concert Symphony for Piano and Orchestra, and on 31 January 1957 his opera The Snow Knight premiered at Nancy and was a popular success. In 1959, he composed his first score for a feature film, Le bel âge. His career was diverse and he composed frequently for major art house directors, most often François Truffaut (including Jules and Jim), but also for Jean-Luc Godard's film Contempt (Le Mépris), and for Alain Resnais, Louis Malle, and Bernardo Bertolucci, besides later working on several Hollywood productions, including Oliver Stone's Platoon and Salvador. Another director Delerue composed for was Ken Russell, who in return filmed a BBC documentary about Delerue entitled Don't Shoot the Composer (1966). He composed the music for Flemming Flindt's ballet, Enetime (The Lesson), based on Ionesco's play, The Lesson. During his 42-year career, he composed scores for 200 feature movies, 125 short ones, 70 TV films, and 35 TV serials. The soundtrack for war docudrama by Pierre Schoendoerffer, Diên Biên Phu (1992), was one of his late notable works. Delerue also made cameo appearances in La nuit americaine and Les deux anglaises et le continent. Delerue composed the music for five of the films made by the noted British director Jack Clayton. Their first collaboration was The Pumpkin Eater (1964), followed by Our Mother's House (1967). In 1982 they reunited for the Disney film version of Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes, but the production was fraught with problems. Unhappy with the sinister tone of Clayton's original cut, the studio took control of the film, and held it back from release for more than a year. They reportedly spent an additional $5 million on re-editing the film, cutting some scenes and replacing them with newly shot footage, with the aim of making the film more commercial and "family-friendly." To Delerue's great disappointment, Disney also insisted on the removal of his original music (which was considered "too dark"), and replaced it with a new, "lighter" score by American composer James Horner. Speaking later about the rejection of his score, Delerue said: "It was extremely painful ... because it was probably the most ambitious score I wrote in the United States." Delerue's music for the film was only available to collectors in low-quality bootleg copies until 2011, when Disney authorised the release of approximately 30 minutes of music, sourced from Delerue's personal tape copy of the score (which originally ran for more than an hour). This was issued by Universal France (along with Delerue's music for the 1991 film Regarding Henry) in a limited edition of 3000 CDs, as the inaugural release of its "Ecoutez le Cinema!" soundtrack series. Despite this disappointment, Delerue worked with Clayton twice more, on his last feature film, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1987), and on Clayton's final screen project, a feature length BBC TV adaptation of Muriel Spark's Memento Mori (1992), which aired just a month after Delerue's death. Georges Delerue died on 20 March 1992 from a heart attack in Los Angeles, eight days after his 67th birthday, just after recording the last cue for the soundtrack to Rich in Love. He is buried in Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California. Delerue married for the last time in 1984; he had a daughter from a previous marriage.

Reader's Guide

Georges Delerue's significance lies in his prolific output and his ability to bridge European art cinema and Hollywood. He composed for over 350 film and television projects, winning an Academy Award for A Little Romance (1979) and three César Awards in consecutive years (1979, 1980, 1981)—a first for any composer. Despite a major disappointment when Disney rejected his score for Something Wicked This Way Comes as "too dark" and replaced it with James Horner's music—a decision Delerue called "extremely painful"—he continued to work internationally until his death. His legacy includes a diverse body of concert works, operas, and ballets, and he was named Commander of Arts and Letters, one of France's highest honors. The French newspaper Le Figaro called him "the Mozart of cinema," reflecting his enduring reputation as a master of film music.

Did You Know?

• Delerue was the first composer to win three consecutive César Awards: for Get Out Your Handkerchiefs (1978), Love on the Run (1979), and The Last Metro (1980).
• The French newspaper Le Figaro named him 'the Mozart of cinema.'
• Delerue was forced to abandon his studies in 1940 to work in a factory to help support his family, and later was diagnosed with scoliosis, after which he decided to become a composer.
• Disney rejected Delerue's original score for Something Wicked This Way Comes as 'too dark,' replacing it with James Horner's music; Delerue called it 'extremely painful' and 'probably the most ambitious score I wrote in the United States.'
• Delerue died of a heart attack on 20 March 1992, just after recording the last cue for the soundtrack to Rich in Love.