In the course of a career that spanned fifty years, Maurice Jarre, who died Sunday in Los Angeles at the age of 84, composed some of the best-known music ever to grace a film soundtrack. Jarre, who had studied at the Conservatoire de Paris, began his film career with the score for George Franju's 1952 documentary Hôtel des Invalides. In the next ten years, he would work on some thirty pictures in his native France, including Franju's horror classic Eyes without a Face (1960), his celebrated version of Thérèse Desqueyroux,, and, later, his 1963 Judex, as well as The Olive Trees of Justice (1962), made in Algeria by the American independent filmmaker James Blue. Jarre's real big break came when producer Sam Spiegel hired him to apply the appropriate symphonic sweep to David Lean's epic Lawrence of Arabia (1962). The Lawrence score won Jarre an Academy Award, and Jarre became one of Lean's regular collaborators, writing the music for Doctor Zhivago (1965) and A Passage to India (1984), both of which also won him Academy Awards, and Ryan's Daughter (1970). His success with Lawrence also inspired other Hollywood producers to swing open their doors, and he was soon working on movies by such directors as Fred Zinneman (Behold a Pale Horse, 1964), John Frankenheimer (The Train, 1964; Grand Prix, 1966; The Fixer, 1968), William Wyler (The Collector, 1965), Richard Brooks (The Professionals, 1966), and Alfred Hitchcock (Topaz, 1969).

Jarre continued to work steadily through the '70s, '80s, and '90s, doing especially memorable work for John Huston on The Man Who Would Be King (1975) and Peter Weir on The Year of Living Dangerously (1975), and racking up Oscar nominations for The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972), Witness (1985), Gorillas in the Mist (1988), Ghost (1990), and the controverisal The Message (1976). He also won ASCAP Awards for Ghost, Fatal Attraction (1987), and Dead Poets Society (1989); in 1993, the society bestowed upon him its Lifetime Achievement Award, though his lifetime achievement in film scoring still had a ways to go: he would continue to work into the new millennium with his final movie score, I Dreamed of Africa (2000), followed by the score for the 2001 TV film Uprising. The father of the production designer Stéfanie Jarre, the screenwriter Kevin Jarre (Tombstone, Glory), and the popular electronic musician Jean Michel Jarre. Already famous for his tendency to incorporate exotic and native instruments into his scores, Jarre himself began to favor electronic scores over full symphonic music in the '80s, a development that he assured anyone who would listen had nothing to do with his finding the process any easier. He is survived by his fourth wife, Fong F. Khong, who he married in 1984.