Lalo Schifrin, composer of scores for films such as Mission: Impossible, Bullitt, Cool Hand Luke and Dirty Harry, has died on Thursday, aged 93, in Los Angeles.
The Argentine-born composer’s career spanned six decades and more than 100 film and TV scores. He was at his most prolific during the 1960s and 70s, when he created what are now regarded as classic scores.
He was nominated for an Academy Award six times, eventually being given an honorary lifetime achievement Oscar in 2018 in recognition of his “unique musical style, compositional integrity and influential contributions to the art of film scoring.” The award was presented by Clint Eastwood, for whom Schifrin composed eight scores.
Arguably, his most well-known score is for the original Mission: Impossible TV series, which ran from 1966 to 1973. His theme accompanied an image of a self-destruct fuse, and was so iconic that it was placed into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2017. When Brian De Palma directed Mission: Impossible (1996), the first in the series starring Tom Cruise, De Palma insisted that the theme be incorporated into the new score.
Born in June 1932 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Schrifin grew up around classical music. His father led the second violin section of the orchestra at the Teatro Colón, and the young Lalo studied piano with Enrique Barenboim, the father of pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim. In 1952, at the age of 20, Schifrin applied for a scholarship at the Conservatoire de Paris to study composition, where his teachers included Olivier Messiaen.
Schifrin also become interested in jazz through playing piano in Parisian jazz clubs, later forming his own jazz orchestra. A chance meeting with Dizzy Gillespie led to an invitation to join his quintet, and Schifrin moved to New York. He became a US resident in 1963 and a naturalised citizen in 1969.
He moved easily between classical, jazz, contemporary, Latin and pop, composing in every style. He was also a prolific conductor and arranger. One of his more famous assignments was making arrangements for the massively popular Three Tenors concerts in the 1990s, featuring Luciano Pavarotti, Plácido Domingo and José Carreras. The recording of the first live concert during the 1990 FIFA World Cup became the best-selling classical album of all time. On the podium, he conducted some of the world’s top orchestras and was music director of California’s Glendale Symphony Orchestra from 1989 to 1995.
When accepting his honorary Oscar in 2018, Schifrin remarked that composing for film had given him “a lifetime of joy and creativity” and the award was “a culmination of a dream”.
“It is a Mission: Accomplished,” he said.
