Los Angeles/Buenos Aires, June 27 (UNI) Acclaimed six-time Oscar nominated Argentinian-American composer Lalo Schifrin, best known for providing the music for making the theme of the original ‘Mission: Impossible’ TV series, ‘Mannix’, ‘Starsky & Hutch’, and ‘Bullitt’, died yesterday.
Aged 93, Schifrin, who received an honorary Oscar at the Governors Awards in November 2018, died of pneumonia at a hospital in Los Angeles, his son Ryan Schifrin told The Hollywood Reporter. He lived for the past few decades in a Beverly Hills home once owned by Groucho Marx.
A native of Argentina whose father was the Buenos Aires Philharmonic concert master for more than three decades, Schifrin was well trained in classical music before being hooked on American jazz when he was a teenager.
Known for his eclectic and artful compositions, fusing various styles such as jazz, symphonic, classical, electronic, and more, Schifrin was renowned as one of Hollywood’s most experimental musicians.
He received six Academy Award nominations for his iconic scores in ‘Cool Hand Luke’ (1967), ‘The Fox’ (1968), ‘Voyage of the Damned’ (1976), ‘The Amityville Horror’ (1979) and ‘The Sting II’ (1983) and for the song ‘People Alone’ from ‘The Competition’ (1980).
Apart from that, he also composed the score for all the three ‘Rush Hour’ films, Bruce Lee’s classic ‘Enter The Dragon’, and Clint Eastwood’s ‘Dirty Harry’ movies.
However, his score for the original 1966 ‘Mission Impossible’ TV series became one of the most important pieces in film scores, as it directly led to the iconic theme of the classic Tom Cruise spy-espionage-thriller films.
Schifrin said it took him just three minutes to put the theme together, and he composed it without seeing any footage from the show.
“Orchestration’s not the problem for me,” he told the New York Post in 2015. “It’s like writing a letter. When you write a letter, you don’t have to think what grammar or what syntaxes you’re going to use, you just write a letter. And that’s the way it came.
“Bruce Geller, who was the producer of the series, put together the pilot and came to me and said, ‘I want you to write something exciting, something that when people are in the living room and go into the kitchen to have a soft drink, and they hear it, they will know what it is. I want it to be identifiable, recognisable and a signature.’ And this is what I did.”
Throughout his career, Schifrin conducted a number of the world’s top orchestras, including those in London, Vienna, Los Angeles, Israel, Mexico City, Houston, Atlanta and Buenos Aires.
In 1987, he was appointed musical director for the Paris Philharmonic Orchestra, which was formed for the purpose of recording music for films, and held the post for five years. Schifrin then conducted a 1995 symphonic celebration in Marseilles, France, to mark the 100th anniversary of the invention of movies by the Lumiere brothers.
