The three-Oscar-winning French film composer Michel Legrand is dead. Legrand died on Saturday night at the age of 86 in Paris, his spokesman said. In his career spanning more than 50 years, Legrand achieved world fame. Among other things, he became known through the film music for "The umbrellas of Cherbourg" and "Yentl".
Legrand worked with music stars such as Ray Charles, Frank Sinatra and Edith Piaf and numerous film greats, including Jean-Luc Godard, Orson Welles and Robert Altman. He won his first Oscar in 1969 for the song "The Windmills of Your Mind," which he composed for the film "Thomas Crown is Unbelievable".
This was followed by two more Oscars for the music for the films "Summer '42" (1972) and "Yentl" with Barbra Streisand (1984). Legrand was also nominated 17 times for a Grammy and took home the US Music Prize five times.
Legrand was born in 1932 in Paris into a family of musicians. At the age of just ten, he began his studies at the Conservatory of Music in the French capital. "Ever since I was a kid, my goal has been to live completely surrounded by music, my dream was never to miss anything, so I never focused on any particular musical discipline," Legrand once said.
After a trip to the world of chansons and jazz, Legrand devoted more and more to film music in the sixties. In 1966 he ventured the leap to Hollywood. The move to the US was a "real risk" back then, Legrand recalled in his 2013 autobiography. But success proved him right.
France's Minister of Culture Franck Riester paid tribute to Legrand on Saturday as a "brilliant composer". The singer Mireille Mathieu remembered her collaboration with the musician who had written several songs for her. Legrand's musical ideas "enchanted the whole world," said the 72-year-old. "For me he is immortal because of his music and his personality," said composer Vladimir Cosma on the death of his colleague.