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35 minutes ago
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Lalo Schifrin, Acclaimed Composer of ‘Mission: Impossible' and ‘Mannix' Themes, Dies at 93
Lalo Schifrin, the six-time Oscar-nominated composer, pianist and conductor renowned for his electric, jazz-infused themes and music for Mission: Impossible, Mannix, Starsky & Hutch and Bullitt, died Thursday. He was 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. More from The Hollywood Reporter 'Squid Game' Finale Ends With Surprise Hollywood Star Cameo Lorde Summer Officially Arrives With New Album 'Virgin' Rick Hurst, Actor on 'The Dukes of Hazzard,' Dies at 79 A native of Argentina whose father was the Buenos Aires Philharmonic concert master for more than three decades, Schifrin was trained in the world of classical music before being hooked on American jazz when he was a teenager. He artfully blended the two genres, and the combustible energy and rhythmic vitality of his compositions were especially well-suited for action-suspense movies and TV shows. The workaholic Schifrin received Oscar nominations for his scores for 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). He scored Dirty Harry (1971) and the sequels Magnum Force (1973), The Enforcer (1976), Sudden Impact (1983) and The Dead Pool (1988), all starring Clint Eastwood — the filmmaker presented him with his Oscar — and served as the composer on all three of the Rush Hour films. Schifrin had Ray Charles perform with a symphony orchestra for The Cincinnati Kid (1965), and he provided the classic saxophone-laden car-chase music for Steve McQueen's Bullitt (1968). His résumé also included work on Coogan's Bluff (1968) — that kicked off his long association with Eastwood and director Don Siegel — Kelly's Heroes (1970), Charley Varrick (1973), The Eagle Has Landed (1976), Telefon (1977), The Nude Bomb (1980), Black Moon Rising (1986), Money Talks (1997), Something to Believe In (1998), Tango (1998), Bringing Down the House (2003) and The Bridge of San Luis Rey (2004). His cool, percolating Mission: Impossible theme, set to an unusual 5/4 time signature and commissioned for the fabled CBS espionage drama that bowed in September 1966, netted Schifrin one of his four Grammy Awards and one of his four Emmy noms. It still serves as a vital link to the Tom Cruise movie franchise. 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, recognizable and a signature.' And this is what I did.' The Mission: Impossible opening credits showed a match lighting a fuse that burned superimposed over quickly-cut scenes from the episode. Schifrin wrote music for several episodes as well, and an M:I album proved quite successful. An inspired Bruce Lee worked out to the show's score in his gym in Hong Kong before signing Schifrin as the composer and orchestrator on Enter the Dragon (1973). As a bonus, Lee gave the musician his first martial arts lessons, for free. Schifrin concocted a jazz waltz in 3/4 time for the theme to the Mike Connors series Mannix — also produced by Geller — and played the Moog synthesizer on the opening music for another 1960s' CBS drama, Medical Center. Schifrin also was responsible for the themes for T.H.E. Cat, Petrocelli, Starsky & Hutch, Bronk and Most Wanted. And his 'Tar Sequence' music from Cool Hand Luke was adopted by ABC affiliates for their Eyewitness News broadcasts. Born Boris Claudio Schifrin on June 21, 1932, he began playing the piano at age 5. His classmates exposed him to jazz records when he was about 16, and he became 'totally absorbed in that music,' he recalled in a 2008 interview for the Archive of American Television. 'It was like an illumination, a very important moment in my life. I converted to jazz.' However, jazz was considered 'immoral' back then, and he had to listen on the sly. He studied music and law for four years at his hometown University of Buenos Aires, then received a scholarship to the Paris Conservatory of Music in 1952, studying classical music under famed composer Olivier Messiaen. 'I had a double life,' he told The Telegraph in 2004. 'I would study at the Conservatory during the day and play in jazz bands at night in places like the Club Saint-Germain. Messiaen didn't like jazz, but he was a very nice man, a Catholic mystic.' In 1956, Schifrin returned to Buenos Aires, formed his own jazz band and got involved in writing music for TV and radio programs. A year later, he won Argentina's equivalent of an Oscar for his score for El Jefe. With Dizzy Gillespie and his all-star band (including Quincy Jones on first trumpet and Phil Woods on alto sax) in town for a concert at the U.S. Embassy, Schifrin conducted his group from behind the piano during a reception to honor the jazz great. The trumpeter approached Schifrin and asked, 'Do you write all these charts, all these arrangements?' he recalled. 'I said yes. 'Would you like to come to the United States?' I thought it was a joke.' Schifrin arrived in New York City in 1958 and played piano in a Mexican restaurant until he was invited by Xavier Cugat to write arrangements for his show and tour with his orchestra. He finally reconnected and signed with Gillespie in 1960, performing on a hit album, Gillespiana, for Verve Records, which was later purchased by MGM. He also arranged jazz LPs for the likes of Stan Getz and Sarah Vaughan. Inspired by the movie work of such composers as Henry Mancini and Johnny Mandel, Schifrin employed his MGM connections and headed to California in 1963. His first Hollywood gig was for the African-set film Rhino! (1964), and he scored several projects under Stanley Wilson at Universal Pictures, including the 1966 bomb-on-an-airplane NBC telefilm The Doomsday Flight, written by Rod Serling. Schifrin also scored David Wolper documentaries, including The Making of a President: 1964 (1966), for which he received an Emmy nom; The World of Jacques Cousteau (1966); and The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1968). 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. His longtime involvement in the jazz and classical worlds came together quite nicely in 1993 when he was featured as pianist and conductor for the first of his several 'Jazz Meets the Symphony' albums. Schifrin, who received the BMI Lifetime Achievement Award in 1988, recorded dozens of albums, many on the Adelph Records label run by his wife, Donna. He also was the principal arranger for The Three Tenors' World Cup concerts. He recently completed a composition for Argentina that was performed in his native country. In addition to his wife and son Ryan, a writer-director (Abominable), survivors include another son, Will Schifrin, a TV writer (The Fairly OddParents); a daughter, Frances; and grandchildren Dylan, Jonah, Jack and Emma. 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Times
8 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Times
Lalo Schifrin obituary: composer of the Mission Impossible theme
He may not have been a secret government agent like the heroes of the Mission: Impossible TV series or Tom Cruise movies which featured his thrilling theme music, but Lalo Schifrin was an expert at covert operations thanks to his passion for a banned art form. As a jazz-mad teenager growing up in Buenos Aires in the late 1940s, he had to be sneaky in order to feed his voracious appetite for bebop. The Argentinian leader, the dictator Juan Perón, had issued a blanket ban on jazz, so there was none to be heard on the radio or in nightclubs. 'Peron had made a law that Argentinian popular music had to be promoted. And in every theatre, between movies, they had some kind of folk music act with singers doing so-called national music, which was horrible. Or, if the music was good, the singers were bad. So the people would go to the lobby, waiting for them to finish, and then they would go back to see the movie.' The young Schifrin bought his records from an American merchant marine skipper sailing from New Orleans. He would pay for the records in advance, then wait 40 days for their arrival. When he went down to the docks to collect his stash, he wore a long raincoat under which he could hide his latest acquisitions. 'In a way, I was smuggling records, but not for sale,' Schifrin said in 1996. 'They were for my own private collection.' Schifrin was born Boris Claudio Schifrin in Buenos Aires in 1932. His father, Luis, was the concertmaster for the Buenos Aires Philharmonic Orchestra, and the young Schifrin was exposed to the great classical composers from birth and classically trained on piano from a young age. Hearing Duke Ellington's music for the first time as a teen was, he said, 'like a religious conversion, and that conversion became more refined, focused and passionate when I discovered Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Bud Powell'. He briefly studied law before going to France to study music at the Paris Conservatoire, where his teachers included the composer Olivier Messiaen, and he fell in love with the edgy sounds of the modern composers. Ironically, it was there that his love for Latin American music was kindled after he attended a lecture and workshop given by the Cuban composer and author Julio Gutiérrez, who had written a book entitled Mambology. It was also in Paris that he began playing jazz professionally. He said: 'I led a double life. I was a classical pianist during the day, and a jazz musician at night.' Returning to a post-Peron Argentina in 1956, he started a big band. Later that year, Gillespie's big band toured Argentina, and Schifrin's outfit was booked to play at a reception in his honour. Gillespie liked what he heard, asked the young Argentinian if he had written the arrangements for the band and suggested he work for him in the States. Schifrin and his first wife, Silvia, moved to New York in 1958. They divorced in 1970, and Schifrin is survived by his second wife Donna (née Cockrell) and his three children — William and Frances, from his first marriage, and Ryan, all of whom work in film and TV production. Aged 26, he composed Gillespiana — a five-movement suite based in part on baroque music forms and scored for a traditional big band minus saxophones, but augmented by four French horns, two percussionists and a tuba. With Schifrin on piano, Gillespie's band performed the piece throughout Europe and the United States. It established him as a composer who could elegantly blend classical music with jazz, and it was a logical step for him to head next to Hollywood, where Elmer Bernstein and Johnny Mandel were taking the same approach to movie scores. Among the early films he scored were Cool Hand Luke (1967) and Bullitt (1968), Kelly's Heroes (1970) and Enter the Dragon (1973), along with Dirty Harry (1971) and several of its sequels. But it was the suitably 'groovy' and exciting music he wrote for the TV series Mission: Impossible in 1966 which put him on the map. It was composed before the title credits were created, and the only inspiration the producers could offer was a cryptic instruction about a 'lit fuse'. Written with an unconventional 5/4 time signature it injected, he explained: 'A little humour and lightness that didn't take itself too seriously.' Thirty years later, when the show was turned into a blockbuster action film starring Tom Cruise, the star told him that retaining the original pulsating and suspenseful theme music had been a deal-breaker when he took on the project. Since that first Mission: Impossible movie in 1996, there have been a further seven films in the series — all with that 'earworm' Schifrin theme. The most recent was released this year and made almost £400 million worldwide. Alongside his film and TV work, he was kept busy with commissions, including the grand finale music for the 1990 World Cup Championship in Italy, when The Three Tenors — Luciano Pavarotti, Plácido Domingo and José Carreras — sang together for the first time. He worked with Carreras and the London Symphony Orchestra on the album Friends for Life in 1992, and again with the LSO on Symphonic Impressions of Oman, a piece commissioned by the Sultan of Oman and released on CD in 2003. He was in demand as a conductor with orchestras across the world, including the London Symphony Orchestra and the London Philharmonic Orchestra — which recorded his Concerto for Guitar and Orchestra, featuring the soloist Angel Romero, in 1984. In the late 1980s, he was musical director of the new Paris Philharmonic Orchestra, formed with the express purpose of recording music for films, performing concerts and participating in TV shows, and he operated as both pianist and conductor for the successful series of Jazz Meets the Symphony recordings, with the LPO, through the 1990s and early 2000s. Along the way, he also wrote compositions which added Latin American influences into the mix. 'People ask me how it is that I'm so 'versatile,'' he said in 1996. 'But I say, 'I'm not versatile. I just don't see limits. To me, all music is one music.' Lalo Schifrin, pianist, composer and conductor, was born on June 21, 1932. He died on June 26, 2025, aged 93
