The end of an epic career

He was one of the most prolific film composers ever, scoring no fewer than 161 films over the course of his career - many of them classics. Renowned for his sweeping, majestic soundscapes as he was for his subtle, haunting themes, he won three Oscars for his work on the classics Lawrence Of Arabia, Dr Zhivago and A Passage To India. Some critics suggested that he lived and breathed music, but Maurice Jarre saw it another way. With a wife, three ex-wives and three children to provide for, what choice did he have?

Though his music could be magnificent, sumptuous or downright eerie, it was the humour undercutting it which was Jarre's trademark, as his work on films like the Zucker spoof Top Secret! reveals. He had an ironic awareness of form and could play with the emotional responses of his listeners, enabling him to adapt his talents to a stunning variety of films.

Because he came to music late in life, having started out as an engineering student, he never quite fitted into the musical establishment, and later in his career he would alienate many of his contemporaries with his eagerness to explore the potential of synthesisers and electronic music. Yet innovation genuinely fascinated him, and he was always moving forwards with his work, always seeking out new challenges and new frontiers.

Beginning his career as an orchestral composer and going on to become director of the Théâtre National Populaire, Jarre fiorst composed for film in 1959, with The Keepers, going on to provide memorably sinister melodies for Eyes Without A Face, but got his big break when David Lean marked him out as the only man worth having to score his epic biopic about TE Lawrence. This work, which ranged from spectacular military music to gentle, subtly romantic strains, shot him into the Hollywood stratosphere, and he soon came to seem like the only name in town. After Dr Zhivago he worked on Night Of The Generals, Isadora and Alfred Hitchcock's spy thriller Topaz. He produced a refreshingly different score for Ryan's Daughter, eschewing popular expectations of a film set in Ireland, and he explored further in his themes for Great Expectations, Shout At The Devil and The Man Who Would Be King.

Lawrence of Arabia

In the Eighties, Jarre's career took a different turn. Again he startled many of his peers by embracing the burgeoning action movie and science fiction adventure genres. His score for Firefox is one of the most memorable things about what has become something of a historical oddity, and his work on Mad Max 2: Beyond Thunderdome elevated a stumbling B-movie into something that felt like an epic. He had a similar effect on Enemy Mine and, five years later, made a major contribution to the unforgettable creepiness of the underrated Jacob's Ladder.

Jarre also wrote the music for some of the most popular films of the Eighties and Nineties, including Witness, Fatal Attraction, Gorillas In The Mist, The Mosquito Coast, Dead Poets Society and Ghost. He retired at the turn of the century when his health began to fail, but managed an appearance at this year's Berlin Film Festival, where he received a Lifetime Achievement Award. He died yesterday after a long struggle with oesophageal cancer. He was 84.