Composer Lalo Schifrin, who wrote the theme for “Mission: Impossible,” has died.
Schifrin was 93 years old.
His wife said her husband died on June 26 of pneumonia at a Los Angeles hospital, The Washington Post reported.
Music was his birthright as the son of a concertmaster from Buenos Aires.
The Post reported that at a young age, Schifrin was able to perform “demanding classical works.” He credited a live performance by Louis Armstrong that was “a religious conversion” to jazz, which led him to become a pianist and arranger for Dizzy Gillespie before the age of 30.
He penned “Gillespiana,” which the newspaper called “a showcase for Gillespie’s soaring and blindingly fast trumpet.” The album sold a million copies and launched Schifrin’s Hollywood career.
Time magazine called him “the most inventive composer of movie scores in the business,” working at a time when Henri Mancini and Johnny Mandel scored television shows and movies using jazz.
Sometimes he “scored” no music for key scenes, such as the car chase in Steve McQueen’s “Bullitt.” The scene starts with music, but it ends once the high-speed chase starts, using the sounds of the engines and tires squealing as the soundtrack to the chase.
It was a decision that director Peter Yates did not agree with, but Schifrin said, “Silence is also music. The lack of music is going to make a great effect.”
He was asked by “Mission: Impossible” creator Bruce Geller to have a theme song that was “exciting but not too heavy.” Schifrin told NPR in 2015 that Geller told him, “When people go to the kitchen and get a Coca-Cola, I want them to hear the theme and say, ‘Oh, this is ‘Mission: Impossible.’”
“Every movie has its own personality. There are no rules to write music for movies,” Schifrin told The Associated Press in 2018. “The movie dictates what the music will be.”
Schifrin’s theme transcended the original show and was also used for the ABC reboot and the films starring Tom Cruise.
The theme won Schifrin two Grammy Awards.
He also had six Academy Award nominations.
Schifrin was only the third composer to get an honorary Oscar from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, Variety reported.
Clint Eastwood presented him with the award “in recognition of his unique musical style, compositional integrity and influential contributions to the art of film scoring.”
Schifrin scored eight of Eastwood’s films.
Overall, he scored more than 100 films and television shows, the AP reported.
In addition to writing music, he conducted orchestras for the “Three Tenors” and was music director at the Glendale Symphony Orchestra and the Paris Philharmonic.
He left behind his wife, Donna Cockrell, who also served as his business manager, three children and four grandchildren, the Variety reported.
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