Alexandre Desplat draws on a wide spectrum of inspirations that include Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, Georges Delerue, Bernard Herrmann, and António Carlos Jobim together with jazz and global musical traditions when crafting his refined orchestral scores for cinema. Active across numerous genres, he first surfaced during the mid-1980s after building a substantial body of work in France, only later attracting notice from Hollywood through the lush yet playful music he supplied for the 2003 English-language release The Girl with the Pearl Earring. That assignment led to his initial Academy Award nomination, earned for the 2006 picture The Queen. Praised for graceful playfulness, he contributed to the Twilight Saga in 2009 and entered the Harry Potter series in 2010, later securing Oscars for Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel in 2014 and Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water in 2017. Further high-level recognition arrived with the 2019 adaptation of Little Women and the 2020 feature The Midnight Sky, while a BAFTA nomination followed in 2022 for The French Dispatch.
Paris welcomed Desplat in 1961, the son of a Greek mother and French father who first met while studying at the University of California at Berkeley. After their wedding in San Francisco the couple established their home in France. Desplat started piano studies at five, later taking up trumpet and then flute. Drawn equally to music and movies, he resolved by age fifteen to compose for the screen.
His debut came with the 1986 film Ki Lo Sa?, after which he accumulated credits on shorts, television projects, and feature films throughout the 1990s, spanning animation, romance, and suspense. The score for the 2000 British-French production The Luzhin Defence appeared on Silva America the following year. Recognition from the 2003 film The Girl with the Pearl Earring, including a Golden Globe nomination, opened doors to further English-language studio work. A second Golden Globe nod arrived for Syriana in 2004, succeeded by his first win for The Painted Veil in 2007. That same year Stephen Frears’s The Queen brought Desplat his first Oscar nomination for Best Original Score. David Fincher’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button earned him a second nomination in 2008, and Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox produced a third in 2009. A Grammy Award recognized his contribution to the 2010 release The King’s Speech.
Subsequent prominent assignments encompassed both parts of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom in 2012, the Best Picture recipient Argo that same year, and Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel in 2014. The latter brought Desplat his first Oscar victory—while he was simultaneously nominated for The Imitation Game—and a second Grammy. Highlights from the ensuing period included 2015’s The Danish Girl, reuniting him with director Tom Hooper, and the 2016 animated feature The Secret Life of Pets.
During 2017 Desplat scored the George Clooney-directed thriller Suburbicon as well as Guillermo del Toro’s romantic fantasy The Shape of Water, securing his second Oscar. Continued collaboration with Anderson yielded Isle of Dogs in 2018. The year 2019 saw releases of The Secret Life of Pets 2, Roman Polanski’s An Officer and a Spy, and Greta Gerwig’s Little Women. Further joint projects included Clooney’s The Midnight Sky in 2020 and Anderson’s The French Dispatch in 2021. Additional 2022 work comprised del Toro’s stop-motion Pinocchio and Stephen Frears’s comedy-drama The Lost King, which recounts the search for Richard III’s remains.
