Gabriel Yared

Lebanon-born Gabriel Yared earned an Oscar for his film scores while forging ties to both French and American art-house cinema. He began in popular music, writing and arranging for Michel Jonasz and Françoise Hardy before entering film with Samy Pavel’s Miss O’Gynie et les Hommes Fleurs in 1973. Six years afterward, Jean-Luc Godard commissioned him for Every Man for Himself; from that point Yared regularly produced as many as seven scores annually. Despite the volume, his output avoided formulaic repetition by drawing on an eclectic range of influences that spanned classical repertoire, folk traditions, rock, and jazz. The atmospheric saxophone writing he supplied for Betty Blue and the Asian-instrument textures he explored in The Lover each received a César. In 1997 he received the Academy Award for The English Patient, released the previous year. Later highlights encompass his Oscar-nominated work on The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999) and Cold Mountain (2003) as well as the 2009 Amelia Earhart biopic Amelia. The Royal Ballet premiered Raven Girl in 2013, a collaboration that paired a libretto by novelist Audrey Niffenegger with Yared’s score. Subsequent projects include the soundtrack for Angelina Jolie’s By the Sea (2015) and the 2016 U.S.-Spain co-production The Promise, which dramatizes the Armenian Genocide.