Alexandre Desplat


Alexandre Michel Gérard Desplat is a French film composer. He has won two Academy Awards, for his musical scores to the films The Grand Budapest Hotel and The Shape of Water, and received nine additional Academy Award nominations, ten César nominations, ten BAFTA nominations, eleven Golden Globe Award nominations, and ten Grammy nominations.
Desplat has composed scores for a wide range of films, including low-budget independent productions and large-scale blockbusters, such as The Queen, The Golden Compass, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, , Fantastic Mr. Fox, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 1 & Part 2, The King's Speech, The Danish Girl, Moonrise Kingdom, Argo, Rise of the Guardians, Zero Dark Thirty, Godzilla, The Imitation Game, Unbroken, Little Women, The Secret Life of Pets, and Isle of Dogs.

Early life

Desplat was born in Paris, to a French father and a Greek mother who had met in the United States as students at the University of California, Berkeley. They married in California and returned to France, settling in Paris. Alexandre was the third child, with two older sisters, Marie-Christine, also known as Kiki, and Rosalinda Desplat. In 1983 Kiki co-founded and leads the women's jazz band "Certains L'Aiment Chaud".
At the age of five, Desplat began playing piano. He also became proficient on trumpet and flute. He studied with Claude Ballif and Iannis Xenakis in France, and Jack Hayes in the United States. Desplat swiftly became a skilled performer and composer.
Desplat's musical interests were wide, ranging from early twentieth-century French composers, such as Maurice Ravel and Claude Debussy, to jazz and world music. He was also influenced by South American and African artists, among whom were Carlinhos Brown and Ray Lema.
A film fan, Desplat set his sights on becoming a film composer from an early age and worked toward that goal as he started his career. He worked on his first film, Le souffleur, in 1986.
When recording the music for his first film, he met violinist Dominique Lemonnier, who became his favorite soloist, and artistic director. They later married.
Desplat has worked on many films since the 1980s, and his big Hollywood break came in 2003 with the soundtrack for the film Girl with a Pearl Earring, a drama set in 17th-century Delft and exploring a fictional muse of Vermeer.

Career

Desplat has composed extensively for French cinema, Hollywood, and incidental music for over 100 films, including Lapse of Memory, Family Express, Regarde Les Hommes Tomber, Les Péchés Mortels, César-nominated Un Héros Très Discret, Une Minute de Silence, Sweet Revenge, Le Château des Singes, Reines d'un Jour, the César-nominated Sur mes lèvres, Rire et Châtiment, Syriana, the César-winner The Beat That My Heart Skipped, The Queen, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 1, The Ghost Writer, Daniel Auteuil's remake of La Fille du Puisatier, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2, and The Grand Budapest Hotel.
Desplat has composed individual songs that have been sung in films by such artists as Akhenaton, Kate Beckinsale, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Valérie Lemercier, Miosotis, and Catherine Ringer. He has also written music for the theatre, including pieces performed at the Comédie Française. Desplat has conducted performances of his music played by the London Symphony Orchestra, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Munich Symphony Orchestra. Desplat has also given Master Classes at La Sorbonne in Paris and the Royal College of Music in London.
In 2007, he composed the scores for Philip Pullman's Golden Compass; Zach Helm's directorial debut Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium with American composer Aaron Zigman; and the Ang Lee movie Lust, Caution. Prior to these break-out works, he contributed scores for The Luzhin Defence, Girl with a Pearl Earring, Syriana, Birth, Hostage, Casanova, The Nest.
For The Painted Veil, he won the Golden Globe Award for Best Original Score, Los Angeles Film Critics Association Award for Best Music, and the 2006 World Soundtrack Award. He won the 2007 BMI Film Music Award, 2007 World Soundtrack Award, 2007 European Film Award, and received his first Academy Award nomination for Best Original Score for The Queen. He also won the Silver Berlin Bear at the Berlin Film Festival for Best Film Music in The Beat that My Heart Skipped. In 2008, Desplat received his second Oscar nomination for David Fincher's Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Desplat received his third Oscar nomination and a BAFTA nomination for Fantastic Mr. Fox in 2010, both of which were won by Michael Giacchino for Up.
Desplat has composed music for Largo Winch, based on the Belgian comic; Afterwards a French-Canadian psychological thriller film directed by Gilles Bourdos in English; Anne Fontaine's Coco avant Chanel, based on the life of designer Coco Chanel; Robert Guédiguian's L'Armée du Crime; Cheri, reuniting him with director Stephen Frears, whom he collaborated with on The Queen; Un Prophète reuniting with director Jacques Audiard; Julie & Julia directed by Nora Ephron; Fantastic Mr. Fox, directed by Wes Anderson and based on the novel by Roald Dahl; New Moon, directed by Chris Weitz; Roman Polanski's Ghost Writer; Tamara Drewe; The Special Relationship; and The King's Speech which earned Desplat his fourth Oscar nomination.
In early 2011, Desplat began to write the music to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2. He reunited with director David Yates, who offered Desplat the opportunity to score the second part after his work on the Part 1 soundtrack in 2010 "enchanted everyone in the control room". Desplat's soundtrack sequel to the 2008 film Largo Winch was released in 2011 and was well received.
Desplat's 2011 projects included The Tree of Life, directed by Terrence Malick, A Better Life, La Fille du Puisatier, Roman Polanski's Carnage, George Clooney's Ides of March, and the logo for the French film company StudioCanal.
Desplat started 2012 with Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, the Florent Emilio Siri-directed biopic Cloclo, and DreamWorks Animation's Rise of the Guardians. His other scores of 2013 included Rust and Bone, Zero Dark Thirty, and Argo, the latter of which earned him Oscar, Golden Globe and BAFTA nominations.
In June 2013, Desplat's first Concerto for Flute & Orchestra premiered in France with flautist Jean Ferrandis and the Orchestre National des Pays de la Loire conducted by John Axelrod. His Trois Etudes for piano originally written for pianist Lang Lang had its U.S. premiere in October 2013 played by pianist Gloria Cheng. He received a sixth Oscar nomination for his score to Philomena, which marked his fourth collaboration with director Stephen Frears.
On 23 June 2014, it was announced that Desplat would head the jury at the 71st Venice International Film Festival. He wrote five major scores during 2014, with The Grand Budapest Hotel winning him his first Academy Award. His score for The Imitation Game was also nominated, and his win therefore marked the first time a composer had won against another of their own scores since John Williams won for Star Wars in 1978, and only the seventh time overall.
In 2018, he won his second Academy Award for The Shape of Water and premiered a new work for solo flute played by Emmanuel Pahud.

Filmography (English language)

Filmography (other languages)

Desplat has received many awards and nominations for his work including two Academy Awards, three BAFTA Awards and two Golden Globe Awards.

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