Unlike many musicians who started to learn music while still in their childhood, Maurice Jarre was already late in his teens when he discovered music and decided to make a career in that field. Against his father's will, he enrolled at Conservatoire de Paris where he studied percussions, composition and harmonies. He also met and studied under Joseph Martenot, inventor of the Martenot Waves, an electronic keyboard that prefigured the modern synthesizer. After leaving the Conservatoire, Jarre played percussion and Martenot Waves for a while at Jean-Louis Barrault's theater. In 1950, another actor-director, Jean Vilar , asked Jarre to score his production of Kleist's 'The Princess of Homburg', the first score Jarre wrote. Shortly after, Vilar created the 'Théâtre National Populaire' and hired Jarre as permanent composer, an association that lasted 12 years. In 1951, filmmaker Georges Franju asked him to write the music of his 23 minutes documentary Hôtel des Invalides (1952), Jarre's first composition for the movie screen. His first full-length feature, again directed by Georges Franju, was Head Against the Wall (1959) followed by Franju's best known film, Los ojos sin cara (1960). Jarre's career took a spectacular turn in 1961 when producer Sam Spiegel asked him to work on David Lean's Lawrence de Arabia (1962). Initially, three composers were supposed to write the score, but for various reasons, Jarre ended up writing all the music himself and won his first Oscar. His second collaboration with David Lean on Doctor Zhivago (1965) earned him another Oscar and obtained a level of success rarely achieved by a film score. He collaborated with Lean again on La hija de Ryan (1970) and Pasaje a la India (1984) for which he received a third Academy Award. He was set to score Lean's next movie, 'Nostromo', but the director became ill and died before the film could ever get made. He also worked for directors as diverse as William Wyler (El coleccionista (1965)); John Huston (three films); Franco Zeffirelli (Jesús de Nazareth (1977)); Volker Schlöndorff (El tambor de hojalata (1979) [The Tin Drum] and Circle of Deceit (1981) [Circle of Deceit]); Peter Weir (four films); Michael Apted (Gorilas en la niebla (1988)) and Alfonso Arau (Un paseo por las nubes (1995)). Mainly perceived as a symphonist and known for his prominent use of percussions, Jarre often integrated ethnic instruments in his orchestrations like cithara on 'Lawrence of Arabia' or fujara (an old Slovak flute) on 'The Tin Drum'. During the eighties, he incorporated synthetic sounds in his music, writing his first entirely electronic score for El año que vivimos en peligro (1982). His son Jean-Michel Jarre is a well-known popular musician.