John Anderson

Her death, from breast cancer, was confirmed by a spokeswoman for her production company, Ciné-Tamaris.

In recent years, Varda had focused her directorial skills on nonfiction work that used her life and career as a foundation for philosophical ruminations and visual playfulness. “The Gleaners and I,” a 2000 documentary in which she used the themes of collecting, harvesting and recycling to reflect on her own work, is considered by some to be her masterpiece.

But it was not her last film to receive widespread acclaim. In 2017, at the age of 89, Varda partnered with the French photographer and muralist known as JR on “Faces Places,” a road movie that featured the two of them roaming rural France, meeting the locals, celebrating them with enormous portraits and forming their own fast friendship. Among its many honors was an Academy Award nomination for best documentary feature.

It was her early dramatic films that helped establish Varda as both an emblematic feminist and a cinematic firebrand — among them “Cléo From 5 to 7” (1962), in which a pop singer spends a fretful two hours awaiting the result of a cancer examination, and “Le Bonheur” (1965), about a young husband’s blithely choreographed extramarital affair.

Varda established herself as a maverick cineaste well before such milestones of the New Wave as Truffaut’s “The 400 Blows” (1959) and Godard’s “Breathless” (1960). Her “La Pointe Courte” (1955), which juxtaposed the strife of an unhappy couple with the struggles of a French fishing village, anticipated by several years the narrative and visual rule-breaking of directors like Truffaut, Godard and Alain Resnais, who edited “La Pointe Courte” and would introduce Varda to a number of the New Wave principals in Paris.

These included Truffaut, Godard, Claude Chabrol and Éric Rohmer, all of whom had gotten their start at critic André Bazin’s magazine Cahiers du Cinema, and who became known as the Right Bank group. The more politicized and liberal Left Bank group would come to include Resnais, Chris Marker and Varda herself.

Arlette Varda was born on May 30, 1928, in Ixelles, Belgium, the daughter of a Greek father and a French mother. She left Belgium with her family in 1940 for Sète, France, where she spent her teenage years. At 18, she changed her name to Agnès.

She studied art history at the École du Louvre and photography at the École des Beaux-Arts before working as a photographer at the Théâtre National Populaire in Paris.

“I just didn’t see films when I was young,” she said in a 2009 interview. “I was stupid and naïve. Maybe I wouldn’t have made films if I had seen lots of others; maybe it would have stopped me.

“I started totally free and crazy and innocent,” she continued. “Now I’ve seen many films, and many beautiful films. And I try to keep a certain level of quality of my films. I don’t do commercials, I don’t do films pre-prepared by other people, I don’t do star system. So I do my own little thing.”

Her “thing” often involved straddling the line between what was commonly accepted as fiction and nonfiction, and defying the boundaries of gender.

“She was very clear about her feeling that the New Wave was a man’s club and that as a woman it was hard for producers to back her, even after she made ‘Cléo’ in 1962,” T. Jefferson Kline, a professor of French at Boston University and the editor of “Agnès Varda: Interviews” (2013), said in an interview for this obituary. “She obviously was not pleased that as a woman filmmaker she had so much trouble getting produced. She went to Los Angeles with her husband, and she said when she came back to France it was like she didn’t exist.”

Varda was married to director Jacques Demy (“Lola,” “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg”) from 1962 until his death in 1990. From 1968 to 1970 they lived in Hollywood, where Demy made “Model Shop” for Columbia Pictures and Varda made “Lions Love,” which married a meditative late-'60s Los Angeles aesthetic to the New York counterculture. (The cast included the Warhol “superstar” Viva; Gerome Ragni and James Rado, the writers of the book for the musical “Hair;” and underground filmmaker Shirley Clarke.) During that same period, she shot the short documentary “Black Panthers” (1968), which included an interview with the incarcerated Panther leader Huey Newton; commissioned by French television, it was suppressed at the time.

It was also during that period that she befriended Jim Morrison, the frontman of the Doors, who visited her and Demy in France; according to Stephen Davis’ “Jim Morrison: Life, Death, Legend” (2004), she was one of only five mourners at Morrison’s funeral in the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris in 1971. That same year she became one of the 343 women to sign the “Manifesto of the 343,” a French petition acknowledging that they had had abortions and thus making themselves vulnerable to prosecution.

In 1972, the birth of her son, Mathieu Demy, now an actor, prompted Varda to sideline her career. He survives her, as does costume designer Rosalie Varda Demy, Varda’s daughter from a previous relationship, who was adopted by Jacques Demy.

“Despite my joy,” Varda told actress Mireille Amiel in a 1975 interview, “I couldn’t help resenting the brakes put on my work and my travels.” So she had an electric line of about 300 feet for her camera and microphone run from her house, and with this “umbilical cord” she managed to interview the shopkeepers and her other neighbors on the Rue Daguerre. The result was “Daguerréotypes” (1976).

In 1977 she made what she called her “feminist musical,” and one of her better-known films, “One Sings, the Other Doesn’t,” which also seemed inspired by personal circumstance.

“It’s the story of two 15-year-old girls, their lives and their ideas,” she told Amiel. “They have to face this key problem: Do they want to have children or not? They each fall in love and encounter the contradictions — work/image, ideas/love, etc.”

One of Varda’s more controversial films, because of its casting, was “Kung-Fu Master!” (1988), a fictional work about an adult woman — played by actress Jane Birkin, a friend of Varda’s — who falls in love with a teenage boy, played by Varda’s son. The title — it was changed in France to “Le Petit Amour” — referred to the young character’s favorite arcade game. The film was shot more or less simultaneously with “Jane B. par Agnes V.,” another of Ms. Varda’s border crossings between fact and fiction, which she called “an imaginary biopic.”

After Jacques Demy’s death, Varda made three films as a tribute: the biographical drama “Jacquot de Nantes” (1991) and the documentaries “Les Demoiselles Ont Eu 25 Ans” (1993), about the 25th anniversary of Demy’s “The Young Girls of Rochefort,” and “L’Univers de Jacques Demy” (1995).

Varda was then relatively inactive until 1999, when, armed for the first time with a digital camera, she set about making “Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse” (“The Gleaners and I”), which resurrected an artistic career now well accustomed to underappreciation and resuscitation.

“She was a person of immense talent, but also enormously thoughtful,” said Kline of Boston University. “When you look at some of the films you might think they were more spontaneous than thought out. A film like ‘Cléo,’ for instance, you might have said, ‘OK, she just follows Cléo around Paris,’ but the film is extremely beautifully imagined and thought out beforehand.”

In ‘Vagabond'” — an 1985 film in which Sandrine Bonnaire plays a woman who is found dead and whose life is recounted, often in documentary style — “the traveling shots in the film are always ending, and each subsequent shot beginning, on a common visual cue. It makes you look at film in a completely different way,” he said.

Alison Smith, author of the critical study “Agnès Varda” (1998), called Varda “a poet of objects and how we use them.” In an interview for this obituary, she added, “Varda as an artist intrigued, and intrigues, me by the constant freshness and curiosity which she brings to her inquiries into the everyday world and how we relate to it, particularly how she uses the detailed fabric of life.”

Richard Peña, who as director of the New York Film Festival helped introduce “Gleaners” to an American audience, praised that film and Varda’s “The Beaches of Agnès” (2008) as “touchstones for a new generation of nonfiction filmmakers.”

Varda is represented at the Museum of Modern Art by photographs, films, videos and a three-screen installation titled “The Triptych of Noirmoutier.” “A decision to change direction and move into installation art when over 80 is, by any standards, remarkable,” Smith said. “But her energy was awe-inspiring.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/29/obituaries/agnes-varda-dead.html" id="a4249ac8-5060-3f00-add4-b3ade2b4d49c">The New York Times</a>.

Agnès Varda, Influential French New Wave Filmmaker, Is Dead at 90

Agnès Varda, a groundbreaking French filmmaker who was closely associated with the New Wave — although her re-imagining of filmmaking conventions actually predated the work of Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut and others identified with that movement — died Friday morning at her home in Paris. She was 90.

His death was confirmed on the artist’s official Facebook page by his management team.

Over a career of more than 60 years, Legrand collaborated onstage, onscreen and in the studio with dozens of celebrated musicians of his era, from Miles Davis to Perry Como, Stéphane Grappelli to Liza Minnelli.

A three-time Academy Award winner and five-time Grammy winner — he was nominated for a total of 13 Oscars and 17 Grammys — Legrand made the love song his métier. Among his better-known compositions are “The Windmills of Your Mind” from “The Thomas Crown Affair” (1968), which won the Oscar for best song; “The Summer Knows,” the theme from “Summer of ‘42” (1971) (Legrand won an Oscar for the movie’s score); and the Oscar-nominated “What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?” from the film “The Happy Ending” (1969). All three were written with lyricists Alan and Marilyn Bergman.

His recording of “Brian’s Song,” his theme from the TV movie of the same name, made the Billboard pop chart in 1972, peaking at No. 56.

Other standards of the Legrand canon include “I Will Wait for You” and “Watch What Happens,” both from “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg” (1964), writer-director Jacques Demy’s musical tale of star-crossed love. (Norman Gimbel wrote the English lyrics.) A pop opera whose entire story was sung, “Umbrellas” first brought Legrand’s talents to the attention of American moviegoers and earned him a devoted following in the United States. He also scored Demy’s follow-up, “The Young Girls of Rochefort,” which included spoken dialogue as well as songs and which, like “Umbrellas,” starred up-and-coming Catherine Deneuve.

On the occasion of the 2009 British rerelease of “Rochefort,” Legrand told Time Out London of meeting Demy.

“I just finished scoring a François Reichenbach movie called ‘America as Seen by a Frenchman,'” he recalled. “Demy loved the score, so we met and he wanted me to score his first movie, which was called ‘Lola.’ So then I scored ‘Lola’ and we became friends and we came to know, appreciate and love each other, and we stayed friends until the very last.”

Demy, who died in 1990, was married to filmmaker Agnès Varda, with whom Legrand also worked extensively. He even appeared onscreen, as a pianist, in her 1962 film, “Cleo From 5 to 7.”

Among Legrand’s other notable compositions was “Papa, Can You Hear Me?” from the Barbra Streisand film “Yentl” (1983), also written with the Bergmans. He received three Oscar nominations for his work on that film, and won for its score.

In 2018, he composed music for “The Other Side of the Wind,” a lost film by Orson Welles, whose “F for Fake” he had scored in 1973.

Although Legrand composed far less for the theater than he did for film and television, he was nominated for Tony and Drama Desk awards for the show “Amour,” although it ran for only 17 performances on Broadway in 2002. He also wrote the music for “Marguerite,” a musical that had a brief run in London in 2008 whose creative team also included the writers and lyricists of “Les Misérables” and “Miss Saigon.”

Legrand recorded more than 100 albums, with such disparate stars as Maurice Chevalier (for whom he worked as an accompanist early in his career), Kiri Te Kanawa, Sarah Vaughan, Lena Horne and Barbra Streisand. Others who recorded his music ranged from Frank Sinatra to Sting.

Legrand celebrated over 50 years in show business in 2010 with a concert at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas that featured Dionne Warwick, George Benson, Melissa Manchester, Patti Page and Jennifer O’Neill (the star of “Summer of ‘42”). He observed his 80th birthday in 2012 by beginning a world tour that included performances in France, Ireland, Japan, Argentina, Brazil, Russia, Denmark and the Netherlands. His schedule last year included performances in London, New York and Tokyo, and he was planning to tour again in 2019.

Michel Jean Legrand was born on Feb. 24, 1932, in Bécon-les-Bruyères, a suburb of Paris, to a French father, Raymond Legrand, a composer and actor, and an Armenian mother, former Marcelle der Mikaelian. From 1942 to 1949, he studied at the Conservatoire de Paris, where his teachers included celebrated pianist Nadia Boulanger, before becoming an in-demand arranger, working for French stars like Édith Piaf and Yves Montand.

In 1947, Legrand recalled in a 2011 interview, he became interested in jazz when he saw trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie in concert in Paris (“I was ecstatic”). He would eventually work with Gillespie and other jazz greats, on albums like “Dizzy Digs Paris” (1953) and, most notably, his own “Legrand Jazz” (1958), for which he arranged well-known jazz compositions for three different groups of established musicians, one of which included Davis, John Coltrane and Bill Evans.

Legrand worked as an arranger with artists in various genres, including opera singers Natalie Dessay and Anne Sofie von Otter.

“While I was studying in Paris I decided that I wanted to touch on and exist within every possible musical discipline,” Legrand told Time Out London in 2009. “Concerts, records, radio, playing piano, conducting, singing, composing, classical, playing jazz. So when I started to work, it was really on that decision.”

Legrand became an international sensation in 1954 with “I Love Paris,” a collection of well-known French songs, followed by “Holiday in Rome” and “Michel Legrand Plays Cole Porter.” All were hits.

He was invited to the Festival of Youth and Students in Moscow in 1958, and aboard the ship from Paris to Moscow he met his future wife, Christine Bouchard, an Yves Saint Laurent model. They had three children. He would eventually marry three times, most recently in 2014 to actress Macha Méril.

Back in Paris, he began composing for film, working notably for New Wave directors like Jean-Luc Godard and later for Demy, whose “Umbrellas” earned Legrand his first three Oscar nominations. “The Young Girls of Rochefort” followed, and in 2009 Legrand was asked if that was a film of which he was particularly proud.

“Yes,” he said, “but I must tell you, I’m not ashamed of anything I’ve done. All the films that I’ve done — and I’ve worked on about 250 — are like my children. So they are all special for different reasons.

“But I like everything that I’ve done, and why not? I always did it with pleasure, and I did it because I wanted to do it. There is always a reason, and that is important for me.”

In 1966 Legrand moved to Hollywood, where his friends and fellow composers Quincy Jones and Henry Mancini introduced him to the Bergmans. The first of his many collaborations with them was “The Thomas Crown Affair.”

On the occasion of a 2010 concert at Olympia Hall in Paris, Legrand was asked by French radio whether any of his dreams had gone unfulfilled.

“Off the top of my head,” he said, “I regret that I didn’t learn more languages, visit certain countries and listen to music that I don’t yet know about. In other words, there’s a whole cultural process that it’s been difficult for me to undertake because I’ve written a lot, worked, traveled, played around. So I haven’t had time to read some of the extraordinary books that I still think about.”

“And then,” he added, “I would have liked to work with Judy Garland, who I nurture a mad passion for. But I was born too late. So no regrets.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/26/obituaries/michel-legrand-dead.html" id="7afad9ea-cf4a-3068-a085-ebc66e9e98ad">The New York Times</a>.

Michel Legrand, Pianist and Film Composer, Dies at 86

Michel Legrand, the invariably romantic pianist, arranger and composer of hundreds of film scores and songs that have became pop hits and love anthems, died Saturday. He was 86.

<h1>His death was confirmed on the artist’s official Facebook page by his management team.</h1>

“And then,” he added, “I would have liked to work with Judy Garland, who I nurture a mad passion for. But I was born too late. So no regrets.”.

Michel Legrand, pianist and film composer, dies at 86

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John Anderson

Articles written by the author

Agnès Varda, Influential French New Wave Filmmaker, Is Dead at 90

Michel Legrand, Pianist and Film Composer, Dies at 86

Michel Legrand, pianist and film composer, dies at 86