Michel Legrand

Abstract This is the autobiography of Michel Legrand (1932–2019), the famous French composer and songwriter best known for his Oscar-winning movie soundtracks, including The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, The Thomas Crown Affair, and Barbra Streisand’s directorial debut Yentl, and for his hit song “The Windmills of Your Mind,” originally sung by Noel Harrison. As told in a series of interviews with French author Stéphane Lerouge, he describes his life—from a drab childhood enlivened by his love of music, through wartime adventures as an adolescent and the years he spent studying at the Conservatoire de Paris, to his long and prolific career as a composer. The story is not told in chronological order, however, with Legrand preferring to begin with an event unfolding in his life at the time, then moving back through his memories of particular people or places or themes. This unusual structure gives the book a liveliness and unpredictability that makes it feel less like a standard autobiography and more like a conversation. It will appeal to both music fans and movie buffs, but the material is not always about his work—it also includes more personal chapters about his strange relationship with his father Raymond Legrand, a conductor and composer and Nazi collaborator, and his fifty-year passion for the actress Macha Méril, with whom he first fell in love during a chaste fling in Rio de Janeiro and finally married at the age of eighty-two.