G. Delerue; Maestro of Film Scores

Georges Delerue, a classically trained composer who became a master of the film soundtrack, winning dozens of awards--including an Oscar--for his ability to capture mood and character through music, is dead.

Delerue, who scored such films as “Platoon,” “Day of the Jackal” and more recently, “Dien Bien Phu,” was 67 when he died Friday at St. Josephs Medical Center in Burbank.

A spokesman said he died of the complications of a stroke he suffered Wednesday.

A student of Darius Milhaud, Delerue received an Academy Award in 1979 for best original soundtrack for “A Little Romance,” a snippet about two teen-agers wildly in love, whose passionate whimsy is encouraged by a garrulous old pickpocket (Laurence Olivier). Delerue also received Oscar nominations for “The Day of the Dolphin,” “Julia,” “Agnes of God” and “Anne of the Thousand Days.”

The critical praise he won for his work on Oliver Stone’s “Platoon,” a 1986 Academy Award-winning film, brought him to the attention of Pierre Schoendoerfer, who hired him to score “Dien Bien Phu” about France’s disastrous, final battle to retain Indochina as a colony.

The composer also had a lengthy association with French director Francois Truffaut, scoring “Jules and Jim,” “Day for Night” and “The Last Metro.” He also scored Fred Zinneman’s “A Man for All Seasons” and many other popular films, including “Silkwood,” “Biloxi Blues” and “Beaches.”

At his death, Delerue had just completed scoring director Bruce Beresford’s “Rich in Love,” starring Albert Finney and Jill Clayburgh. Beresford said after the composer’s death that “his scores were never trite. They were so melodic and effortless. It was like turning on a tap. The music just flowed.”

A prolific composer of some 200 films over four decades, Delerue was born into a working-class family in the French town of Rubaix.

He showed early musical talent and won a scholarship to the prestigious Paris Conservatory, where such professors as Milhaud encouraged him to write for the cinema.

After his successes with Truffaut, Delerue became known for his impressionistic use of strings, harp and woodwinds that often melded into what many viewed as mysticism. He came into demand by American and British directors and moved to Los Angeles in 1983. He became an American citizen last year.

Here he also wrote music for television productions and commercials. In 1968, he won an Emmy for the National Educational Television documentary “Our World.”

In 1987, musicologists throughout the world praised the music he created for the restoration of the 1927 silent film “Casanova.”

Director Herbert Ross, for whom the musical dramatist scored “Steel Magnolias,” described Delerue as “simply a genius at film scoring.”

Survivors include his wife and two daughters.