Two-time Oscar-winning Alexandre Desplat is one of the most respected film composers in the world today. Desplat is noted for his collaborations with some of the world’s top filmmakers: Greta Gerwig, Wes Anderson, Guillermo del Toro, George Clooney, Kathryn Bigelow, Stephen Daldry, David Fincher, Stephen Frears, Tom Hooper, Ang Lee, Terrence Malick and Angelina Jolie. To date, he has received eleven Academy Award nominations.
Desplat first captivated American ears with The Girl With The Pearl Earring and Birth. He has since scored a range of acclaimed films, The Queen, The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button, The Imitation Game, The King’s Speech, Argo, Philomena, The Painted Veil for which he received a Golden Globe, and Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox, Isle of Dogs, and The Grand Budapest Hotel which won the 2015 Oscar for Best Original Score. Desplat’s thematic score to Guillermo Del Toro’s film The Shape of Water won the 2018 Academy Award for Best Original Score and garnered a 2018 Golden Globe, a BAFTA award, and a 2019 Grammy nomination. Desplat scored Greta Gerwig’s Little Women which was nominated for a 2020 Golden Globe and an Academy Award for Best Original Score, George Clooney’s The Midnight Sky, which received a 2021 Golden Globe nomination for Best Score, and Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch, which earned him another Golden Globe nomination in 2022.
Desplat’s work includes Angelina Jolie’s Unbroken, his second collaboration with Tom Hooper The Danish Girl, Godzilla, directed by Gareth Edwards, Illumination Entertainment’s box office smash hit, The Secret Life Of Pets as well as the sequel The Secret Life of Pets 2, Florence Foster Jenkins starring Meryl Streep, Zero Dark Thirty directed by Kathryn Bigelow, Twilight Saga: New Moon, directed by Chris Weitz, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Pts. 1 & 2, Jacques Audiard’s Rust and Bone and The Sisters Brothers starring Joaquin Phoenix and Jake Gyllenhaal, and George Clooney’s comedy crime feature, Suburbicon.
Most recently, Desplat has scored Graham Moore’s directorial debut The Outfit, starring Mark Rylance, and Stephen Frears’ The Lost King, starring Steve Coogan and Sally Hawkins. Upcoming is the highly anticipated Netflix stop-motion animated feature Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, for which he provided both the Original Score and all Original Songs.
Born to a Greek mother and French father, Desplat grew up in France with a budding love for Hollywood film music, and broke into the French film industry in the 1990s. “I was in a car with a friend who had offered me a double vinyl of Star Wars,” Desplat remembers. “It might have been ’78. He gave me this record, and I remember having said to him, “Hmm. ‘Music composed and conducted by John Williams.’ That’s what I want to do.” And that’s what I’m doing.” With a penchant for lyricism, elegant orchestrations, and precise dramatization, Desplat has quickly joined the pantheon of all-time greats.