Iconic 'Mission: Impossible' composer Lalo Schifrin has died, aged 93

27 June 2025, 12:43 | Updated: 27 June 2025, 12:45

The Argentine-American composer, best known for his jazz-fusion spy thriller score, has died, his family confirm.

Lalo Schifrin, the Argentine-American pianist, composer and conductor who wrote scores for more than 100 film and TV scores, has died aged 93.

Schifrin’s sons, William and Ryan, confirmed his death due to complications with pneumonia.

Over the span of his nearly 70-year career, he won four Grammys and one Latin Grammy, was nominated for six Academy Awards and received an Academy Honorary Award, which was handed to him by Clint Eastwood in 2018.

“Every movie has its own personality. There are no rules to write music for movies,” Schifrin told the Associated Press in 2018. “The movie dictates what the music will be.”

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Schifrin was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1932 to a musical family. His father was the concertmaster of the Buenos Aires Philharmonic at the Teatro Colón. Following in the family tradition, Lalo Schifrin began playing the piano at age six and at 20 received a scholarship to the Paris Conservatoire.

Schifrin’s TV career began in his twenties, when he formed a 16-piece jazz orchestra that featured on a weekly variety show on Buenos Aires TV. In 1963, after nearly 10 years of working with big bands and other jazz performers, he got his first Hollywood film assignment from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer for the film Rhino!.

In 1966 he wrote the theme for the series Mission: Impossible, for which he won two Grammys, was nominated for two more and was also nominated for three Primetime Emmys.

The theme is written in a 5/4 time signature, which Schifrin once joked was to represent “mutant people with five legs.” Interestingly, the Morse code for “M.I.” is two dashes followed by two dots. It has been suggested that, if a dot is one beat and a dash is one and a half beats, then this gives a bar of five beats: a 5/4 bar. However, this has never been confirmed by Schifrin as the inspiration for the score, although he said he used Morse code to compose the score for The Concorde... Airport '79.

Schifrin told the Associated Press: “The producer called me and told me, ‘You’re going to have to write something exciting, almost like a logo, something that will be a signature, and it’s going to start with a fuse.‘

“So I did it and there was nothing on the screen. And maybe the fact that I was so free and I had no images to catch, maybe that’s why this thing has become so successful – because I wrote something that came from inside me.”

Read more: Simon Pegg: ‘We sang the Mission Impossible theme a lot in the cast. Whenever Tom walks on set!’

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As well as Mission: Impossible, he wrote scores for TV shows such as Planet of the Apes and Starsky and Hutch, as well as for nearly 30 films including Cool Hand Luke (which was also in 5/4), Dirty Harry and Bullitt.

His working score for The Exorcist was rejected by William Friedkin, the film's director: the six minutes of music for the initial film trailer he had written reportedly frightened the audience too much.

He also scored a number of documentaries including the The Hellstrom Chronicle, The Making of the President 1964 and The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.

The breadth of his musical experience and jazz background emanated into his film work. Actress Kathy Bates said of the composer: “His work cannot be easily labeled. Is what he creates jazz? Is it classical, contemporary, popular? The answer is yes, it is all of those things. Lalo is a true Renaissance man: a performer at the piano, a painter with notes, a conductor and composer who has scored some of the most memorable films of the past half-century.”

Schifrin served as music director of the Paris Philharmonic for five years. The orchestra was set up in 1987 for the purpose of recording music for films, performing concerts and participating in television shows. In 1989, Lalo Schifrin was appointed Music Director of the Glendale Symphony Orchestra, and worked in the role for six years.

The final award Schifrin won was his Honorary Academy Award in 2018. After six Oscar nominations, he was given this recognition “to honour extraordinary distinction in lifetime achievement, exceptional contributions to the state of motion picture arts and sciences, or for outstanding service to the Academy”.

“Receiving this honorary Oscar is the culmination of a dream,” Schifrin said at the time, “It is mission accomplished.”