Allan Gray

Career Gray began writing film scores in the Weimar Republic. His films there included Emil and the Detectives (1931) and The Countess of Monte Cristo (1932). and the following year they settled in Amersham, Buckinghamshire, where they lived in Bois Lane. Like many of his fellow émigré composers he was arrested (on June 26 1940) as an “enemy alien” and taken to Liverpool, and from there interned on the Isle of Man.

But by 1943 he had established himself in the British film industry, composing for London Films and other major studios before joining Powell and Pressburger to score many of their best-known Archers Film Unit productions, including The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), A Canterbury Tale (1944), I Know Where I'm Going! (1945) and A Matter of Life and Death (1946), the Prelude of which was recorded on a 78 disc and later reissued on EMI CD. 'Commando Patrol' from The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp ("a perfect illustration of the jazz idiom in background scoring")

In 1951 he composed the score for the British–American adventure film The African Queen, directed by John Huston and produced by Sam Spiegel and John Woolf.

Gray also composed for theatre, television and radio, including the 1946 Stratford-on-Avon production of Love's Labour's Lost, and Much Ado About Nothing starring Robert Donat at the Aldwych Theatre, also in 1946. For television he contributed the music for 117 episodes of NBC's widely syndicated Douglas Fairbanks Jr. Presents in co-operation with Bretton Byrd. The series was filmed at the British National Studios in Elstree from 1953. He was friendly with another émigré musician, the conductor Walter Goehr, who conducted some of his film scores, and for a while taught his son, the composer Alexander Goehr. He died in Amersham on September 10, 1973.

Film scores

In popular culture Gray's "Swing Doors" is featured in the 2008 American video game Fallout 3. Gray's "Swing Doors" is featured in the documentary The Color of War, in episode "Victory in Europe". Gray's "Swing Doors" is featured in an episode of Father Knows Best.