Vangelis Biography – Vangelis Wiki
Vangelis born Evángelos Odysséas Papathanassíou known professionally as Vangelis was a Greek musician, composer, and producer of electronic, progressive, ambient, and classical orchestral music. He was best known for his Academy Award-winning score to Chariots of Fire (1981), as well as for composing scores for the films Blade Runner (1982), Missing (1982), Antarctica (1983), The Bounty (1984), 1492: Conquest of Paradise (1992), and Alexander (2004), and for the use of his music in the 1980 PBS documentary series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage by Carl Sagan.
He developed an early interest in music and experimented with sound by banging pots and pans or fixing nails, glasses, and other objects to the strings of his parents’ piano. He performed his first piano concert at the age of six. After studying painting at the Athens School of Fine Arts, he made his start with local Greek rock bands. He left for Paris when he was 25, part of an exodus of artistic talent following the 1967 military coup.
In Paris, he joined fellow Greeks Demis Roussos and Lucas Sideras in the progressive rock band Aphrodite’s Child, achieving cult status and selling millions of records before they broke up in 1972. Fascinated by the then-new field of electronic synthesizers, he settled in London in 1974, where he established Nemo Studios, the “sound laboratory” that produced most of his solo albums for more than a decade. But he valued his independence over record sales.
In 1980, he contributed music to Carl Sagan’s award-winning science documentary Cosmos. He wrote music for NASA’s 2001 Mars Odyssey and its Juno Jupiter missions, as well as a Grammy-nominated album inspired by the Rosetta space probe mission in 2016. In 2018, he composed a piece for the funeral of Stephen Hawking that included the late professor’s words and was broadcast into space by the European Space Agency. His final album, 2021’s Juno to Jupiter, was inspired by the Nasa probe Juno and featured recordings of its launch and the workings of the probe itself in outer space.
He was showered with honors, receiving the Max Steiner film music award, France’s Legion d’Honneur, NASA’s Public Service Medal, and Greece’s top honor, the Order of the Phoenix.
Vangelis Age
He was born on March 29, 1943, in Agria, a coastal town in Magnesia, Thessaly, Greece, and brought up in Athens. He died on May 17, 2022, in France at the age of 79.
Vangelis Wife
Vangelis carefully guarded his privacy and little known was known of his personal life. “I don’t give interviews, because I have to try to say things that I don’t need to say,” he told the LA Times in 2019. “The only thing I need to do is just to make music.”
Very little is known about his personal life and he rarely gave interviews with journalists. Excerpts from other interviews mention that he had married twice before. A 1976 interview, published by Dutch music magazine OOR, stated that he was married to Veronique Skawinska, a photographer who did some album artwork for him. A 1982 interview with the music magazine Backstage suggests that he was previously married to singer Vana Veroutis, who provided vocals for some of his records, beginning with La Fête Sauvage and, later, Heaven and Hell.
Vangelis Family
His father Odysseus worked in property and was an amateur sprinter; his son described him as “a great lover of music”. He had one brother, Nikos. He developed an interest in music at age four, composing on the family piano and experimenting with sounds by placing nails and kitchen pans inside it and with radio interference. When he was six his parents enrolled him in music lessons, but he later said that his attempts to study “failed” as he preferred to develop techniques on his own. He considered himself fortunate to have not attended music school, as he believed that it would have impeded his creativity. He learned to play from memory. “When the teachers asked me to play something, I would pretend that I was reading it and play from memory. I didn’t fool them, but I didn’t care”.
Vangelis Death
Vangelis died on May 17, 2022, aged 79, at a hospital in Paris due to heart failure. “It is with great sadness that we announce that the great Greek Vangelis Papathanassiou passed away late on the night of Tuesday, May 17,” Vangelis’s lawyer was quoted as saying by the ANA news agency.
Over his more than 50-year career, the musician was renowned for his musical experimentation and eclectic influences. He won an Oscar in 1982 for his theme for the British film Chariots of Fire and went on to develop the scores for a slew of other movies, including Ridley Scott’s cult classic Blade Runner, as well as for theatre and ballet.
Vangelis Cause of Death
He died on May 17, 2022, aged 79, at a hospital in Paris due to heart failure.
