Andre Previn

He was born Andreas Ludwig Priwin on April 6, 1929, in Berlin. After his parents realized he had perfect pitch — his father had been an amateur pianist in Berlin — André entered the Berlin Conservatory when he was 6. His father, Jacob, a Polish-born lawyer who was Jewish, moved the family to Paris in 1938 to escape the Nazis. André studied with Marcel Dupré at the Paris Conservatory for about a year before the family left for Los Angeles. Mr. Previn became an American citizen in 1943, and in 1950 he was drafted into the Army and served with the Sixth Army Band. He also studied conducting in San Francisco with Pierre Monteux, whom he later followed at the London Symphony. A relative worked in the music department at Universal Studios, and Mr. Previn wrote music for movies even before he went into the Army. He collected Oscars for scoring “Gigi” (1959), “Porgy and Bess” (1960), “Irma La Douce” (1964) and “My Fair Lady” (1965). Mr. Previn’s first wife, Betty Bennett, was a singer he had seen in San Francisco jazz clubs. They had two daughters, Claudia and Alicia, also known as Lovely (who became a violinist in the Irish band In Tua Nua), and divorced in 1958. His second marriage was to Dory Langan, an MGM lyricist, who, after they separated, recorded several albums as a singer-songwriter under the name Dory Previn, many of them reflections on their breakup and its aftermath. Dory Previn died in 2012. Their divorce in 1970 was prompted by the well-publicized affair between Mr. Previn and Mia Farrow, who had been a friend of Ms. Previn’s. Ms. Farrow divorced Sinatra in 1968 and married Mr. Previn in 1970. They had three children, Matthew and Sascha, who were twins, and Fletcher. They also adopted Summer Song, known as Daisy, and Soon-Yi, who married Woody Allen in 1997. Mr. Previn’s fourth wife was Heather Haines Sneddon. They had a son, Lukas, in 1984, and divorced in 1999, the year he wrote the violin concerto for his fifth wife, the violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter He and Ms. Mutter married in 2002 and divorced in 2006 but continued to perform together.