Józef Żmigrod (February 23, 1902 – September 10, 1973), better known by his stage name Allan Gray, was a Polish composer active in the UK film industry from the late 1930s until the mid 1950s.
Early life and education
Gray was born Józef Żmigrod in Tarnów, Austria-Hungary, (present-day Poland) into a musical family: his father was a concert violinist.[2] He studied philosophy in Heidelberg and later Berlin, where he composed a children's opera, Wavelength ABC.[3] There (during the 1920s) he became a student of Arnold Schoenberg, funding himself by composing jazz-influenced music for the cabaret. He later wrote music for Max Reinhardt's theatre productions. As Schoenberg disapproved of such music, Żmigrod took up the stage name Allan Gray, naming himself after Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray.[4]
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).[3] But he was forced to leave the country in 1934 after the rise of Nazi Germany, moving to England. He married Luise Radermacher in Hendon in 1935 (thereafter known as Lissy Gray, and described as "a Belgian countess"),[5] and the following year they settled in Amersham, Buckinghamshire, where they lived in Bois Lane.[6] 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.[6] In October 1940, Ralph Vaughan Williams petitioned for Gray to be released as a musician of eminent distinction.[7]
Gray became a naturalized UK citizen on 29 January, 1947.[14] 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.[6] He died in Amersham on September 10, 1973.
