Allan Gray (composer)

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. He studied philosophy in Heidelberg and later Berlin, where he composed a children’s opera, Wavelength ABC. 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. 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 o