Trivia

He had a musical education by Arnold Schönberg before he wrote first compositions for stage performances of Max Reinhardt.

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.

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

Gray became a naturalized UK citizen on 29 January, 1947.

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.

During the immediate post-war period Gray had also been composing various popular songs (frequently with lyricist Tommie Conner), contributing material to a number of stage revues such as "Sauce Tartare".

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).

His most famous composition is the song Flieger, grüß mir die Sonne with lyrics by Walter Reisch, which Hans Albers recorded for the film "FP1antwortet nicht" on July 7, 1932. The song has since been played by many other singers and music groups, including in the 1980s by the band 'Extrabreit' and by 'Scooter' in the song I'm Your Pusher .

He studied in Berlin during the 1920s under Arnold Schönberg, among others .

His film scores in Britain were playfully eclectic in style, alternating between haunting romanticism, catchy melodies, and occasional stark modernist touches.

Gray's arguably most experimental work can be found in his collaborations with Powell and Pressburger, particularly in I Know Where I'm Going! (1945), where he inventively used Scottish folklore, and in A Matter of Life and Death (1946), where ticking clocks and repetitive piano scales evoke the monotony of celestial afterlife.

His composition 'Commando Patrol' from The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp ("a perfect illustration of the jazz idiom in background scoring") achieved popularity under its own right as recorded by The Squadronaires in 1943.

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").

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 became a student of Arnold Schoenberg, funding himself by composing jazz-influenced music for the cabaret. As Schoenberg disapproved of such music, Zmigrod took up the stage name Allan Gray, naming himself after Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray.

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. In October 1940, Ralph Vaughan Williams petitioned for Gray to be released as a musician of eminent distinction.

As a composer for Trude Hesterberg's "Wilder Bühne" and the cabaret "Die Rampe", he set texts by Erich Kästner, Kurt Tucholsky, Joachim Ringelnatz, Marcellus Schiffer, among others, and wrote chansons for Werner Finck's cabaret "Die Katakombe".

Allan Gray (born Josef Zmigrod) was an Austrian-British composer .