Oscar-winner Vangelis, the composer of Chariots of Fire and Blade Runner, has died aged 79

Oscar-winning composer Vangelis died Tuesday in a hospital in France where he was being treated for COVID-19.

Vangelis, the Greek composer, good  known for his music in Chariots of Fire and Blade Runner, has died. He is 79 years old.

The Oscar winner died Tuesday in a hospital in France where he was being treated for COVID-19, a law firm representing Vangelis told the Greek newspaper OT. A Vangelis representative did not immediately respond to PEOPLE's request for comment.

Born Evangelos Odysseus Papatanasiou on March 29, 1943, in Agria, Greece, and raised in Athens. He was a self-conducted musician from an early age. Vangelis performed on the European stage of pop and progressive rock music in the 60s and 70s, playing with several bars also composing nature documentaries.

He received early recognition for his music on Carl Sagan's 1980 series PBS Cosmos: A Personal Voyage.

Vangelis' breakthrough came when she was cast in the 1981 British historical sports drama Fire Chariots. His work in the film reached #1 on the Billboard charts and won an Academy Award for Best Original Music Score also a Grammy for Record of the Year.

Although electronic score synthesizers were uncommon over time, according to Variety, it normalizes the use of synthesized music in film and television.

From there, he continued to write for titles such as Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982), Missing (1982), Antarctica (1983), The Bounty (1984), 1492: Conquest of Paradise (1992), and Oliver Stone's Alexander Stone ( 2004). 

Model's Vangelis Chorus Symphony was used as the theme of NASA's 2001 Mars Odyssey mission. According to News, he also composed the original song in space in honor of the late Stephen Hawking, which was used at his 2018 memorial. His latest studio album, Juno to Jupiter, was released last year, and Classic Pop Magazine says it was inspired by NASA's Juno spacecraft.