André Previn was born Andreas Ludwig Priwin in Berlin on April 6, 1929. Most published reports give that year, although Previn himself said he was born in 1930. His father, Jack Previn, was a lawyer, judge and music teacher, and the youngest of the three children was the one who took to the piano lessons the whole family received. He entered the Berlin Conservatory at six. In 1938 the conservatory told his father that the boy was no longer welcome because he was Jewish, and the family left for Paris, where he studied theory at the Conservatoire. They sailed for New York on October 20, 1938 and reached Los Angeles on November 26. Previn became a naturalized American citizen in 1943 and taught himself English, his third language, from comic books and films.

His professional life began in the film studios. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer hired him in 1946, while he was still a student at Beverly Hills High School, after its music department noticed his work for a local radio program, and his first official credit was the Lassie film The Sun Comes Up (1949). Drafted in 1950, he served with the Sixth Army Band at the Presidio of San Francisco and took private conducting lessons from Pierre Monteux. Back at MGM in 1953 he stayed for sixteen years in all. Over a career in which he worked on the music of more than fifty films he was nominated for eleven Academy Awards and won four: Gigi (1958), Porgy and Bess (1959), Irma la Douce (1963) and My Fair Lady (1964).

Jazz ran alongside the studio job from the start. By his own later account he was won over by Art Tatum's recording of "Sweet Lorraine," which his father handed him with an instruction to learn it. Matthew Guerrieri's survey of every jazz and jazz-adjacent record Previn made finds him on radio broadcasts in December 1944, on a Nat Cole-style trio session for the Sunset label in 1945 and 1946, and as a guest on Frank Sinatra's radio program in the autumn of 1946. His first major-label album as a leader, André Previn at the Piano, was recorded for RCA Victor in October and November 1947. In his memoir he wrote that the San Francisco jazz clubs he frequented while stationed there in 1952 changed his view of jazz, introducing him to the new music of Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Bud Powell and the Modern Jazz Quartet, and Guerrieri reports that he sat in with Parker and Gillespie.

After his discharge he became a fixture of the Los Angeles scene. Collaboration, recorded for RCA Victor in 1954 with the trumpeter and arranger Shorty Rogers, was his first record with the drummer Shelly Manne. On August 17, 1956 Previn, Manne and the bassist Leroy Vinnegar recorded Modern Jazz Performances of Songs from My Fair Lady in one evening at the Contemporary studio in Los Angeles. Billed to Shelly Manne & His Friends, it is generally described as the first jazz album built entirely on one Broadway score, and it was still the best-selling jazz album in the United States two years later according to Billboard. The group went on to record Broadway scores one after another for Contemporary, sometimes under Manne's name and sometimes under Previn's as André Previn & His Pals: Li'l Abner (1957) with Vinnegar, then, with Red Mitchell in the bass chair, Pal Joey, Gigi, Bells Are Ringing and West Side Story. Alongside them came Double Play! (1957) with the pianist Russ Freeman and Manne, solo albums of the songs of Vernon Duke, Jerome Kern and Harold Arlen, and trio dates with Mitchell and the drummer Frankie Capp. West Side Story and André Previn Plays Songs by Harold Arlen won the Grammy for best jazz performance by a soloist or small group at the 1961 and 1962 ceremonies. By Guerrieri's account, a DownBeat readers' poll at the end of 1958 ranked him just ahead of Bill Evans and behind Oscar Peterson, Thelonious Monk, Dave Brubeck and Erroll Garner.

He worked with singers and horn players as well. He accompanied Dinah Shore (Dinah Sings, Previn Plays, 1960) and Doris Day (Duet, 1962), arranged and conducted Julie London's Your Number Please (1959), recorded Kurt Weill songs with the trombonist J. J. Johnson (1962) and made 4 to Go! (1963) with the guitarist Herb Ellis, the bassist Ray Brown and Manne. The film score for The Subterraneans (1960) brought Gerry Mulligan, Russ Freeman, Art Farmer and Carmen McRae into the MGM studio. Then the balance shifted. Previn's formal conducting debut is generally dated to 1963, and he became music director of the Houston Symphony in 1967, principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra in 1968 (a post he held until 1979), music director of the Pittsburgh Symphony from 1976 to 1984, music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic from 1985 to 1989 and chief conductor of the Royal Philharmonic from 1985 to 1992. Television made him famous in Britain, from André Previn's Music Night to a 1971 Morecambe and Wise sketch in which he was billed as "Andrew Preview." He wrote the Broadway musical Coco with Alan Jay Lerner, the West End musical The Good Companions (1974), the operas A Streetcar Named Desire (1998) and Brief Encounter (2009), concertos, chamber music and song cycles, and a memoir of his Hollywood years, No Minor Chords (1991). Jazz recording, which had been concentrated in the years from 1945 to 1967, mostly stopped.

It resumed in the late 1980s. Earlier, in 1983, he had recorded Nice Work If You Can Get It with Ella Fitzgerald and the bassist Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen, the only album she made with him. He had also filmed television specials with Peterson in 1974 and with Fitzgerald in 1979. In March 1989 he recorded After Hours for Telarc with Joe Pass and Brown. When the guitarist Mundell Lowe took Pass's chair the trio made Uptown (1990), Old Friends (1992, recorded live in San Diego) and Jazz at the Musikverein (Verve, 1997), and he recorded duo songbooks of Gershwin (1998) and Ellington (1999) with the bassist David Finck, followed by Live at the Jazz Standard (2001) and the solo ballad album Alone (2007). One more album came in 2013, Change of Heart, a set of his own songs with the singer Michael Feinstein. Previn passed away at home in Manhattan on February 28, 2019, at the age of 89. His honors included an honorary knighthood (KBE) in 1996, the Kennedy Center Honors in 1998, the Glenn Gould Prize in 2005, a lifetime achievement Grammy in 2010 and ten competitive Grammy Awards spread across classical, film and jazz recordings.

Previn's career had three sides, film scoring, classical conducting and composing, and jazz, and he kept them apart in his own mind: in a 1986 profile he said he had never considered himself a jazz musician but a musician who occasionally played jazz. The jazz side is nonetheless well documented, with dozens of leader and co-leader albums, two jazz Grammys and a long run of sessions with the first-rank players of the West Coast scene. As a pianist he started from the trio style of Nat Cole and the virtuosity of Art Tatum, then grafted on bebop's touch and articulation after the San Francisco years, and he admired Oscar Peterson and Bill Evans as trio pianists. The critic Ted Gioia, writing about West Coast jazz, found his work uneven in quality and jazz content and often more a popularizer's than a serious practitioner's, but at his best a persuasive player with an earthy, hard-swinging style that at times recalled Horace Silver. Guerrieri's survey values the Broadway-score albums for their wit and Previn's ability to shift idioms at will, notes that he played the blues on almost every record without ever sounding like a native of the idiom, and calls his touch and his reshuffling of harmony recognizably his own. Dizzy Gillespie said Previn had the flow that technique alone does not supply, and Wynton Kelly, asked in a 1964 DownBeat blindfold test which pianists he would go out of his way to hear, named Previn. His easy-listening albums with strings, his vocal accompaniments and the film and classical careers that followed explain why many jazz listeners know him as an outsider, and why he was sometimes criticized for glibness.