Oscarwinning composer of haunting soundtracks
ROME — Ennio Morricone, the Oscarwinning Italian composer who created the coyotehowl theme for the classic Spaghetti Western “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” and often haunting soundtracks for such Hollywood gangster movies as “The Untouchables” and the epic “Once Upon A Time In America,” died Monday. He was 91.
Morricone’s longtime lawyer, Giorgio Assumma, said “the Maestro,” as he was known, died in a Rome hospital of complications following surgery after a recent fall in which he broke a leg bone.
Outside the hospital, Assumma read a farewell message from Morricone.
“I am Ennio Morricone, and I am dead,” began the message. In the greeting, the composer went on to explain that the only reason he was saying goodbye this way and had requested a private funeral was: “I don’t want to bother anyone.”
During a career that spanned decades and earned him an Oscar for lifetime achievement in 2007, Morricone collaborated with some of Hollywood’s and Italy’s top directors, including on “The Untouchables” by Brian de Palma, “The Hateful Eight” by Quentin Tarantino, “The Battle of Algiers” by Gillo Pontecorvo and “Nuovo Cinema Paradiso,” a nostalgic ode to the importance of movie houses in Italian small town life, by Giuseppe Tornatore.
The Tarantino film won Morricone an Oscar for best original score in 2016. In accepting the award, he told the audience at the ceremony: “There is no great music without a great film that inspires it.”
In total, he produced more than 400 original scores for feature films.
His iconic socalled Spaghetti Western movies saw him work closely with the late Italian film director Sergio Leone, a former classmate.
Morricone practically reinvented music for Western genre movies through his partnership with Leone. Their partnership included the “Dollars” trilogy starring Clint Eastwood as a quickshooting, lonesome gunman: “A Fistful of Dollars” in 1964, “For a Few Dollars More” in 1965 and “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” a year later.
“Inspiration does not exist,” Morricone said in a 2004 interview with the Associated Press. “What exists is an idea, a minimal idea that the composer develops at the desk, and that small idea becomes something important.”
Italian President Sergio Mattarella, in a condolence message to the composer’s family, wrote: “Both a refined and popular musician, he left a deep footprint on the musical history of the second half of the 1900s.”
Born in Rome on Nov. 10, 1928, Morricone was the oldest of five children. His father was a trumpet player.
After studying trumpet and composition at the Conservatory of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in the Italian capital, he started working as a trumpeter and then as an arranger for record companies.
In 1961, he wrote his first score for a movie, a bittersweet comedy set in the final moments of Fascism called “Il Federale” (known in English as “The Fascist”). That decade also saw Morricone cooperate with Pontecorvo, first on “The Battle of Algiers,” the blackandwhite classic depicting the Algerian uprising against the French; and later on “Queimada,” a tale of colonialism starring Marlon Brando.
Morricone received his first Oscar nomination for original score with “Days Of Heaven,” a 1978 movie by U.S. director Terence Malick. Besides “The Hateful Eight,” the others were for “The Mission” (1986), “The Untouchables” (1987), “Bugsy” (1991) and “Malena” (2000).
Morricone is survived by his wife Maria Travia, whom he cited when accepting his 2016 Oscar. Married in 1956, the couple had four children, Marco, Alessandra, Andrea and Giovanni.