Oscar-winning film composer Morricone dies
ITALIAN composer Ennio Morricone, who created the memorable coyote-howl theme for the Spaghetti Western The Good, The Bad And The Ugly, has died aged 91.
His lawyer Giorgio Assumma said the Maestro, as he was known, died in a Rome hospital early yesterday of complications after he broke his leg in a fall.
During a career that spanned decades and earned him a lifetime achievement Oscar in 2007, before he took the best original score award for Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight in 2016, Morricone collaborated with some of the most renowned directors in the world.
His work can be heard in Brian de Palma’s The Untouchables, The Battle Of Algiers by Gillo Pontecorvo, John Carpenter’s The Thing and Roland Joffe’s The Mission.
It is perhaps his work with Italian film-maker Sergio Leone – who was a schoolfriend of Morricone’s – that is the most instantly recognisable. The Dollars trilogy of so-called Spaghetti Westerns from the 1960s was massively influential and made Clint Eastwood an international star.
In total, Morricone produced more than 400 original scores for feature films.
Morricone was known for crafting just a few notes, like those played on a harmonica in Leone’s Once Upon A Time in America, which would be instantly associated with that film.
He was credited with reinventing music for Western movies through his partnership with Leone. In A Fistful Of Dollars (1964), For A Few Dollars More (1965) and the epic The
Good, The Bad And The Ugly (1966), Eastwood starred as the gunman The Man With No Name, before going on to forge his own stellar career in front of and behind the camera.
In 1984, Morricone and Leone worked together again on Once Upon A Time In America, a saga of Jewish gangsters in New York that explores themes of friendship, lost love and the passing of time.
The movie, starring Robert De
Niro and James Woods, is considered by some to be Leone’s masterpiece, thanks in part to Morricone’s evocative score, including a lush section played on violins.
“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.”