Spaghetti Western movie composer Ennio Morricone dead at 91
ROME » Ennio Morricone, the Oscar-winning Italian composer who created the coyote-howl theme for the iconic Spaghetti Western
“The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” and often haunting soundtracks for such classic 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 would win him the Oscar for best original score in 2016. In accepting that award, Morricone 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 so-called 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 quick-shooting, 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.
Morricone was celebrated for crafting just a few notes — like the four notes played on a miniature pan flute favored by a character in Leone’s 1984 movie “Once Upon A Time in America” — that would instantly become a film’s highly memorable motif.
That movie is a saga about Jewish gangsters in New York that explores themes of friendship, lost love and the passing of time, starring Robert De Niro and James Wood. It is considered by some to be Leone’s masterpiece, thanks in part to Morricone’s evocative score, including a lush section played on string instruments.