Oscar-winning Italian composer Ennio Morricone, 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 on Monday. He was 91.
Oscar-winning Italian composer Ennio Morricone, 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 on Monday. He was 91.
Morricone’s longtime lawyer and friend, Giorgio Assumma, said the Maestro, as he was known, died in a Rome hospital of complications following a recent fall in which he broke a leg.
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 Brian de Palma (The Untouchables), Quentin Tarantino (The Hateful Eight) and Gillo Pontecorvo (The Battle of Algiers).
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.
Morricone was credited with nothing less than reinventing music for western movies through his partnership with Leone, a former classmate. 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 those played on a harmonica in Leone’s 1984 movie Once Upon A Time in America, which would instantly become the film’s motif.
The movie is a saga of Jewish gangsters in New York that explores themes of friendship, lost love and the passing of time, starring Robert De Niro and James Woods. 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.
Movie lovers everywhere. If you have a projector, throw open your windows tonight and project this onto a wall, a cliff, a sheet, a billboard, to celebrate how #Enniomorricone made movies soar: https://t.co/e3QBrqhwzA
‘Discipline and curiosity’
“Inspiration does not exist,” Morricone said in a 2004 interview with The Associated Press. “What exists is an id