We start the week with some very sad news, as legendary Italian film composer Ennio Morricone has passed away aged 91, having suffered complications from a fall.
Known as ‘The Maestro’, Morricone worked on over 500 films during his illustrious career and is perhaps best known for his collaborations with fellow Italian and former schoolmate Sergio Leone, which included the Clint Eastwood-headlined Dollars Trilogy – A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly – as well as Once Upon a Time in the West, A Fistful of Dynamite, and Once Upon a Time in America.
Morricone worked extensively in the Spaghetti Western genre, frequently collaborating with the likes of Sergio Corbucci and Sergio Sollima, and also began scoring Hollywood films from his home in Rome, working with filmmakers such as Brian De Palma, Oliver Stone, Roland Joffe, Warren Beatty, John Carpenter, William Friedkin, Wolfgang Petersen and Barry Levinson.
During his career, Morricone received Academy Award nominations for Days of Heaven, The Mission, The Untouchables, Bugsy and Malena; he received an Honorary Award in 2007, and finally won the Oscar for Best Original Score in 2016 for his work on Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight.
