Ennio Morricone (born November 10, 1928, Rome, Kingdom of Italy – died July 6, 2020, Rome, Italy) was an Italian composer and conductor. He composed music for more than 500 films and television series. Although only 30 of his soundtracks were for Westerns, these remain his most famous works. Morricone’s compositional style is especially known for the “spaghetti” Westerns (The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and Once Upon a Time in the West, both directed by Sergio Leone). In 2007, he received the Academy Honorary Award for his entire career, becoming the second film composer to receive this distinction after Alex North.
Morricone was born in Rome and studied at the Santa Cecilia Conservatory in Rome, learning to play the trumpet and studying composition under Goffredo Petrassi. Initially, he aimed to compose modern classical music, but this changed when he was invited to arrange Italian songs, something entirely unusual for him at the time.
In 1956, he married Maria Travia. He began composing film music in 1962 but continued to work in classical composition and arrangements. In 1964, he began his famous collaboration with directors Sergio Leone and Bernardo Bertolucci. For Leone, he composed the music for A Fistful of Dollars and went on to create a series of “spaghetti Westerns.” By 1968, he had composed 20 film scores. His collaboration with Leone became one of the most enduring partnerships between a director and a composer, spanning all of Leone’s films from A Fistful of Dollars to Once Upon a Time in America.
