Ennio Morricone

A massively successful and influential film composer, Italian conductor and orchestrator Ennio Morricone (born on November 10, 1928) is indelibly associated with the distinctively original soundtracks for the "spaghetti western" movies - notably A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, and Once Upon a Time in the West. Throughout his decades-spanning career, he has influenced a varied list of artists such as Danger Mouse, Metallica, and Radiohead, just to name a few. The son of Italian jazz trumpeter Mario Morricone, he composed his own music from the age of six and studied trumpet at the National Academy of Santa Cecilia. In the early 1950s he wrote background music for radio dramas, while composing classical pieces for voice and piano. He also played in a jazz band and arranged pop music for the Italian broadcasting service RAI. He is best-known, however, for his film scores for director Sergio Leone's movies through the 1960s, distinguished by the use of gunshots and cracking whips. Numerous other movie scores maintained his reputation as one of the world's greatest living composers, while he occasionally worked in the pop genre with artists like Amii Stewart and Mireille Mathieu. Morricone’s successful relationship with Hollywood began in the early 70s and went well into the 2010s, writing scores for blockbuster films like Brian De Palma’s The Mission (1987), Barry Levinson’s Bugsy (1992), and Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight (2016), which earned him his first Academy Award for Best Original Score. Before that, Morricone had received an Honorary Academy Award in 2007 for his contribution to film music. In subsequent years, Morricone spent most of his touring throughout Europe and writing music for TV and commercials before passing away at the age of 91 as a result of a series of fall-related injuries.