ENNIO MORRICONE

(10 November 1928 - 6 July 2020)

The Italian composer Ennio Morricone, who has died aged 91, wrote over 500 film scores for features, shorts and television, plus classical, jazz and pop music. He is celebrated for his music to the films of Sergio Leone, a classmate at school. Composing multiple film scores every year (he wrote 29 in 1972), he made an (uncredited) debut in Franco Rossi’s Death of a Friend in 1960. He wrote fourteen more before Bertolucci used him on Before the Revolution in 1964. Then Leone employed him for A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, A Fistful of Dynamite, Once Upon a Time in the West and Once Upon a Time in America. Morricone wrote for all genres rather than just Westerns or horror, so worked for many directors, including Marco Bellocchio, Gillo Pontecorvo, Dario Argento, Mario Bava, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Liliana Cavani, Don Siegel, Ếdouard Molinaro, Edward Dmytryk, Roland Joffḗ, Pedro Almodovar, Franco Zeffirelli, Barry Levinson, Terrence Malick, Brian De Palma and Quentin Tarantino. His most affecting music is for Giuseppe Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso (1988), a tribute to movies with a brilliant score, for which his son Andrea wrote the 'Love Theme'. Morricone was nominated and won awards everywhere including an Oscar for Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight in 2016, although he already had an honorary lifetime achievement Academy Award in 2007. Morricone was married to Maria Travia from 1956. They have three sons, Marco, Andrea and Giovanni, and a daughter, Alessandra.

MICHAEL DARVELL