Ennio Morricone, the famous Italian composer responsible for scoring spaghetti westerns and more than 500 films, passed away at the age of 91 in Rome on Monday, his lawyer Giorgio Assumma confirmed.
Assumma said Morricone had been admitted to the hospital last week after falling and breaking his femur.
Morricone is perhaps most famous for scoring Sergio Leone’s 1960s spaghetti westerns, including the massively popular “Dollars Trilogy” starring Clint Eastwood: 1964’s A Fistful of Dollars, 1965’s For a Few Dollars More and 1966’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. He also worked with Bernardo Bertolucci, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Terrence Malick, Roland Joffé, Brian De Palma, Quentin Tarantino, Barry Levinson, Mike Nichols, John Carpenter and plenty of other acclaimed filmmakers over the course of his lengthy career.
In 2016, Morricone won his first competitive Oscar for his work on Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight. (He received an Oscar for lifetime achievement in 2007.) He was also nominated for five other Academy Awards, and he won two Golden Globe and four Grammys.
“The notion that I am a composer who writes a lot of things is true on one hand and not true on the other hand,” Morricone told the New York Times in 2007. “Maybe my time is better organized than many other people’s. But compared to classical composers like Bach, Frescobaldi, Palestrina or Mozart, I would define myself as unemployed.”
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