Ennio Morricone, Oscar-Winning Composer of Film Scores, Dies at 91 [July 6, 2020]

Ennio Morricone, Oscar-Winning Composer of Film Scores, Dies at 91 - The New York Times

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/06/movies/ennio-morricone-dead.html

 

His vast output included atmospheric music for spaghetti westerns in his native Italy and scores for some 500 movies by a Who’s Who of directors.

Ennio Morricone directed a concert in Rome in January.Credit...Roberto Monaldo/LaPresse, via Associated Press

By Robert D. McFadden

July 6, 2020Updated 4:14 p.m. ET

 

Ennio Morricone, the Italian composer whose atmospheric scores for spaghetti westerns and some 500 films by a Who’s Who of international directors made him one of the world’s most versatile and influential creators of music for the modern cinema, died on Monday in Rome. He was 91.

His death, at a hospital, was confirmed by his lawyer, Giorgio Assumma, who said that Mr. Morricone was admitted there last week after falling and fracturing a femur. Mr. Assumma also distributed a statement that Mr. Morricone had written himself, titled, “I, Ennio Morricone, am dead.”

To many cineastes, Maestro Morricone (pronounced (mo-ree-CONE-eh) was a unique talent, composing melodic accompaniments to comedies, thrillers and historical dramas by Bernardo Bertolucci, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Terrence Malick, Roland Joffé, Brian De Palma, Barry Levinson, Mike Nichols, John Carpenter, Quentin Tarantino and other filmmakers.

He scored many popular films of the past 40 years: Édouard Molinaro’s “La Cage aux Folles” (1978), Mr. Carpenter’s “The Thing” (1982), Mr. De Palma’s “The Untouchables” (1987), Roman Polanski’s “Frantic” (1988), Giuseppe Tornatore’s “Cinema Paradiso” (1988), Wolfgang Petersen’s “In the Line of Fire” (1993), and Mr. Tarantino’s “The Hateful Eight” (2015).

), Wolfgang Petersen’s “In the Line of Fire” (1993), and Mr. Tarantino’s “The Hateful Eight” (2015).

 

Mr. Morricone won his first competitive Academy Award for his score for “The Hateful Eight,” an American western mystery thriller for which he also won a Golden Globe. In a career showered with honors, he had previously won an Oscar for lifetime achievement (2007) and was nominated for five other Academy Awards; in addition, he won two Golden Globes, four Grammys and dozens of international awards.

 

Mr. Morricone receiving an Oscar for lifetime achievement in 2007.Credit...Monica Almeida/The New York Times

 

But the work that made him world famous, and that was best known to moviegoers, was his blend of music and sound effects for Sergio Leone’s so-called spaghetti westerns of the 1960s: a ticking pocket watch, a sign creaking in the wind, buzzing flies, a twanging Jew’s harp, haunting whistles, cracking whips, gunshots and a bizarre, wailing “ah-ee-ah-ee-ah,” played on a sweet potato-shaped wind instrument called an ocarina.

Imitated, scorned, spoofed, what came to be known as “The Dollars Trilogy” — “A Fistful of Dollars” (1964), “For a Few Dollars More” (1965) and “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” (1966), all released in the United States in 1967 — starred Clint Eastwood as “The Man With No Name” and were enormous hits, with a combined budget of $2 million and gross worldwide receipts of $280 million.

 

 

The trilogy’s Italian dialogue was dubbed for the English-speaking market, and the action was brooding and slow, with clichéd close-ups of gunfighters’ eyes. But Mr. Morricone, breaking the unwritten rule never to upstage actors with music, infused it all with wry sonic weirdness and melodramatic strains that many fans embraced with cultlike devotion and that critics called viscerally true to Mr. Leone’s vision of the Old West.