Oscar winner Ennio Morricone, composer for spaghetti westerns, dies at 91

Oscar-winning Italian composer Ennio Morricone, who created the coyote-howl theme for the iconic Spaghetti Western “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” and often haunting soundtracks for such classic Hollywood gangster movies as “The Untouchables” and the epic “Once Upon A Time In America,” died on Monday. He was 91.

Morricone’s longtime lawyer and friend, Giorgio Assumma, said the Maestro, as he was known, died in a Rome hospital of complications following a recent fall in which he broke a leg.

During a career that spanned decades and earned him an Oscar for lifetime achievement in 2007, Morricone collaborated with some of Hollywood’s and Italy’s top directors, including on “The Untouchables” by Brian De Palma, “The Hateful Eight” by Quentin Tarantino and “The Battle of Algiers” by Gillo Pontecorvo.

The Tarantino film would win him the Oscar for best original score in 2016. In accepting that award, Morricone told the audience: “There is no great music without a great film that inspires it.”

In total, he produced more than 400 original scores for feature films.

His iconic so-called Spaghetti Western movies saw him work closely with the late Italian film director Sergio Leone.Morricone was credited with nothing less than reinventing music for Western movies through his partnership with Sergio Leone, a former classmate. Their partnership included the “Dollars” trilogy starring Clint Eastwood as a quick-shooting, lonesome gunman: “A Fistful of Dollars” in 1964, “For a Few Dollars More” in 1965 and “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” a year later.

Morricone was celebrated for crafting just a few notes, like those played on a harmonica in Leone’s 1984 movie “Once Upon A Time in America,” which would instantly become the film’s motif.

In his late 80s, Morricone provided the score for “The Hateful Eight,” Tarantino’s 2015 70-mm epic and the first time in decades that he had composed new music for a Western. It was also the first time Tarantino had used an original score.

Morricone’s style was sparse, made of memorable tunes and unusual instruments and arrangements, and often stirred deep emotions. His music punctuated the long silences typical of the Spaghetti Westerns, with the characters locked in close-ups, staring at each other and waiting for their next moves. The coyote howl, harmonicas and eerie whistling of “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” became Morricone’s trademark and one of the most easily recognizable soundtracks in cinema.

Born in Rome on Nov. 10, 1928, Morricone was the oldest of the five children. His father was a trumpet player. After studying trumpet and composition at the Conservatory of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in the Italian capital, he started working as a trumpeter and then as an arranger for record companies.

In 1961 he wrote his first score for a movie, a bittersweet comedy set in the final moments of fascism called “Il Federale” (known in English as “The fascist”). That decade also saw Morricone cooperate with Pontecorvo, first on “The Battle of Algiers,” the black-and-white classic depicting the Algerian uprising against the French; and later on “Queimada,” a tale of colonialism starring Marlon Brando.

Morricone received his first Oscar nomination for original score with “Days of Heaven,” a 1978 movie by U.S. director Terence Malick. Beside “The Hateful Eight,” the others were for “The Mission” (1986), “The Untouchables” (1987), “Bugsy” (1991) and “Malena” (2000).

Morricone is survived by his wife, Maria Travia, whom he cited when accepting his 2016 Oscar. Married in 1956, the couple had four children, Marco, Alessandra, Andrea and Giovanni.