Oscar-winning Italian film composer Ennio Morricone has died at the age of 91. According to his attorney, Giorgio Assumma, he died this morning in a Rome hospital after falling and breaking his leg.
During his lengthy and prolific career, Morricone scored more than 500 films, sold more than 70 million albums won countless awards for his work.
Morricone rose to worldwide prominence for scoring the Spaghetti Westerns directed by his friend Sergio Leone — low-budget films that emerged in the mid-1960s such as Per Un Pugno di Dollari (A Fistful of Dollars) and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Utilizing a minimal, sparse ethos, his symphonic soundtracks — which later spanned other genres of film — transformed the Western genre.
In more recent years, Morricone was hired by Quentin Tarantino to score his western The Hateful Eight. He won his first Oscar outside of his lifetime achievement award for his work on the film.
Among the many directors, actors and musicians paying tribute to the master are British electronic duo Orbital.
On Twitter the duo posted, “So sad to hear that Ennio Morricone has died. He was a great influence. One of the best film composers of all time.”
“I met Ennio a couple of times. The first time he was suitably unimpressed when I gave him a couple of Orbital albums until he noticed my partner was pregnant at which point his face lit up and he touched the bump saying something like ‘ah lovely baby!’ In Italian.”
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