Ennio Morricone is one of the most prolific and versatile of all film composers, having written more than 530 scores for a wide variety of movies that include dramas, comedies, mysteries, horror films, Westerns and historical epics. His most celebrated scores are those for Sergio Leone's "spaghetti Westerns" such as The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)and Brian De Palma's gangster epic The Untouchables (1987).

Morricone was born in 1928 in Rome and studied at the Santa Cecilia Conservatory, specializing in trumpet. He had created scores for several Italian films and television shows before finding fame in his first collaboration with former classmate Leone, A Fistful of Dollars (1964), composed under the pseudonym Leo Nichols. This was the film that introduced the spaghetti Western and established Clint Eastwood as a major film star -- and Morricone's witty, evocative score played a major role in its success. With their spare style and use of unorthodox instruments (electric guitar, harmonica, Jew's harp, etc.), his compositions revolutionized the way music was used in Westerns.

Morricone's other collaborations with Leone have included For a Few Dollars More (1965), The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), Duck, You Sucker (1971), My Name Is Nobody (1973), Trinity Is Back Again (1975) and Once Upon a Time in America (1984).

Morricone contributed one of his most rousing scores to The Five Man Army (1969), which was set in Mexico and featured an American director (Don Taylor) but had an Italian crew and the style of a spaghetti Western! Other outstanding Morricone scores have included those for Gillo Pontecorvo's historical drama Burn! (1970 aka Queimada!), Terrence Malick's haunting Days of Heaven (1978), Roland Joffe's The Mission (1986) and Giuseppe Tornatore's Cinema Paradiso (1989). Morricone's son Andrea is also a film composer.

by Roger Fristoe