Ennio Morricone has died at the age of 91, Italian news media and The New York Times report. The Oscar–winning Italian composer, whose spaghetti western soundtracks helped to define the genre, was hospitalized last week after he fell and fractured his femur, his lawyer told the Times. As well as spectacular scores for Sergio Leone and Clint Eastwood’s 1960s western classics, he produced landmark work across modern cinema, including scores for Quentin Tarantino, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Terrence Malick, and Brian De Palma, among many others.
Morricone played music from a young age, earning a trumpet diploma from Rome’s Conservatorio di Santa Cecilia in 1946 and a diploma in composition from the conservatory eight years later. He scored his first feature film, Luciano Salce’s Il federale, in 1961, before connecting with spaghetti western director Sergio Leone for several iconic films: A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965), The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), and Duck, You Sucker! (1971). In 1984, Morricone rejoined Leone for another classic, the gangster epic Once Upon a Time in America, starring Robert de Niro and James Woods.
Morricone scored some 500 genre-spanning films—comedy, drama, horror, and more. Among them are Exorcist II: The Heretic, John Carpenter’s The Thing, 1986’s The Mission, and his final film project, Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight.
Morricone was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Score six times, winning once in a competitive category, for The Hateful Eight in 2016. Before that, Morricone received an honorary Academy Award in 2007 for his “magnificent and multifaceted contributions to the art of film music.”
Morricone received the Grammy Trustees Award in 2014 and received seven Grammy nominations, winning one, for The Untouchables in 1988, for Best Album of Original Instrumental Background Score Written for a Motion Picture or Television. Late in his life, Morricone was forced to cancel live shows over health concerns. The composer suffered a back injury in 2014 that forced postponements. In 2016, he canceled concerts in Rome due to a collapsed vertebrae.
Morricone was “one of a kind,” composer Hans Zimmer told BBC Breakfast on Monday morning. “His music was always outstanding and done with great emotional fortitude and great intellectual thought.”