Leo Nichols

Leo Nichols

Ennio Morricone, (born November 10, 1928) is an Italian composer, orchestrator and conductor, who has written music for more than 500 motion pictures and television series, as well as contemporary and modern classical works. His scores have been included in over forty award-winning films.

Morricone became known worldwide by composing the film scores for Spaghetti Westerns directed and/or produced by Sergio Leone, including 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), A Fistful of Dynamite (1971) and My Name is Nobody (1973).

During the sixties and seventies, Morricone built long-term associations with European directors such as Bernardo Bertolucci, Henri Verneuil, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Terence Young, Sergio Corbucci, Dario Argento and Elio Petri. He composed music for all film genres, ranging from comedy and drama to action thrillers and historical films. As a consequence, his career includes a wide range of composition genres, making him one of the world's most versatile, prolific and influential composers.

Since 1977, Morricone's career in Hollywood got a boost by composing music for directors such as John Boorman, Wolfgang Petersen, Brian De Palma, Oliver Stone, Barry Levinson, Mike Nichols, Terrence Malick and John Carpenter. Notable scores include Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977), Days of Heaven (1978), The Thing (1982), The Untouchables (1987), Casualties of War (1988), Bugsy (1991), In the Line of Fire (1993), Disclosure (1994), Wolf (1994), Bulworth (1998) and Mission to Mars (2000).

In the 80s and 90s, Morricone also continued to compose music for European directors. His scores for Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in America (1984), Roland Joffé's The Mission (1986), Pedro Almodóvar's Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (1990) and the Giuseppe Tornatore movies, including Cinema Paradiso (1988) and Legend of 1900 (1998), are among his most awarded film scores.

His most recent compositions include the scores for Vatel (2000), Ripley's Game (2002), Fateless (2005), La sconosciuta (2006), Baaria - La porta del vento (2009) and The Best Offer (2013). In the 2000s, Morricone's music has been extensively reused in movies such as The Boat That Rocked (2009) and Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill Vol.1 and 2 (2003-2004), Inglourious Basterds (2009) and more recently in Django Unchained (2012).

In 2007, Ennio Morricone received the Academy Honorary Award "for his magnificent and multifaceted contributions to the art of film music". He has been nominated for a further five Oscars in the category of Best Original Score during 1979-2001, but has never won competitively. Morricone has won two Grammy Awards, two Golden Globes, five BAFTAs during 1979-1992, seven David di Donatello, eight Nastro d'Argento, and the Polar Music Prize in 2010.