Ennio Morricone, one of the world’s best-known and most prolific film composers, died in Rome yesterday at the age of 91.
He composed the music for about 500 films, including his old childhood friend Sergio Leone’s 1966 spaghetti western The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight, for which he won an Oscar in 2016.
Morricone died in hospital where he was being treated for a fractured femur following a fall, lawyer and family friend Giorgio Assuma said in a statement.
Morricone “passed away in the early hours of July 6 with the comfort of his faith,” the statement said.
He remained “fully lucid and with great dignity right until the end,” the statement added.
Tributes began pouring in for the maestro soon after his death was announced.
“We will remember forever and with infinite gratitude the artistic genius of maestro Ennio Morricone,” Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte said.
“He made us dream, he moved us and made us think, writing unforgettable notes that will remain forever in the history of music and cinema,” he said on Twitter.
Italian Minister of Health Roberto Speranza wrote in a tweet: “Adieu maestro, and thank you for the emotions you gave us.”
Gilles Jacob, the former head of the Cannes film festival, described him as the “emperor” of film music.
Born on Nov. 10, 1928, Morricone began composing at the age of six, and at just 10 he enrolled in a trumpet school at the prestigious Saint-Cecilia conservatory in Rome.
FILM CAREER
His film career began in 1961, when he was 33, with a collaboration with director Luciano Salce in Mission Ultra-secrete before going on to gain fame with the score for A Fistful of Dollars starring Clint Eastwood in 1964.
Before winning the Oscar for best film score in 2016, the Rome-born son of a trumpeter had been nominated no fewer than five times before the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences — embarrassed that such a talent had not been recognized sooner — presented him with a lifetime achievement award in 2007.
Morricone’s previous nominations were for Days of Heaven (1978), The Mission (1986), The Untouchables (1987), Bugsy (1991) and Malena (2000).
Although he is most closely associated in the public mind with Leone’s westerns starring Eastwood, Morricone’s composition for Roland Joffe’s Jesuit drama The Mission is considered by many critics to be his cinematic masterpiece, an epic and eclectic reflection of South America’s musical melting pot.
After his collaboration with Leone, he worked with Italian screen legends Federico Fellini and Pier Paolo Pasolini, and later with the likes of Pedro Almodovar, Bernardo Bertolucci, Brian De Palma and Oliver Stone.
‘IN A DIFFERENT PLACE’: The envoy first visited Shanghai, where he attended a Chinese basketball playoff match, and is to meet top officials in Beijing tomorrow US Secretary of State Antony Blinken yesterday arrived in China on his second visit in a year as the US ramps up pressure on its rival over its support for Russia while also seeking to manage tensions with Beijing. The US diplomat tomorrow is to meet China’s top brass in Beijing, where he is also expected to plead for restraint as Taiwan inaugurates president-elect William Lai (賴清德), and to raise US concerns on Chinese trade practices. However, Blinken is also seeking to stabilize ties, with tensions between the world’s two largest economies easing since his previous visit in June last year. At the
UNSETTLING IMAGES: The scene took place in front of TV crews covering the Trump trial, with a CNN anchor calling it an ‘emotional and unbelievably disturbing moment’ A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former US president Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said yesterday. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) said the man was declared dead by staff at an area hospital. The man was in Collect Pond Park at about 1:30pm on Friday when he took out pamphlets espousing conspiracy theories, tossed them around, then doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire, officials and witnesses said. A large number of police officers were nearby when it happened. Some officers and bystanders rushed
Beijing is continuing to commit genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in its western Xinjiang province, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a report published on Monday, ahead of his planned visit to China this week. The State Department’s annual human rights report, which documents abuses recorded all over the world during the previous calendar year, repeated language from previous years on the treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang, but the publication raises the issue ahead of delicate talks, including on the war in Ukraine and global trade, between the top U.S. diplomat and Chinese
RIVER TRAGEDY: Local fishers and residents helped rescue people after the vessel capsized, while motorbike taxis evacuated some of the injured At least 58 people going to a funeral died after their overloaded river boat capsized in the Central African Republic’s (CAR) capital, Bangui, the head of civil protection said on Saturday. “We were able to extract 58 lifeless bodies,” Thomas Djimasse told Radio Guira. “We don’t know the total number of people who are underwater. According to witnesses and videos on social media, the wooden boat was carrying more than 300 people — some standing and others perched on wooden structures — when it sank on the Mpoko River on Friday. The vessel was heading to the funeral of a village chief in