A native and lifelong resident of Rome whose first instrument was the trumpet, Morricone won his Oscar for his work on Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight (2015) and also was nominated for his original scores for Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven (1978), Roland Joffe’s The Mission (1986), Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables (1987), Barry Levinson’s Bugsy (1991) and Giuseppe Tornatore’s Malena (2000).
The composer quickly became a prolific name in Hollywood, working with directors including Don Siegel, Oliver Stone and Warren Beatty.
Ennio Morricone's greatest career regret was due to a Sergio Leone lie
It was his work with Quentin Tarantino that eventually earned him his Academy Award for The Hateful Eight in 2016. This made Morricone the oldest person to win a competitive Oscar at the time.
Speaking about the collaboration with Tarantino, Morricone described working on his film as “perfect ... because he gave me no cues, no guidelines."
He told The Guardian: "I wrote the score without Quentin Tarantino knowing anything about it, then he came to Prague when I recorded it and was very pleased. So the collaboration was based on trust and a great freedom for me."
“The music is indispensable, because my films could practically be silent movies, the dialogue counts for relatively little, and so the music underlines actions and feelings more than the dialogue,” Leone, who died in 1989, once said. “I’ve had him write the music before shooting, really as a part of the screenplay itself.”
Morricone’s spare focus on one instrument — like the trumpet solo in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, or the oboe, which soared over a lushly reverent backdrop in The Mission — enriched his contributions.
