Ennio Morricone, the Italian composer whose haunting scores to Spaghetti Westerns like A Fistful of Dollars and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly helped define a cinematic era, has died, his lawyer said on Monday. He was 91.
Morricone had broken his femur 10 days ago and died “at dawn” in a clinic in Rome, Giorgio Assumma said, confirming earlier reports by Italian news wire ANSA.
Born in Rome in 1928, Morricone wrote scores for some 400 films but his name was most closely linked with the director Sergio Leone, with whom he worked on the Spaghetti Westerns as well as epic crime drama Once Upon a Time in America.
Morricone worked in almost all film genres.