Ennio Morricone, Grande Ufficiale OMRI (born November 10, 1928) was an Italian composer and conductor.

He had composed and arranged scores for more than 500 film and TV productions and widely acknowledged as one of the most prolific and influential film composers of his era.
He was well-known for his long-term collaborations with international acclaimed directors such as Sergio Leone, Brian De Palma, Barry Levinson, and Giuseppe Tornatore.

He wrote the characteristic film scores of Leone's Spaghetti Westerns A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965), The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) and Once Upon a Time in the West (1968). In the 80s, Morricone composed the scores for John Carpenter's horror movie The Thing (1982), Leone's Once Upon a Time in America (1984), Roland Joffé's The Mission (1986), Brian De Palma's The Untouchables (1987) and Giuseppe Tornatore's Cinema Paradiso (1988). His more recent compositions include the scores for Oliver Stone's U Turn (1997), Tornatore's The Legend of 1900 (1998) and Malèna (2000), De Palma's Mission to Mars (2000), Lajos Koltai's Fateless (2005), and Tornatore's Baaria - La porta del vento (2009).

Morricone has received two Grammy Awards, two Golden Globes, six BAFTAs in 1979–1992 & 2015, seven David di Donatello, eight Nastro d'Argento, and the Polar Music Prize in 2010. In 2007, he received the Academy Honorary Award "for his magnificent and multifaceted contributions to the art of film music".
The composer also has been nominated for five Academy Awards for Best Original Score during 1979–2001. He won the award in 2016 for The Hateful Eight. He was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2010.