In a career that spans six decades, Morricone started out composing background music for Italian radio shows and progressed to providing accompaniments for songs by artists such as Mario Lanza.
But it was the rise of the "Spaghetti Western", and in particular his collaboration on the movies of Sergio Leone that brought him fame and fortune - films such as A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, and Once Upon a Time in the West were huge successes in the 1960s, and it was Morricone's music that gave them their unique atmosphere.
Remarkably, however, in the UK it was a low-budget BBC Wales drama The Life and Times of David Lloyd George, starring Philip Madoc, that gave him renewed exposure. For one of the surprise hits of the "uber-cool" year 1981 was none other than his theme for that programme, Chi Mai.
Capturing the mood that year for pre-war nostalgia (Brideshead Revisited and the films of Merchant Ivory were also hugely successful), this was possibly the first occasion when scores of Britain's "yoof" actually bought a piece of classical music, and it rocketed to number 2 in the charts. And it is sublime...
Ennio Morricone on Wikipedia
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