Film composer Ennio Morricone received the 2,574th star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame Friday, honored for a diverse career that has included writing the scores for more than 450 films, including the 1960s so-called Spaghetti Westerns starring Clint Eastwood.
Harvey Weinstein, co-founder of The Weinstein Company, and director Quentin Tarantino were among the speakers joining Morricone at the ceremony on Hollywood Boulevard.
The Italian Morricone does not speak English but addressed the crowd through an interpreter. Tarantino took to the microphone to welcome him to Hollywood.
“To have Ennio here in Los Angeles, which rarely happens, this is very, very exciting,” Tarantino said. “To bring this bit of ‘Italia’ to Hollywood Boulevard is a really wonderful thing.”
The ceremony came two days before the Oscars, which could bring the 87- year-old Morricone his first Academy Award in competition. He is nominated for best original score for “The Hateful Eight,” which was directed and written by Tarantino with Weinstein and his brother Bob serving as executive producers.
The nomination for “The Hateful Eight” is the sixth for Morricone, who was also nominated for his scores for “Days of Heaven,” “The Mission,” “The Untouchables,” “Bugsy” and “Malena.”
Morricone received an honorary Oscar in 2007 for “his magnificent and multifaceted contributions to the art of film music.”
Morricone also wrote the scores for the Sergio Leone-directed westerns “A Fistful of Dollars,” “For a Few Dollars More,” “The Good, The Bad and The Ugly,” “Once Upon a Time in The West” and “A Fistful of Dynamite.”
Additionally, he wrote the scores for “The Battle of Algiers,” “Cinema Paradiso” and “Once Upon a Time in America.”
Morricone has worked with such directors as Sergio Leone, Bernardo Bertolucci, Lina Wertmuller, Brian De Palma, Roman Polanski and Oliver Stone.
Morricone was born in Rome on Nov. 10, 1928. He wrote his first concert works at the end of the 1950s, then worked as an arranger for the Italian state broadcaster RAI. Morricone started his career as a film music composer in 1961 with “Il Federale.”
