Ennio Morricone, Grande Ufficiale OMRI (born 1928-11-10); sometimes also credited as Dan Savio or Leo Nichols, is an Italian composer especially noted for his film scores. He has composed and arranged scores for more than 500 film and television productions. He is best known for the characteristic sparse and memorable soundtracks of Sergio 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) which have been frequently cited by many in the film industry as some of the greatest film scores ever composed.

Although only 30 of his film scores are for Westerns, it is these for which he is best known. His more recent notable compositions for film include the scores for The Mission (Roland Joffé, 1986), The Untouchables (Brian DePalma, 1987), Cinema Paradiso (Giuseppe Tornatore, 1988), Lolita (Adrian Lyne, 1997) and Malèna (Giuseppe Tornatore, 2000). He received the Honorary Academy Award (Lifetime Achievement Award) in 2007 (although he never won an Oscar in competition), only the second film composer to do so (the first being Alex North).

Morricone makes no qualitative distinction between his film scores (which he collectively calls "applied music") and his by now more than 100 concert pieces (termed "absolute music"). He has collaborated with industry giants, most notably Quincy Jones and Celine Dion. An admirer of Morricone's compositions for many years, Jones enlisted his longtime songwriting collaborators Alan and Marilyn Bergman to write the lyrics that Dion sang to Morricone's Once Upon A Time In America theme.