Sergio Leone Biography
Sergio Leone (1929 - 1989) was an Italian director, producer and screenwriter credited as the pioneer of the Spaghetti Western genre and widely regarded as one of the most influential directors in the history of cinema. Born in 1929 in Rome, son of the Italian silent film director Roberto Roberti and the actress Bice Valerian, Sergio Leone was predestined for cinema. He began in between as an assistant on Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves (1949) and Mervyn LeRoy's Quo Vadis (1951) and William Wyler's Ben-Hur (1960). It was at the end of the 1950s that he began writing his first screenplays and was then assigned to direct The Colossus of Rhodes (1961). After directing Robert Aldrich's second film crew, Sodome and Gomorrah (1961), and facing the progressive decline of the American western, the Italian filmmaker appropriated this genre by creating a remake of Akira Kurosawa's film The Bodyguard: A Fistful of Dollars (1964). With this second feature film, Leone champions a new style, that of the "spaghetti" western. The director strives to break the codes of the traditional western, parodying typical situations, favoring slowness and stretching scenes to excess. As a child he had been a classmate of Ennio Morricone, who was the one who composed the soundtracks for the director's films, accompanying the violent graphics with operatic music. In addition to being a worldwide success, the film contributed to the emergence of an American star, Clint Eastwood. Followed by the second and third parts of the trilogy: And for a Few Dollars More (1965) and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), which can be seen as the full statement of his style. Leone then created the ambitious masterpiece Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), a truly modern work in which the director invited international stars such as Henry Fonda, Charles Bronson and Claudia Cardinale, and Once Upon a Time in America ( 1984). It will take him more than ten years to create this New York fresco, which goes from the 1920s to the 1960s, and in which we find Robert De Niro, James Woods and Joe Pesci. In just six films, Leone has imposed a personal cinematic style. His work has had a fundamental influence on contemporary cinema, especially for directors such as Quentin Tarantino. He died in 1989 and rests in Pratica di Mare, near Rome.
