Do we like them?

Do we like Ennio Morricone?

Our score: 7 out of 10. A clean run on harm and a name that draws only warm tributes, but we couldn't open enough pages to back a higher number.

Ennio Morricone died in Rome on 6 July 2020, aged 91, so there's no fresh drama to chase. He was born in Rome in 1928, the son of a trumpet player who taught him to read music and play instruments. That's the root of a career that ran to hundreds of film scores.

He's the bloke behind the music of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and Once Upon a Time in the West, the spaghetti western sound the whole world can hum. He finally won a competitive Oscar in 2016 for Quentin Tarantino's The Hateful Eight. Few film composers have a catalogue that wide.

The nearest thing to a scandal came in November 2018, when German Playboy published an interview in which he was quoted trashing Tarantino. Morricone said it was totally false and his camp talked about legal action. The Telegraph reported that Playboy then backtracked from the interview, so the quotes are best treated as unreliable rather than as something he said.

On the harm check, we looked for anything he said or did against LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants, vaccines or the planet, and for any dodgy company he kept. Nothing turned up in what we could see. That's a gap in the record, not a guarantee, and we couldn't open full articles on his views.

On the good stuff, he left a body of work that moved people for generations, and he wrote his own death notice, which opened with the line announcing his death. We saw reports of benefit concerts, but couldn't confirm the details from dated sources, so we won't lean on them. Thin on charity, then, but a loved legacy and no mud sticking.