Sergio Leone ✝

Leone\'s film-making style includes juxtaposing extreme close-up shots with lengthy long shots. His movies include the sword and sandal action films The Last Days of Pompeii (1959) and The Colossus of Rhodes (1961), the Dollars Trilogy of Westerns featuring Clint Eastwood: A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965) and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966); Once Upon a Time in the West (1968); Duck, You Sucker! (1971) and the crime drama Once Upon a Time in America (1984).\n', ' Born in Rome, Leone was the son of the cinema pioneer Vincenzo Leone (known as director Roberto Roberti or Leone Roberto Roberti) and silent film actress Edvige Valcarenghi (Bice Waleran). During his schooldays, Leone was a classmate of his later musical collaborator Ennio Morricone for a time. After watching his father work on film sets, Leone began his own career in the film industry at the age of 18 after dropping out of law studies at the university.\n', ' Working in Italian cinematography, he began as an assistant to Vittorio de Sica during the movie The Bicycle Thief in 1948. Leone began writing screenplays during the 1950s, primarily for the \'sword and sandal\' (a.k.a. \'peplum\') historical epics, popular at the time. He also worked as an assistant director on several large-scale international productions shot at the Cinecittà Studios in Rome, notably Quo Vadis (1951) and Ben-Hur (1959), financially backed by the American studios.\n', '