Sergio Leone

SERGIO LEONE
Italian Filmmaker
Rome, Italy 1929 - Rome, Italy 1989

Sergio leone was an Italian film director, producer and screenwriter most famous for his spaghetti westerns.

In addition to his spaghetti western films Leone in known for his style of juxtaposing extreme close-up shots with lengthy long shots and original music soundtracks. His most well-known movies include the Man with No Name trilogy (a.k.a. the Dollars Trilogy) (which consists of A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly), Once Upon a Time in the West and Once Upon a Time in America.

Leone is credited for kick-starting the career of Clint Eastwood and for notoriously turning down the opportunity to direct the Godfather, in favor of finishing work on a similar project, which would later become Once Upon a Time in America and would take him nearly a decade to complete. The film, funded by Warner Brothers, was turned in at four hours and deemed too long for American audiences. A two-hour version was released in the US and flopped but the original cut, which ran in Europe to warm reviews, was later re-released in the states on DVD and finally gained American critical acclaim as a "masterpiece."

An infamous compulsive eater, Leone became obese and died of a heart attack in 1989 with nearly a half dozen projects in the works.