Legendary Italian film composer Ennio Morricone is to receive France's most prestigious award, becoming a member of the Legion d'Honneur, the French embassy in Rome announced on Wednesday.
Morricone ''has always had special ties with France, having worked with some of France's greatest directors,'' said Ambassador Jean-Marc de La Sabliere.
''Through his music, entire generations have been able to approach different forms of composing,'' said the ambassador, who will bestow the award at a ceremony at the embassy on Thursday.
The 80-year-old composer will become a Chevalier (Knight), the highest decoration in the French order established by Napoleon in 1802.
The maestro, whose signature soundtracks for Sergio Leone's 1960s spaghetti Westerns brought him instant fame, has scored more than 500 movies and TV films in a career spanning 45 years.
Although he was nominated for an Oscar five times he never won but the Academy bestowed him with a lifetime achievement award in 2007.
He had frequently expressed disappointment at the Academy's omission, particularly after it overlooked his poignant score for Roland Joffe's epic tale of 18th-century genocide in South America, The Mission.
''That score really deserved the Oscar and everybody thought it would get it... The music to that film really represents everything I am - both on a technical and spiritual level,'' Morricone once told the BBC.
Other Oscar nominations were for his music to the Richard Gere-starring drama Days Of Heaven (1978), the Brian de Palma Mafia movie The Untouchables (1987), the gangster movie Bugsy (1991) with Warren Beatty, and Italian director Giuseppe Tornatore's 2000 film Malena featuring Monica Bellucci.
But in most people's minds, Morricone's name is inevitably twinned with that of Sergio Leone, all of whose films were scored by the Rome-born composer.
The composer created another memorable soundtrack for Leone's gangster epic Once Upon A Time in America (1984) with Robert De Niro.
Other credits include Bernardo Bertolucci's Novecento (1900), Tornatore's Cinema Paradiso, Roman Polanski's Frantic and Franco Zeffirelli's Hamlet.
Morricone has remained rooted in Rome, where he was born in 1928, and has turned down repeated offers to transfer to Hollywood.
''I was offered a free villa in Beverly Hills but I said no thank you, I prefer to live in Italy,'' the composer, who does not speak English, once told reporters.
Morricone is married with four children. His son, Andrea Morricone, is also a successful film composer.
Speaking in Milan on Tuesday, the maestro urged young people to take a serious interest in music, dismissing a lot of contemporary songs as ''too simple'' and ''repetitive''.
