10 Hollywood Legends You've Probably Never Heard Of
8. The Composer
The late Giovanni ‘Nino’ Rota, who died in April 1979, was an Italian conductor, pianist, music professor… oh, and composer, renowned for his scores for feature films.
Working with such notable auteurs as Federico Fellini, Franco Zeffirelli and Luchino Visconti in his native country, Rota became best known for his Oscar-winning score for The Godfather Part II - he was nominated for The Godfather two years earlier as well, but the nomination had been revoked upon finding that Rota had reworked another of his pieces to fit the love theme in Coppola’s classic.
A child prodigy, extraordinarily talented and prolific, Rota composed ten operas, five ballets and literally dozens and dozens of other pieces. Alongside them, however, are over one hundred and fifty scores for movie productions worldwide spanning a career from 1933 to 1970.
That averages out at three scores a year - but there were many years in which his output far exceeded that. In Astonishingly, between 1945 and 1950 alone, Rota produced forty scores for cinema - seventy-six in the fifties.
Rota was close friends with the legendary Igor Stravinsky, while Gus Van Zant and Michael Winterbottom, denied the opportunity to work with him, have reworked his music for their films. Rota has influenced film composers as varied as Danny Elfman, songwriters as idiosyncratic as Lana Del Rey and composers as revered as Richard Galliano.
But it was his work with Fellini that defined his career in cinema. The director called him “the most precious collaborator I have ever had”, in a partnership that lasted thirty years. Fellini’s relationship with Rota was so intuitive, so easy and harmonious, that he would often film scenes using Rota’s music as a backdrop, to achieve a particular rhythm or evoke a particular feeling. Fellini trusted him to such a degree that he would often just relate a feeling or a circumstance to Rota, knowing that his friend would produce the perfect music to accompany it.
There may well never be another like him.