Sergio Leone was virtually born into the cinema - he was the son of Roberto Roberti (A.K.A. Vincenzo Leone), one of Italy's cinema pioneers, and actress Bice Valerian. Leone entered films in his late teens, working as an assistant director to both Italian directors and U.S. directors working in Italy (usually making Biblical and Roman epics, much in vogue at the time). Towards the end of the 1950s he started writing screenplays, and began directing after taking over Les derniers jours de Pompéi (1959) in mid-shoot after its original director fell ill. His first solo feature, Le colosse de Rhodes (1961), was a routine Roman epic, but his second feature, Pour une poignée de dollars (1964), a shameless remake of Akira Kurosawa's Le garde du corps (1961), caused a revolution. Although it wasn't the first spaghetti Western, it was far and away the most successful, and shot former T.V. cowboy Clint Eastwood to stardom (Leone wanted Henry Fonda or Charles Bronson but couldn't afford them). The two sequels, Et pour quelques dollars de plus (1965) and Le bon, la brute et le truand (1966), were shot on much higher budgets and were even more successful, though his masterpiece, Il était une fois dans l'Ouest (1968), in which Leone finally worked with Fonda and Bronson, was mutilated by Paramount Pictures and flopped at the U.S. box office. He directed Il était une fois... la révolution (1971) reluctantly, and turned down offers to direct Le parrain (1972) in favor of his dream project, which became Il était une fois en Amérique (1984). He died in 1989 after preparing an even more expensive Soviet coproduction on the World War II siege of Leningrad.
