Ennio Morricone, Italy's legendary film composer, said on Thursday that a decision to award him an Oscar had "corrected an oversight".
Reacting to Wednesday's announcement that he would receive an honorary Oscar at the Academy Awards ceremony next February, Morricone said: "I've been given a host of awards - the only one missing was the Oscar".
The 78-year-old maestro, whose signature soundtracks for Sergio Leone's 1960s spaghetti Westerns brought him instant fame, said the decision had nonetheless caught him by surprise.
"I really wasn't expecting this. I'm overjoyed," said Morricone, adding that he would travel to Los Angeles to receive the award in person on February 25.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which grants the Oscars, said that it had been "responding not just to the remarkable number of scores that Mr. Morricone has produced but to the fact that so many of them are beloved and popular masterpieces".
Academy President Sid Ganis said that Morricone, who is considered one of the greatest film composers of all times, had made a "magnificent contribution" to the cinema music repertoire.
Morricone has scored more than 500 movies and TV films in a career spanning 45 years and has been nominated for an Oscar five times.
He has 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.
Instead, the 1986 music Oscar went to Round Midnight, a film about a self-destructive jazz artist.
Morricone said afterwards that it had been a "theft", especially since the Round Midnight score was mainly based on existing pieces.
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.
Although they both attended the same junior school, they only began working together in 1964 when Morricone wrote the music for A Fistful Of Dollars, the first film in the hit Clint Eastwood Dollar trilogy.
The famous trumpet solo, the use of twangy guitars and the whistling light motif associated with Eastwood became an integral part of the film's success.
In the follow-up For A Few Dollars More, a haunting tune played on the chimes of a pocket-watch provided the main theme, while in the final The Good, The Bad And The Ugly (1966), Morricone added a trademark coyote-howl motif to his score, created by two yelling male voices.
The trilogy's soundtracks became the most recognised sounds ever affiliated with the Western genre.
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, told reporters on Thursday.
Morricone is married with four children. His son, Andrea Morricone, is also a successful film composer.
