Anthony Minghella Dies

[Chevyman]

Originally Posted by Dave Rattigan Wasn't it Minghella whose family makes ice cream on the Isle of Wight? Might seem an irrelevant detail, but I'm sure the locals round there held a lot of affection for Anthony and his family.

Yes Dave. A little credit here:-
Isle of Wight Nostalgia Site: Famous residents & visitors

And from the IOW press here:-
ANTHONY MINGHELLA DIES

I'm sure the islanders were very proud of their famous son?

[DB7]

No age at all and a great shame. I wasn't a fan of his big-budget features but Truly, Madly, Deeply is a marvellous little picture.

[Marky B]

Originally Posted by Dave Rattigan Wasn't it Minghella whose family makes ice cream on the Isle of Wight? Might seem an irrelevant detail, but I'm sure the locals round there held a lot of affection for Anthony and his family.

You're right,Dave. I did a walk around the Isle of Wight in 1997 (very nice it was,too). Very shocked to learn of Anthony's death. He was instrumental in the continuisng good fortunes of the British film industry.
Mark

[samkydd]

Originally Posted by smudge Breaking news from the BBC News website is that Anthony Minghella has died. Nothing further has been posted at this point. EDIT: Now confirmed by his agent. He was 54. His most recent work, an episode of The No1 Ladies Detective Agency is due to be screened over Easter on the BBC Smudge

He also wrote three Morse screenplays, including the very first episode based on the Colin Dexter novel "The Dead of Jericho". Very talented and no age at all!

[christoph404]

Thats rather shocking and sad news of Anthony Minghella passing away, far too young, a very sobering reminder of our mortality I guess, he looked a happy picture of health to me in all the clips on the news but as Steve points out something like this could probably happen to anyone regardless of their state of health.

[TimR]

I'm sorry for the loss of this very talented man at the age of only 54. I think of Minghella as an outstanding story-teller, whether in small scale or epic films. My understanding is that he was also a champion of the British film industry.

[s20076037]

It's sad news that he died at a relative young age.

I was wondering though - wasn't he head of BFI? And if so, what did he actually do for the British film industry?

[TimR]

Originally Posted by s20076037 It's sad news that he died at a relative young age. I was wondering though - wasn't he head of BFI? And if so, what did he actually do for the British film industry?

He was the chairman until recently.

He created British films of very high quality that were also appealing to a worldwide audience, without losing their integrity as British films. He remained based in Britain and helped foster talent: he was a director, writer, producer and teacher.

That is quite an impressive legacy.

[David Brent]

A great loss to the British film industry. Talent like his does not come around very often and for him to be taken from us at such a young age is a great tragedy.

Dave.

[julian_craster]

A tribute on the BFI website:
BFI | News | 2008 Satyajit Ray Foundation Short Film Competition


Anthony Minghella (1954-2008)

Though Anthony Minghella first found success as a writer and director of theatre and radio plays, and always considered himself a writer first and foremost, the UK film world is none the less appalled at the unforeseen loss of a prodigious film-making talent it considered its own. It's a devastating blow that this should happen just as he was about to present his new BBC adaptation of The No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency this coming Easter.

After a serving an apprenticeship writing Jim Henson's Storyteller series and directing episodes of Inspector Morse, Minghella made his first impact on the cinema in 1990 with his humorously ghost-ridden, unashamedly sentimental study of a widow's grief, Truly, Madly, Deeply. This brought him the attention of people who would form some of the key creative partnerships of his life, such as producer Saul Zaentz and Miramax head Harvey Weinstein, and later Sidney Pollack. But it was his vivid, epic adaptation of Michael Ondaatje's novel The English Patient that launched him to the very top of the film-making profession. The film won nine Academy Awards, including the Award for directing for Minghella.

The follow-up was his 1999 cinema masterpiece, The Talented Mr.
Ripley, a superb evocation of America's idle rich set in 1960s Italy with its keen insight into the mind of Patricia Highsmith's sociopathic social misfit Tom Ripley. This brought another Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. It was while he was on set in Romania shooting his next epic adaptation, the American Civil War romance Cold Mountain, that Alan Parker flew out and convinced him to take on the role of Parker's successor as Chairman of the British Film Institute.

Driven multidisciplinary talent that he was, Minghella didn't flinch from helping to reshape the BFI into a 21st Century organisation. His chairmanship oversaw the opening of BFI Southbank, the rise of the London Film Festival to new prominence, and the granting of vital government capital to help preserve the holdings of the BFI Archive. The cruellest irony is that, in David Lean's centenary year, his natural successor as a maker of epic cinema - as demonstrated by The English Patient - should have passed on when there were so many more films to come.

Nick James, Editor, Sight & Sound

[julian_craster]

Obituary
Anthony Minghella

Oscar-winning director of The English Patient who was at home in the theatre and opera as much as in films

Ronald Bergan
Wednesday March 19, 2008
The Guardian

Anthony Minghella, who has died aged 54 in hospital after a haemorrhage following an operation, made an impact in various fields - as a director of theatre, television, cinema, radio and opera, as a playwright, screenwriter and producer, and as chairman of the BFI. The talented Mr Minghella's eclectic oeuvre stretched from a short film of the three character Play (2000), as part of Channel 4's Samuel Beckett cycle, to the $83m Hollywood epic Cold Mountain (2003); from the intimate fantasy, Truly Madly Deeply (1990), made for the BBC, to the vast panorama of the Oscar-winning The English Patient (1996), financed by Miramax. Minghella, whose ample figure and cheery countenance exuded a love of life, seemed to be Harold Pinter, Orson Welles, David Lean and Richard Attenborough all rolled into one.

A passionate supporter of Portsmouth football club, he was also a mixture of English restraint and Italian exuberance. Some critics stressed the adjectives in the titles of The English Patient and Cold Mountain to describe his work, while others saw his films as truly, deeply romantic. His background might explain this dichotomy.

Minghella was born on the Isle of Wight, the son of ice-cream factory owners. His father was Italian/Scottish and his mother came from Leeds. But, according to Minghella: "My maternal grandmother was a real figurehead in my life. She was a tiny peasant woman from Valvori near Monte Cassino in the south of Italy ... she'd run a cafe in the Gorbals in Glasgow so she spoke this coarse Italian/Scottish. I'd listen to her talk in a very superstitious, Catholic way about men and women and how the world worked: men are weak, women are strong; women survive, men are helpless and stupid." It was she who influenced his play A Little Like Drowning (1989), a moving and funny drama about an Italian grandmother and her English grandchildren.

Before going to university, Minghella had dreams of being a pop musician, and played keyboards in a couple of bands, Earthlight and Dancer. "That was a really important part of my life. There was a rich music scene on the island at the time and, for me, writing songs developed later into writing plays. Music was a very vibrant ingredient in my life, and I originally saw my early plays as being a format for music," he explained.

Minghella graduated from Hull University, where he eventually abandoned his doctoral thesis on Beckett. "There was a time, for five years, when I read Beckett almost on a daily basis. The sense of language and poetry in his writing has been the single biggest influence on me as a writer," he declared - which may come as a surprise to those who know only his blockbusters. During the 1980s, after lecturing in drama at his alma mater, he worked in television, mainly writing scripts for Grange Hill, Jim Henson's puppet series The Storyteller: Greek Myths, and Inspector Morse. At the same time, he was writing plays, winning the London Theatre Critics award for most promising playwright in 1984, and, two years later, for best play for Made in Bangkok, an examination of the exploitation of women in Thailand by westerners.

Minghella's international breakthrough came when he wrote and directed the film Truly Madly Deeply, about a bereaved woman (Juliet Stevenson) who literally wills her dead lover (Alan Rickman) back to life. This rather sentimental drama, a very English riposte to the Demi Moore vehicle Ghost, was transcended by sincere performances and some telling dialogue. Perhaps the lure of Hollywood was so strong that Minghella agreed to direct a fluffy romantic comedy, Mr. Wonderful (1993), for which, exceptionally, he did not write the screenplay.

He did not make the same mistake with The English Patient, for which he sequestered himself away from friends and family for 18 months while writing the adaptation of Michael Ondaatje's 1992 Booker Prize-winning novel. This was followed by two years filming in Tunisia and Italy.

The result, a considerable leap in scale and ambition for Minghella, was an impressive, if somewhat languorous, epic love story set during the second world war, which won nine Academy awards, including best director and best picture. Certainly Minghella showed he was able to get fine performances from his cast and control a complex structure - the plot moves between the Italian front near the end of the war, where a French-Canadian nurse (Juliette Binoche) cares for a seriously burned patient (Ralph Fiennes), and North Africa during the late 1930s, when the patient, revealed as a Hungarian count and mapmaker, fell in love with a married woman (Kristin Scott Thomas).

The Talented Mr Ripley (1999), the second film to be based on the novel by Patricia Highsmith, was a sleek and intelligent thriller with Matt Damon in the title role. Cold Mountain, based on Charles Frazier's sombre bestselling American civil war novel, was another meticulously crafted picture in the epic mode, stunningly shot (in Romania) by cinematographer John Seale. Starring Jude Law and Nicole Kidman - he as a wounded Confederate soldier who decides to desert his army at the end of the war to return home to his love - it was reminiscent of the lush historical pictures of yesteryear. Comic relief was provided by Renee Zellweger, as a hillbilly, a role that won her the best supporting actress Oscar.

Returning to England and his first original screenplay since Truly Madly Deeply, Minghella was literally more at home with Breaking and Entering (2006), starring Jude Law as an architect involved in the gentrification of King's Cross. Pleasant but rather pat, the film made little impression.

Minghella's last completed film, The No1 Ladies Detective Agency, written with Richard Curtis, is to be shown on BBC1 next Monday. It has already caused controversy - unrelated to the subject or quality of the film - because it gives a rosy picture of Botswana, where it was filmed, but where hundreds of bushmen have been relocated from their ancestral lands.

In 2005, Minghella, who was made a CBE in 2001, also courted controversy with his party political broadcast on behalf of the Labour party which showed Tony Blair and Gordon Brown working together lovingly. In the same year, Minghella directed Madam Butterfly, of which the Guardian's Tom Service wrote: "Anyone expecting images of cinematic brilliance from Anthony Minghella's new production of Puccini's Madam Butterfly for English National Opera will not be disappointed," although the critic went on to express mixed feelings about the production, which went on to the Metropolitan in New York, where it met with success. Minghella is survived by his wife, Hong Kong-born choreographer Carolyn Choa, a son and a daughter.

Robert Cooper writes: I read Anthony before I met him. It was his stage play Two Planks and a Passion which I was hoping to direct for the radio in the mid-80s. The play was about members of one of the smaller guilds in 14th-century York who were rehearsing The Passion as their contribution to the city's Miracle Plays during a time of cutbacks in the local council's arts budget. Then news gets out that the king is coming and suddenly the dull burghers of York are hurling money at their humble plays in an orgy of self-aggrandisement. It was an extraordinary combination of razor-sharp observation of human frailty coupled with characters of genuine sincerity, complexity, warmth and charm. Meeting Anthony was the same experience. He possessed a quiet wit, an extraordinary insight into people and situations, a massive intelligence - which he never used to make you feel inadequate - and, most of all, a relaxed presence which made you feel that, somehow, you "belonged". And as you got to know him you found his genuine delight in the simple treats of life - food, friendship, conversation, music and especially family.

Watching him direct his first film was a revelation. It was Truly Madly Deeply in Bristol in 1989. As soon as Anthony began, I realised he had somehow discovered how you direct. He had not tried to learn everyone's job, he just treated people in a way that ensured they did the best work they had ever done in their life for him.

And of course it was as hard as that. The pressures of film-making can reveal character in a very unforgiving way. But no matter how difficult the situation, I never saw Anthony anything other than intensely interested in and understanding of other people's artistic process. Nor was this only apparent on set. After working with the cast and crew for 12 hours, he would meet with them half an hour later to watch rushes, have dinner with them and round the evening off with a game of squash with the assistant designer - cheered on by those who had not by this time given up and gone to bed. With Anthony you simply couldn't not do your best for him.

His death marks an immeasurable loss to Britain's cultural life.

Anthony Minghella, playwright and film director, born January 6 1954; died March 18 2008

[Freddy]

Truly Madly Deeply, if memory serves me well, when first shown on BBC was so well acclaimed that they repeated it the same week/month.

A very sad loss. It's as if a giant has been felled.

Freddy

[Chevyman]

Aside from a book of condolence which has been opened at County Hall, Ryde, online comments may be left here at the Isle Of Wight County Press website:-

tributes@iwcp2.demon.co.uk

[julian_craster]

Anthony Minghella

Daily Telegraph
19/03/2008

Anthony Minghella, who died yesterday aged 54, was the Oscar-winning film director of The English Patient; a protean talent, he was also a playwright, television writer and opera producer, and between 2003 and 2007 served as the chairman of the British Film Institute.

Anthony Minghella, the Oscar-winning film director of The English Patient
Anthony Minghella: made skilful adaptations of difficult
books and brought out the best in his casts

In the last capacity, he oversaw the transformation of the National Film Theatre, cramped under Waterloo Bridge, into the modern, spacious BFI Southbank.

As a film-maker Minghella was a meticulous craftsman rather than an individual artist, and closer to directors such as Carol Reed and Anthony Asquith than to, say, Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni.

He made only six feature films, latterly separated by three-year intervals, and the last, Breaking and Entering (2006), was a conscious scaling down from the Hollywood ethos into which he had been catapulted by the success of The English Patient.

He was born at Ryde, on the Isle of Wight, on January 6 1954 to Gloria and Edward Minghella. His father was of Italian/Scottish extraction and the family business was the manufacture of ice cream.

As a boy he attended Sandown Grammar School and subsequently St John's College, Portsmouth. He progressed to the University of Hull, where he later taught Drama, though he did not complete his doctoral studies.

As a young man Minghella played in folk clubs and rock venues, writing songs that achieved some popularity in these circles. He maintained close connections with the Isle of Wight, where a theatre was later named in his honour, and retained a lifelong enthusiasm for Portsmouth FC.

His early work was done for television, both at the BBC and ITV; he was a script editor on the children's drama Grange Hill, and worked on Jim Henson's Storyteller and some episodes of the Inspector Morse series.

He also enjoyed some success as a playwright in the early 1980s. His play Made in Baghdad was named best new production in 1984, and his directorial career began with a staging of Beckett's Play and Happy Days. He wrote two radio plays; Hang Up and Cigarettes and Chocolate.

For BBC2 he made his first film, Truly, Madly, Deeply, in 1991. It had been intended for transmission on television under its original title, Cello. But it was felt to have greater potential in cinemas, and therefore enjoyed a full theatrical release. In some respects it resembled the hugely successful Hollywood film Ghost, to which it probably owed its wider release.

As in Ghost, the main character (played by Juliet Stevenson) tries to cope with the sudden death of her husband (Alan Rickman), who nevertheless keeps materialising. Audiences found the subject appealing and the tongue-in-cheek tone of Rickman's performance a valuable antidote to the mawkishness of the plot.

On the strength of this film Minghella was invited to Hollywood, where he made Mr Wonderful in 1993, but it did not find favour. It starred Matt Dillon as the would-be owner of a bowling alley whose plans are thwarted by the alimony he has to pay his ex-wife.

Minghella's breakthrough came with The English Patient (1996), which won a sheaf of prizes, including best picture, best director and seven other awards at the annual Oscars ceremony.

An adaptation of the notoriously difficult novel by Michael Ondaatje, it capitalised on Minghella's proven ability with actors and provided outstanding opportunities for Ralph Fiennes, Kristin Scott Thomas and Juliette Binoche, who was named best supporting actress. The desert location photography revealed a sweep unsuspected in Minghella's earlier, more modest pictures.

He waited three years before making another film, but in many ways it was even better. The Talented Mr Ripley (1999) was based on a Patricia Highsmith novel already filmed as Plein Soleil by René Clément in 1959. Tom Ripley is a con-man who runs rings round the American rich and easily impressed.

In the film, Minghella identified the apparent flaws in Matt Damon's screen persona that no previous director had spotted. He also provided Philip Seymour Hoffman with a superb, if brief, cameo role as one of Ripley's murder victims. His infinite disdain for people from a lower class than himself was one of the highlights of the film.

Minghella's later films were less impressive. Cold Mountain (2003), from a best-seller about the American Civil War years by Charles Frazier, failed to match the skills in adaptation Minghella had shown in The English Patient.

It was a sprawling would-be epic that was actually less momentous than the often-derided Gone With the Wind. But once again Minghella did his supporting cast proud. Renée Zellweger won an Oscar for her over-the-top Southern accent in the same category as Juliette Binoche had for The English Patient.

After this, Minghella's hands were partly tied by his key role at the British Film Institute, but he did find time for one more picture, Breaking and Entering (2006). Set in London, it told the unlikely tale of a famous architect (Jude Law) who trails a burglar home and falls in love with his Bosnian refugee mother (Juliette Binoche).

It proved a sad end to a promising career. Almost forgotten, however, are two shorts he also made. Play (2000) runs 16 minutes and was the most successful of the early 21st-century attempts to put Samuel Beckett on film. And in 2005 he made an anonymous party political broadcast outlining Labour's pledges for the election.

Amazingly, it was the first film of its kind to incorporate all the cinematic tricks of the trade learnt (and often forgotten) in the 1920s. Though it came in for criticism for its "insincerity" (Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were shown gazing adoringly at one another), Labour won the election.

Late in life he also ventured into producing operas and won acclaim for his romantic production of Puccini's Madama Butterfly for English National Opera.

His adaptation of Alexander McCall Smith's crime novels, The No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, is due to be screened on BBC1 on Sunday.

Anthony Minghella married the Hong Kong choreographer Carolyn Choa, who survives him with their son Max, an actor, and his daughter from an earlier marriage, Hannah, who was a production assistant on The Talented Mr Ripley.

[julian_craster]

From The Times
March 19, 2008
Anthony Minghella: The Times obituary

Versatile scriptwriter and film director who won an Oscar and achieved international renown with The English Patient


Anthony Minghella graduated from writing for Grange Hill, EastEnders and the British stage to big-budget Hollywood epics, winning an Oscar in 1997 as Best Director for the wartime love story The English Patient. Though he directed only six feature films — and Jude Law starred in three of them — he wrote and produced several others, and made an indelible mark on British and international cinema.

Minghella prompted considerable debate on the direction and nature of British cinema. His detractors saw films such as The English Patient and the American Civil War drama Cold Mountain (2003) as old-fashioned, as throwbacks to the cinema of David Lean, and they were sceptical about his association with Hollywood and his taste for big budgets.

The English Patient was only his third feature film. Oddly enough, the first, Truly Madly Deeply (1990), the story of a woman (Juliet Stevenson) and her dead partner’s ghost (Alan Rickman), was admired by critics for its sense of intimacy, but it was overshadowed by Ghost, which had a similar storyline, bigger stars and a bigger budget.

The scale and the lush, foreign locations that subsequently attracted derision from some were the very elements that appealed to others. The English Patient was an old-fashioned epic story that played out in various bright, exotic settings (rather than the fashionably gritty northern streets of a Ken Loach movie). But Minghella did not rely on pretty locations to carry his film, and effectively interwove complex story strands and managed to translate the poignancy and fatalism of the original Michael Ondaatje novel to the big screen.

Minghella was to some extent a successor to Lean, but he also showed a penchant for crime drama and had a major hit with The Talented Mr Ripley (1999), with Matt Damon as the amoral impostor who inveigles his way into the lives of rich socialites, played by Law and Gwyneth Paltrow.

Recently Minghella had returned to crime fiction, and to television, for a feature-length pilot episode for The No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, which was adapted from the novel by Alexander McColl Smith and will be broadcast on BBC One on Sunday night. The central character is a full-figured, Black African detective. The stories have little in common with Sherlock Holmes, being more interested in local colour than serious criminality. Minghella shot on location in Botswana, and the crew reportedly had to construct electric fences to protect the cast from possible animal attack.

Anthony Minghella was born on the Isle of Wight in 1954. His ancestors were predominantly Italian, and his parents have an ice-cream business. Minghella showed little interest in following them into the business. An early enthusiasm for drama was nurtured at Fairway Grammar School, in Sandown, on the Isle of Wight, by Gareth Pritchard, who taught English and directed Minghella in school plays. Minghella thanked him in his Oscar acceptance speech. Pritchard died this month.

Minghella played keyboards in a rock band before going to Hull University, where he studied and then taught drama. He began in television not as a writer or director, but as a runner (general assistant) on Magpie, the cool ITV alternative to Blue Peter, and in the mid-1980s he became a script editor and writer on Grange Hill, the BBC’s school soap that had been praised for its realism and was by that time well established.

His plays were also beginning to have some impact. In 1984 he won the London Theatre Critics Circle Award as the most promising new playwright, for A Little Like Drowning, Love Bites and Two Planks and a Passion; in 1986 he won the Critics Circle award for best new play for Made in Bangkok; and in 1988 he won the Prix d’Italia for his radio play Hang Up.

He wrote several episodes of Inspector Morse (1987-90) and the entire run for the Bafta-winning series The Storyteller (1988). John Hurt played the old storyteller, introducing weird tales that served as a vehicle for the creations of the legendary puppeteer Jim Henson. Minghella and Henson worked together again on another award-winner, Living with Dinosaurs (1989).

Truly Madly Deeply (1990), which Minghella wrote and directed, was made by the BBC, essentially for television, but it also became a modest international cinema hit. It brought Minghella a Bafta award for best original screenplay and led directly to The English Patient, with an international cast that included Ralph Fiennes and Kristin Scott Thomas as the couple whose love affair is threatened by war and a vengeful husband. When Scott Thomas’s character is badly hurt, Fiennes leaves her in a cave and goes for help. But his plane is shot down and he loses both his good looks and his memory in the resulting fire. Colin Firth was the cuckolded husband; Willem Dafoe was a thumbless man trying to track down the man he thinks betrayed him; Juliette Binoche played the nurse who cared for the anti-hero of the title; and Naveen Andrews her lover.

It was shot in Italy and Tunisia, cost an estimated $27 million and grossed around ten times that on its initial cinema release. It won nine Oscars and six Baftas, including Best Picture in each case, and turned Minghella into Hollywood’s director of choice for big-scale, exotic, period dramas.

However, his second film, Mr Wonderful (1993), was a sweet and relatively straightforward, low-budget American blue-collar romance, with Matt Dillon as the electrician who rediscovers romance with his former wife Annabella Sciorra.

Minghella returned to Italy for The Talented Mr Ripley, an adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s novel about an amoral conman, Tom Ripley. The film consolidated Minghella’s status.

Cold Mountain was another prestigious literary adaptation, from a novel by Charles Frazier. It was controversial from the outset. It was an American production, set around one of the most monumental events in American history, but to save money it was filmed largely in Romania — a decision that prompted considerable resentment in certain quarters.

Renée Zellweger won an Oscar for a rather broad performance as a country bumpkin that some believed might have been more appropriate to a comedy sketch, but the film got lukewarm reviews and struggled to recoup a hefty $85 million budget.

In 2003 Minghella took on the role of chairman of the British Film Institute. He complained that Britain needed more studios to make more films and retain British talent. Personally he seemed to turn his back on Hollywood as he sought to develop his career on this side of the Atlantic.

In 2005 he directed a party election broadcast for the Labour Party, which was criticised for insincerity for presenting Tony Blair and Gordon Brown as if they were a couple of star-struck lovers. He also directed an English National Opera production of Madam Butterfly, working on it with his wife, the Hong Kong-born choreographer Carolyn Choa. She had worked on several of his film and appeared in Truly Madly Deeply in a supporting role as the translator. He was also reportedly writing a libretto for a new opera for the Metropolitan Opera, New York.

Minghella’s next film, Breaking and Entering (2006), was highly contemporary, set in the London of political and economic refugees, but it was to prove a box-office flop. It was an original script. Jude Law played a rich architect who followed a young thief who has broken into his premises and then began a relationship with his mother, a Bosnian refugee (Juliette Binoche). At the very least it represented an attempt by Minghella to try to move his career on.

He was producer on several films, including Iris (2001), The Quiet American (2002) and Michael Clayton (2007).

His brother Dominic Minghella is a screen writer. The Anthony Minghella Theatre at Quay Arts Centre on the Isle of Wight was named in his honour. Minghella was an enthusiastic supporter of Portsmouth Football Club. He was appointed CBE in 2001.

Minghella is survived by his wife, Carolyn Choa, his daughter and their son, Max, an actor.

Anthony Minghella, CBE, scriptwriter and film director, was born on January 6, 1954. He died in hospital of post-operative complications on March 18, 2008, aged 54