Anthony Minghella Film Director Who Won Oscar For Movie English Patient
Anthony Minghella Film Director Who Won Oscar For Movie English Patient
Anthony Minghella, a multi-talented British dramatist, screenwriter and film director who won an Academy Award for directing the “The English Patient,” died March 19 at Charing Cross Hospital in London. He had a brain hemorrhage after undergoing routine surgery last week for a growth in his neck. He was 54.
Mr. Minghella began his career as a playwright and screenwriter for British stage and television before embarking on his first film, the cult classic “Truly, Madly, Deeply,” in 1991. He had his greatest success with “The English Patient,” which was nominated for 12 Academy Awards in 1997 and won nine, including best picture. Besides his Oscar for best director, Mr. Minghella was nominated for best adapted screenplay.
Among his other films were the dark psychological thriller “The Talented Mr. Ripley” (1999), the Civil War epic “Cold Mountain” (2003) and “Breaking and Entering” (2007), a modern morality tale set in London. He was an executive producer of “Michael Clayton,” a nominee for best picture at this year’s Academy Awards.
Shortly before his death, Mr. Minghella had finished directing an adaptation of Alexander McCall Smith’s best-selling “The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency,” filmed in Botswana. It is scheduled to premiere on British television this week.
Mr. Minghella wrote original screenplays for “Truly, Madly, Deeply” and “Breaking and Entering,” but he was better known for reimagining other writers’ works for the screen. He spent several years adapting Canadian novelist Michael Ondaatje’s “The English Patient,” which contained so many shifting scenes and dense layers of language that it was deemed impossible to film.
But Mr. Minghella’s version, starring Ralph Fiennes as a mysterious agent in World War II who was severely burned in a plane crash, was a triumph of intimate storytelling and stunning visual scenemaking. In the film, Fiennes reveals snippets of his past while he is being cared for by a nurse played by Juliette Binoche, who won an Oscar for her role.
“I knew from the beginning there was no linear or conventional way to tell the story,” Mr. Minghella told The Washington Post in 1996. The novel’s “lyrical and anti-narrative” qualities led him to focus on “a series of striking images.”
Washington Post critic Rita Kempley described “The English Patient” as “completely intoxicating” and continued: “Sin, alas, has never been so alluring, nor sinners . . . so achingly gorgeous. That’s the miracle of writer-director Anthony Minghella’s artistry. We are taken out of ourselves.”
Mr. Minghella was born Jan. 6, 1954, on the Isle of Wight and considered himself a cultural outsider. His father, a Sicilian immigrant, ran a cafe and later became an ice cream-maker.
In an interview with The Post last year, Mr. Minghella recalled his mixed feelings about attending a posh party in his home town with film stars and aristocrats.
“All I could think,” he said, “is that the last time I was there, I had to go in through the tradesman’s entrance, because I was selling ice cream.”
As a boy, he befriended the projectionist at a local movie theater. Later, he studied theatrical history at England’s University of Hull, where he taught for several years. He began writing for the British stage, and in 1984, London drama critics called him the country’s “most promising playwright.” His 1986 play “Made in Bangkok,” about sex tourism, was named best new play.
In the late 1980s, he wrote the original episodes of a popular British TV detective series, “Inspector Morse,” and adapted myths and folk tales for puppet characters in Jim Henson’s “The Storyteller.”
Mr. Minghella’s first film, “Truly, Madly, Deeply,” about a woman’s longing for her dead lover, became an unexpected hit, but he said his second directing effort, 1993’s “Mr. Wonderful,” was undercut by studio interference.
After the success of “The English Patient,” Mr. Minghella could insist on full artistic control. In 1999, he adapted Patricia Highsmith’s novel “The Talented Mr. Ripley” into a stylish thriller starring Matt Damon as a cold-blooded social climber in the 1950s. The film received five Academy Award nominations, including one for Mr. Minghella’s adapted screenplay.
His next picture, “Cold Mountain,” which he adapted from Charles Frazier’s novel, was an $80 million extravaganza filmed in Romania. Renee Zellweger won an Oscar as best supporting actress for her role as a backwoods woman from North Carolina.
In 2005 and 2006, Mr. Minghella turned his vision to opera, directing new productions of Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly” for the English National Opera and the Metropolitan Opera in New York, with choreography by his wife. He also made short films for the British Labor Party and served as chairman of the British Film Institute.
While completing work on “Cold Mountain” in 2003, Mr. Minghella summed up his career to London’s Sunday Telegraph: “I’ve found nothing so fulfilling as working and creating images on a large scale. ‘Cold Mountain’ will take up five years of my life. But I don’t mind because it corrals a certain appetite I have for disappearing into a film, working and working, and making that your life.”
Survivors include his wife, Carolyn Choa of London; a son, actor Max Minghella of New York; a daughter, Hannah Minghella of Los Angeles; three sisters; and a brother.