Film director and writer Anthony Minghella made his feature writing-directing debut with the film, Truly, Madly, Deeply in 1990. Born in Ryde, Isle of Wight, England, on January 6, 1954, to Italian parents, he often helped his parents in the operation of their ice cream factory, but he dreamed of becoming a writer. He studied English and drama at the University of Hull and began a career as a playwright and theatre director. Also interested in music, Minghella wrote songs and it was an attempt to create a showcase for some of his tunes that led him to pursue a writing career. At the same time, he began directing for the stage while supporting himself teaching at his alma mater. With the 1981 success of his play Whale Music, Minghella began looking for further commissions in writing for television, radio and stage. The West End production of his examination of the exploitation of women in Thailand, Made in Bangkok, brought further notice and a citation for Best Play from the London Critics' Circle. Minghella wrote several episodes of the popular mystery series Inspector Morse, as well as segments of Jim Henson's children's fantasy, The Storyteller (1987-88). His first Hollywood studio film, Mr. Wonderful (1993), was received with lukewarm reviews, but the writing was thought to be creditable, and Minghella was tapped to write the screenplay of Michael Ondaatje's novel, The English Patient (1996). He also directed the film, which earned an impressive 12 Academy Award nominations and took home nine statues, including Best Picture and one for Minghella as Best Director.
From that triumph, Minghella moved on to adapt Patricia Highsmith's novel, The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), and also directed the film which starred Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow and Jude Law. His next writing/directing achievement was Cold Mountain (2003), adapted from the novel by Charles Frazier. Minghella also arranged the music and produced the score for the film. The film won eight Golden Globe nominations, including one for Minghella for Best Director and for Best Screenplay.
From 2003 to 2007, Minghella was Chairman of the Board of Governors of the British Film Institute.
Minghella died on March 18, 2008. He was married to choreographer Carolyn Choa, and they had two children.
Career Highlights: The Talented Mr. Ripley, The English Patient, Truly, Madly, Deeply
First Major Screen Credit: Grange Hill (1978)
Biography
A director known primarily for his classy, richly textured screen adaptations of famous novels, Anthony Minghella gained international recognition with his 1996 adaptation of Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient. Nominated for eleven Academy Awards, the film ultimately won nine including Best Film and Best Director statuettes for Minghella.
Born to Italian parents on the Isle of Wight on January 6, 1954, Minghella grew up next door to the neighborhood cinema. An early film devotee, he managed to score free film admission by befriending the cinema's projectionist. Despite his lifelong interest in the cinema, Minghella took a long and circuitous path to filmmaking. After earning a degree from the University of Hull, where he lectured on literature, he began writing plays. In 1984, three years after he started his playwriting career, he was named Most Promising Playwright of the Year by the London Theatre Critics. Further adulation followed in 1986 when Minghella's Made in Bangkok was named the year's best play. Minghella, who had also written for television and radio, made his film directorial debut in 1991 with Truly, Madly, Deeply. A romantic fantasy starring Juliet Stevenson as a musician whose beloved boyfriend (Alan Rickman) returns to her from the dead, it was an extremely auspicious beginning for the director. The film earned a number of international awards, including the Australian Film Institute's prize for Best Picture.
Minghella's follow-up, Mr. Wonderful (1993), was his first Hollywood production. A drama starring Matt Dillon, Annabella Sciorra, Mary-Louise Parker, and William Hurt, it proved to be a disappointing experience for its director who became very disillusioned with major-studio filmmaking. Despite this, when he began adapting The English Patient for the screen in 1995, Minghella did so with the intention of making the film in concert with 20th Century Fox, who ended up retracting its involvement five weeks before shooting was to begin. It was only after producer Saul Zaentz persuaded the independent and more artistically adventurous Miramax to finance the film (the studio eventually provided 26 million dollars of the film's 31-million-dollar cost) that The English Patient became a reality.
The English Patient proved to be the film that, in large part, made Miramax's reputation, as well as that of Minghella. A lush romantic drama starring Ralph Fiennes as an enigmatic Hungarian adventure, Kristin Scott Thomas as his married lover, and Juliette Binoche as the nurse who cares for him after he is horribly burned, it was one of the year's biggest hits. Earning a privileged spot on nearly every critic's "year's best" list, the film swept the international awards and propelled Minghella into the realm of A-list directors.
Minghella remained on somewhat familiar ground for his follow-up to The English Patient, a 1999 adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley. A lush period thriller set in '50s Italy, it featured cinematography by John Seale, who had earned an Oscar for his work on The English Patient, and the prodigiously blonde starring lineup of Matt Damon, Cate Blanchett, Jude Law, and Gwyneth Paltrow. Despite its strong cast (particularly Jude Law, who earned an Oscar nomination for his portrayal of the spoiled, doomed Dickie Greenleaf) and stunning production values, The Talented Mr. Ripley became a broad critical success and gleaned several award nominations in the States, including a Best Adapted Screenplay nod at the 1999 Academy, Golden Globe noms for Best Director and Screenplay, and a Best Director nod for Minghella from the National Board of Review.
Minghella subsequently embarked on another literary conformation, beginning production in 2000 on his adaptation of Charles Frazier's celebrated Civil War novel Cold Mountain. Starring Nicole Kidman, Renée Zellweger, Jude Law and Donald Sutherland, it took Minghella three years to turn out the film (he shot it in 2002; it received general release on Christmas Day 2003), and the reviews were far more divisive for Mountain than they had been for Ripley. Time's Richard Corliss, The Washington Post's Stephen Hunter, and The New Yorker's David Denby worshipped the film (astonishingly, Denby hailed it as superior to Gone With the Wind); many others tagged it as mediocre. Salon's Stephanie Zacharek branded Mountain as "completely juiceless."
In 2004, Minghella signed with Miramax to write and direct two films on slightly scaled-down budgets. The Ninth Life of Louis Drax represents an adaptation of Liz Jensen's novel, which hadn't yet gone to press at the time of Minghella's contract. A psychological thriller set in France, the film -- like the novel -- will tell the story of a comatose nine-year-old survivor of nine nearly-fatal accidents, one for each year of his life -- which could suggest foul play by the victim's absent father. The second Miramax project, Breaking & Entering, charts the relationship between an architect and a young thief, and marks the first occasion since Truly, Madly, Deeply that Minghella is directing a film from one of his own scripts. ~ Rebecca Flint, All Movie Guide
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Minghella was born on the Isle of Wight, the son of Gloria and Edward Minghella,
ice cream factory owners.[2] His father was Italian/Scottish and his mother came from Leeds; her ancestors originally came
from Valvori, a small village in the Lazio region of central
Italy. Minghella attended Sandown Grammar School and St John's College (Portsmouth). He is a graduate of the University of Hull, where he completed undergraduate and graduate courses, but eventually abandoned
his doctoral thesis.
Career
His first piece of produced work was a 1975 stage adaptation of Gabriel
Josipovici's Mobius the Stripper, however it was his 1985 piece Whale Music that kickstarted his
career.[3] He made his directorial debut with a double bill of
Beckett's Play and Happy Days. During the 1980s, he worked in television,
starting as a runner on Magpie before moving into script editing the children's drama series Grange Hill for the
BBC and later writing The Storyteller series for
Jim Henson. He also worked on episodes of the ITV detective
drama Inspector Morse. His 1986 play Made in Bangkok found mainstream
success in the West End.
His 1990 feature Truly, Madly, Deeply, a drama he had written and
directed for the BBC's Screen Two anthology strand, bypassed its expected TV broadcast and
received a cinema release. In order to make the film, he had turned down an offer to direct another episode of
Inspector Morse, which he had thought would be a much higher-profile
assignment.
He directed a party election broadcast for the Labour Party in 2005. The short film depicted Tony Blair and
Gordon Brown working together and was criticised for being insincere: "The Anthony
Minghella party political broadcast last year was full of body language fibs", said Peter Collett, a psychologist at the
University of Oxford. "When you are talking to me, I'll give you my full attention
only if I think you are very high status or if I love you. On that party political broadcast, they are staring at each other like
lovers. It is completely false."[4]
Minghella was married to Hong Kong-born choreographer Carolyn Choa. His brother,
Dominic, is also a successful scriptwriter, and his son, Max, is an actor. His daughter Hannah worked as a production assistant on 'The Talented Mr. Ripley'. His
sister Edana is currently involved in a Jazz event on the Isle of Wight, and his nephew Dante is
one of the participants in Channel 4's Child Genius series.
He was a big Portsmouth FC fan and appeared in the Channel 4 documentary Hallowed Be Thy Game.
Death
Minghella's death was reported on March 182008 by his agent,
Judy Daish. No further details have been revealed.[1]
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