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 11 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 marked 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 Minghella's disenchantment with Hollywood, when he began adapting The English Patient for the screen in 1995, he 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. In the final analysis, it was the film that made Miramax's reputation to a large degree and put Minghella on the cultural map. A lush romantic drama starring Ralph Fiennes as an enigmatic Hungarian adventurer, 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. It also won the 1996 Oscar for Best Picture.
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 starring lineup of Matt Damon, Cate Blanchett, Jude Law, and Gwyneth Paltrow. Thanks to its strong cast (particularly Jude Law, who earned an Oscar nomination for his portrayal of the spoiled, doomed Dickie Greenleaf), stunning production values, and deft direction by Minghella 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 Awards, Golden Globe nominations for Best Director and Screenplay, and a Best Director nod for Minghella from the National Board of Review.
Minghella subsequently embarked on another literary adaptation, bringing Charles Frazier's celebrated Civil War novel Cold Mountain to the screen. It took the director three years to turn out the film, which was finally released Christmas Day 2003. Starring Nicole Kidman, Renée Zellweger, Jude Law, and Donald Sutherland, Mountain received far more divisive reviews than Ripley had, but it still garnered seven Oscar nominations, including a win for Zellweger as Best Supporting Actress.
In 2004, Minghella signed with Miramax to write and direct two films on slightly scaled-down budgets. The first Miramax project, Breaking and Entering (2006), was set in a multicultural, contemporary London and charted the relationship between an architect (Jude Law) and a young Bosnian thief (Rafi Gavron). Also starring Robin Wright Penn as Law's long-time girlfriend and Juliette Binoche and the thief's mother, Breaking and Entering received a very limited release and a generally negative response from critics, who found it rather lackluster despite a stellar cast and some worthy performances. The second Miramax project, "The Ninth Life of Louis Drax," was to be 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 -- was to 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.
That project never came to be, as Minghella died suddenly and arbitrarily in mid-March 2008, when -- after undergoing a routine neck operation at Charing Cross Hospital in London -- he suffered a fatal brain hemorrhage. The director was 54. At the time of his death, he co-ran Mirage Entertainment with industry veteran Sydney Pollack, and was still in production on The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, a made-for-television feature scripted by Richard Curtis about an all-female cadre of private investigators headquartered in Botswana. In his later years, Minghella had also branched out into producing, with features including Michael Clayton (2007), Margaret (2007), and The Reader (2008) to his credit. ~ Rebecca Flint Marx, All Movie Guide
His first piece of produced work was a 1975 stage adaptation of Gabriel Josipovici's Mobius the Stripper and it was his 1985 piece Whale Music that kickstarted his career.[2] He made his directorial debut with a double bill of Samuel Beckett's Play and Happy Days. His first feature film as a director was A Little Like Drowning in 1978.
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 wrote several episodes of the ITV detective drama Inspector Morse and an episode of long-running ITV drama Boon. His 1986 play Made in Bangkok found mainstream success in the West End.
Minghella won radio success with a Giles Cooper Award for his radio drama Cigarettes and Chocolate[3][dead link] first broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 1988. It was revived on 3 May 2008 as a tribute to its author director following his death. His production starred Juliet Stevenson, Bill Nighy and Jenny Howe. His first radio play Hang Up, starring Anton Lesser and Juliet Stevenson, was revived on 10 May 2008 as part of the BBC Radio 4 Minghella season.[4]
Minghella's 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.
The pilot episode of the television adaptation of The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, which he co-wrote and directed, was broadcast on BBC One shortly after his death on 23 March 2008; it was watched by 6.3 million viewers.
He vocally supported I Know I'm Not Alone, a film of musician Michael Franti's peacemaking excursions into Iraq, Palestine and Israel.
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."[5]
He returned to radio drama in 2006 with Eyes Down Looking on BBC Radio 3, starring Jude Law, Juliet Stevenson and David Threlfall to mark Samuel Beckett's 100th birthday celebrations.[6]
Minghella's last work will be the screenplay of the film adaptation of the 1982 Tony Award-winning musical Nine based on the film 8½ by Mario Fratti with music by Maury Yeston. Although he worked with Michael Tolkin on the screenplay, Minghella will receive sole credit.
Personal life
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, and is currently President of Sony Pictures Animation.[7] His sister Edana participated 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 fan and appeared in the Channel 4 documentary Hallowed Be Thy Game. His home had two double bedrooms dedicated to the display of Portsmouth memorabilia dating back to the club's founding in 1898.[8][9]
