Anthony Minghella, Director, Dies at 54 (original) (raw)

March 18, 2008

Anthony Minghella, a British filmmaker who won an Academy Award for his direction of “The English Patient,” died Tuesday morning in London.

Mr. Minghella, 54, died of complications from surgery to treat tonsil cancer, according to Leslee Dart, his publicist.

Mr. Minghella’s films, which also included “Breaking and Entering,” “The Talented Mr. Ripley” and “Cold Mountain,” used a careful eye for cultural and historical detail to explore how the dynamics of class pushed people into roles and behavior not of their choosing.

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Anthony Minghella in 2006.Credit...MJ Kim/Getty Images

His gifts for building lush, fully realized worlds within worlds also found expression in opera. Mr. Minghella directed an acclaimed staging of “Madama Butterfly” in 2006, and he was commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera to direct and write the libretto for a new work by the composer Osvaldo Golijov that was slated for the 2011-2012 season.

Mr. Minghella recently completed work on “The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency,” an adaptation of the Alexander McCall Smith novel that was filmed in Botswana for HBO and the BBC as the pilot of a series.

Mr. Minghella first began working in theater, both as a writer and a director. Samuel Beckett was a particular fascination; Mr. Minghella organized a star-studded tribute to Beckett in 2006.

After his movie-directing debut in “Truly, Madly, Deeply,” a made-for-television production that was released theatrically in 1990, Mr. Minghella went on to adapt a number of novels for a series of well-reviewed films. In addition to the directing Oscar for “The English Patient,” Mr. Minghella also received an adapted-screenplay nomination for the film; his screenplay for “The Talented Mr. Ripley” was nominated as well.

In 2000, Mr. Minghella joined a fellow director, Sydney Pollack, to form Mirage, an independent production company that concluded a three-year first-look deal with The Weinstein Co. earlier this month.

Anthony Minghella was born in 1954, and grew up on the Isle of Wight, off the southern coast of England, where his parents, immigrants from southern Italy, ran an ice cream factory.

An outsider even in his native land, Mr. Minghella was more than willing to take on large historical issues in his work, such as the human consequences of epic warfare in “Cold Mountain,” about a soldier’s journey across a Civil War landscape. Closer to home, his film “Breaking and Entering” examined the interlocking lives of thieves and their victims in contemporary London, where immigrants are less assimilated than tolerated.

“But while we share the geographical space, we don’t share much else,” he said to The New York Times in 2006. “We’re not particularly well integrated. One of the curiosities can be the differences, rather than the similarities, between people walking down the street differences in expectation and privilege, in wealth and opportunity. It’s not tension or aggression, but a kind of guarded indifference. We coexist rather than create communities.”

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