[BITList] He didn't take it with him...

[John Feltham]

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Minghella,  Anthony  (1954-2008), playwright, screenwriter, and film director, was born on 6 January 1954 at 76 Pellhurst Road, Ryde, Isle of Wight, the second of five children of Edward Minghella (b. 1921) and his wife, Gloria Alberta, nee Arcari (b. 1930), both second-generation offspring of Italian immigrants. He grew up in a bustling household with three sisters, a younger brother, and a spirited maternal grandmother, where everyone was expected to lend a hand to make a success of the family business, the manufacture and sale of quality ice cream at a high-street cafe. Prophetically enough, his main contribution as a child was to sell ices from a tray in the cinema next door. Enrolled at eleven as a day boy at St John's College, a Catholic boarding school in Southsea, he became rebellious and took to playing truant. He fared better after moving in 1969 to Sandown grammar school, especially in the sixth form, where a dynamic English teacher involved him in performances with a local dramatic society and urged him to apply to university.

A gifted pianist who played keyboards with teenage rock bands, Minghella had seemed destined for a career in music, but in 1972 he was offered a place to read drama at Hull University. There, the balance in the degree course between formal academic study, practical tuition, and hands-on experience of production work on stage or in television and radio studios precisely answered his needs and served to develop his latent talents. On gaining a first in 1975, he embarked on postgraduate research into the work of Samuel Beckett and was engaged initially as a part-time tutorial assistant in the drama department, before being appointed to a lectureship in 1978. It was during this period that he wrote and directed his earliest plays, Mobius the Stripper (a musical based on the story by Gabriel Josipovici) and Whale Music, both first performed by students in the department's theatre, and made his first film, A Little Like Drowning (later rewritten as a stage play). Through the department he also met the Hull-based playwright Alan Plater, who gave him encouragement and commissioned another piece, Child's Play, for presentation at Hull Arts Centre, of which Plater was chairman. Subsequently Minghella always acknowledged his debt to the intellectual and creative stimulus he derived from his nine years at Hull University, and returned there to give master classes and to receive an honorary DLitt in 1997.

On 20 September 1975 he married Yvonne Allport, a 22-year-old psychologist, and daughter of Rex Allport, technical sales representative; they had one daughter, Hannah (b. 1979), but the marriage soon ended in separation and ultimately divorce, and in 1981 Minghella abandoned both teaching and research to make his way in London as a full-time writer. Later that year Whale Music was staged professionally at the Leicester Haymarket, and was soon followed by two new plays, Two Planks and a Passion at the Northcott Theatre, Exeter, in 1983, and Love Bites at Derby Playhouse in 1984. Together these earned him the Critics' Circle award in 1984 for most promising playwright, and at London's Aldwych two years later he took the award for best play with Made in Bangkok, a sardonic commentary on the interface between economic and sexual exploitation. He had already secured a foothold in television in 1981 as co-author, with Jim Hawkins, of the BBC drama series Maybury, set in a hospital psychiatric unit. He maintained a regular low-key presence during the mid-1980s as script editor of Grange Hill before establishing his reputation in 1986 on Channel 4 with What If It's Raining?, a dramatic trilogy, dedicated to his daughter, poignantly recounting the breakdown of a marriage and its impact on a parent-child relationship, in which the prevailing mood of autobiographical hurt is undercut by irony and occasional slapstick. In the meantime he had remarried, on 2 March 1985, to the Hong Kong-born dancer-choreographer (and former fellow student a year his junior) Carolyn Jane Choa (formerly Lunn), daughter of George Choa, medical practitioner. Their son, Max Giorgio, was born in the same year.

In the late 1980s Minghella contributed episodes to ITV's crime series Inspector Morse and Boon, and, in contrast, scripted Jim Henson's live action/puppet programmes for children, The Storyteller (1988) and Living with Dinosaurs (1989). Switching media, he proved equally responsive to the possibilities of radio drama with Hang Up (1987), which won the Prix Italia, and Cigarettes and Chocolate (1988), which picked up Giles Cooper and Sony awards.

A watershed that largely determined Minghella's creative future was reached in 1990 with Truly, Madly, Deeply, a dark fantasy, interlaced with wry comedy, about a traumatic bereavement and the regenerative power of love, which Minghella both wrote and directed. Initially commissioned for BBC television, it was released as a feature film and met with critical as well as popular acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic, collecting a BAFTA and a Writers' Guild award for best original screenplay, and giving him a directorial entree to Hollywood. His first film there, Mr Wonderful (1993), a low-budget romantic comedy about a divorced couple rediscovering mutual attraction, was affecting but unremarkable, whereas its successor, The English Patient (1996), which he adapted from the novel by Michael Ondaatje and shot on location in Italy and Tunisia, caused a sensation. Ambitious in narrative structure and emotional intensity alike, this saga of adulterous grand passion and tragic redemption dominated the industry's trophy ceremonies, amassing nine Academy awards (including those for best picture and best director), two Golden Globes, and six BAFTAs. His adaptation, too, of Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr Ripley (1999) was commended by reviewers for its subtle handling of the homoerotic infatuation and class envy underlying the action and leading inexorably to multiple homicide. In the following year he joined the American director Sydney Pollack as partner in the independent production company Mirage Enterprises, but a disappointingly ambivalent reception was accorded to his expansive screen version of Charles Frazier's novel Cold Mountain (2003), an Odyssey-like tale of doomed romantic love set against a backdrop of the American Civil War, which emblematically counterpointed sequences of battlefield carnage and lawless marauding against images of restoring a moribund farm to fruitful life.

As a mark of the professional esteem in which he was now held, Minghella was appointed CBE in 2001, and awarded further honorary doctorates by the universities of Southampton (2000), Bournemouth (2001), and Reading (2006). In 2003 he identified himself with the cause of cinema in the UK by becoming chairman of the British Film Institute, redefining its purview to attract a more inclusive public and promote a broader, better informed film culture. To this end he oversaw a major expansion of the facilities at BFI Southbank and raised additional funding to restore and digitize the institute's unique film archives for wider access. Off duty he demonstrated his political affiliation by producing an election broadcast for the Labour Party in 2005 and his sporting allegiance as a lifelong supporter of Portsmouth FC, memorabilia of whose exploits shared domestic shelf space with his own.

In 2005 Minghella returned triumphantly to the London theatre with an imaginative production for English National Opera of Puccini's Madam Butterfly, featuring choreography by his wife and a life-size, bunraku-style puppet as Butterfly's child, which, save for die-hard traditionalists, enthralled audiences at the Coliseum and won an Olivier award, before being restaged at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. There was applause, too, at The Place for his witty 'text for dance', Self Assembly, but his return to present-day London for Breaking and Entering (2006) aroused little excitement: his attempt to encompass in one film issues of divided loyalty, conflicting value systems, and personal accountability in a multi-ethnic King's Cross was seen as overly contrived and unconvincing.

Minghella's last film, an adaptation with Richard Curtis of Alexander McCall Smith's The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, shot in Botswana, was shown on BBC television in March 2008 to a mixed critical reaction overshadowed by a sense of shock at his untimely death. He had died suddenly at Charing Cross Hospital five days earlier, on 18 March, of a haemorrhage following an apparently successful operation for cancer of the tonsils. He was cremated at Golders Green crematorium, and survived by his wife, Carolyn, and his children. Obituaries were suffused with profound regret for an outstanding talent denied the opportunity to attain his full potential; equally regrettable in retrospect is that so much creative energy which could have been reserved for his own highly original writing was expended on adapting that of others.

Of the work that Minghella did complete, perhaps the most remarkable quality is its sheer versatility: with a resourcefulness evident in his early writing for the stage, he quickly adjusted to the demands of radio or television drama before mastering those of film-making, and proceeded to achieve international recognition in each. No less striking is its range of tone. Minghella's enterprise in tackling story-lines of epic grandeur, with locations to match, and in which the musical score plays an organic part, prompted comparisons with David Lean, yet alongside the great vistas of desert sand or spectacles of Confederate bloodshed he crafted scenes of compelling tenderness and intimacy, in which the precise rhythmical texture of his writing elicited performances of exquisite sensitivity and nuance from his actors. At the heart of virtually his entire body of work lay a deep-seated thematic preoccupation with the various complexions of love (and its vulnerability to separation, estrangement, and loss), together with a predilection for confronting audiences with a problematic situation viewed from multiple angles, in line with his belief that films should function as 'some kind of moral gymnasium'  (The Independent, 12 December 2003). He was well served by his empathetic rapport with actors, several of whom chose to work with him on more than one film, as did key members of his production team. While ostensibly an auteur, intent on realizing his own screenplays, he was certainly no autocrat: his closest associates invariably described his approach as that of a born collaborator, unpretentious, even-tempered, funny, with a warm generosity of spirit that brought out the best in others, and, above all perhaps, a lucid intelligence. He remained at bottom an intellectual, unwavering in his devotion to Beckett, of whose Play he directed an incisive production for Channel 4's Beckett on Film cycle in 2000 and whose inventive command of language he singled out as the most potent influence on his own writing. A new drama studio was named in his honour at Hull University, as were a departmental building at Southampton University and a theatre at the Quay Arts Centre in Newport, Isle of Wight, of which he was made a freeman in 1997 and where an annual film festival was instituted in his memory. Both his children went on to pursue active film careers in America.

Donald Roy 

Sources  The Independent (26 March 1997); (12 Dec 2003); (19 March 2008) + Hull Daily Mail (4 July 1997) + D. Argent, 'The talented mister', Creative Screenwriting (Jan/Feb 2000) + E. Cochrane, interview, Empire (March 2000) + The Observer [review section] (19 Jan 2003) + Screen International (16 April 2004) + J. Davis, 'Breaking and entering', Creative Screenwriting (Nov/Dec 2006) + The Times (19 March 2008); (20 March 2008) + Daily Telegraph (19 March 2008) + The Guardian (19 March 2008); (20 March 2008) + Sunday Times (23 March 2008) + Screen International (28 March 2008) + R. Stayton, 'The talented Mr Minghella', Written By (April 2008) + Sight and Sound (May 2008) + BFI Screenonline, www.screenonline.org.uk, accessed on 25 April 2011 + WW (2008) + personal knowledge (2012) + private information (2012) [Edward and Gloria Minghella, parents; J. Lunn; J. Stevenson; R. Cooper; A. Nevill; J. Daish] + b. cert. + m. certs. + d. cert.
Archives U. Hull, archives [drafts etc.] FILM BFINA, 'Anthony Minghella talks to Mark Lawson', Mark Lawson talks to..., M. Lawson (interviewer), BBC4, 27 Dec 2003 + BFINA, 'Love, loss and Anthony Minghella', Imagine, M. Springford (director), BBC1, 8 July 2008 + BFINA, current affairs and documentary footage + A life in pictures: Anthony Minghella, http://www.bafta.org + Media Masterclass: Anthony Minghella, http://youtu.be/-ihVndJm_yM + interview at Starz Denver Film Festival, http://youtu.be/KaeK8Nvrank SOUND BL NSA, documentary recordings
Likenesses  P. Tozer, bromide fibre print, 1990, NPG · photographs, 1993-2007, Rex Features, London · W. Counts, photograph, 1996, PA Photos, London [see illus.] · photographs, 1996-2007, Getty Images, London · photographs, 1996-2007, PA Photos, London · P. Dawes, photograph, 1997, repro. in Hull Daily Mail (4 July 1997) · photograph, 1997, repro. in Daily Mail (26 March 1997) · photographs, 1997-2007, Photoshot, London · F. Greer, bromide print, 1998, NPG · photograph, c.1999, repro. in The Guardian (15 Dec 2001) · G. Calton, photograph, repro. in The Observer (19 Jan 2003) · J. Evans, photograph, repro. in The Independent (12 Dec 2003) · N. Turner, photograph, repro. in Times Higher Education Supplement (14 March 1997) · obituary photographs · photograph, repro. in The Independent (26 March 1997)
Wealth at death  £6,581,238: probate, 28 Oct 2009, CGPLA Eng. & Wales



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