Oscar-winning
director Anthony Minghella, who turned such literary works
as
The English Patient, The Talented Mr.
Ripley,
and
Cold Mountain
into acclaimed
movies, has died. He was 54.
Minghella's death
was confirmed Tuesday by his agent, Judy Daish. No
other details were immediately available.
''Anthony
Minghella was a wonderful human being, creative and
brilliant, but still humble, gentle, and a joy to be
with,'' said former British prime minister Tony Blair,
who became friends with Minghella after the filmmaker
directed a Labour Party election ad in 2005. ''Whatever I
did with him, personally or professionally, left me
with complete admiration for him, as a character and
as an artist of the highest caliber.''
The English Patient,
the 1996 World War II
drama, won nine Academy Awards, including Best Director for
Minghella, Best Picture, and Best Supporting Actress
for Juliette Binoche. Based on the celebrated novel by
Canadian writer Michael Ondaatje, the movie tells of a
burn victim's tortured recollections of his misdeeds in time
of war.
In a 1996
interview with the Associated Press, Minghella said the film
was the pinnacle of his career at the time: ''I feel more
naked and more exposed by this piece of work than
anything I've ever been involved with.''
He said too many
modern films let the audience be passive, as if they
were saying, ''We're going to rock you and thrill you. We'll
do everything for you.''
''This film goes
absolutely against that grain,'' he said. ''It says,
'I'm sorry, but you're going to have to make some
connections. There are some puzzles here. The story
will constantly rethread itself and it will be
elliptical, but there are enormous rewards in that.'''
Minghella
(pronounced min-GELL-ah) also was nominated for an Oscar for
Best Screenplay for the movie and for his screenplay for
The Talented Mr. Ripley.
His 2003
Cold
Mountain
, based on Charles Frazier's novel of the
U.S. Civil War, brought a Best Supporting Actress
Oscar for Renee Zellweger.
The 1999
The
Talented Mr. Ripley,
starring Matt Damon as a
murderous social climber, was based on a novel by
Patricia Highsmith. It earned five Oscar nominations.
Among his other
films were
Truly, Madly, Deeply
(1990) and last
year's Oscar-nominated
Michael Clayton
, on which he
was executive producer.
Minghella also
turned his talents to opera. In 2005 he directed a highly
successful staging of Puccini's
Madama
Butterfly
at the English National Opera in London. The
following year he staged it for the season opener of
New York's Metropolitan Opera. It was the first
performance of the Met's new era under general manager
Peter Gelb.
Minghella was
recently in Botswana filming an adaptation of Alexander
McCall Smith's novel
The No. 1 Ladies' Detective
Agency.
It is due to air on British television this
week.
The book is the
first in a series about the adventures of Botswanan
private eye Precious Ramotswe; a 13-part television series
was recently commissioned by HBO.
Jeff Ramsay,
press secretary to Botswanan president Festus Mogae, called
Minghella's death a ''shock and an utter loss.''
He said the
director had been coming to the country ahead of the
detective film and learning about Botswana.
Ramsay said
Minghella had told him how he had been forced to shoot
Cold Mountain
in Romania and that it had
''seemed wrong.'' He said this made the director ''more sure
that the film could only be shot in Botswana.''
Born the second
of five children to southern Italian emigrants, Minghella
came to moviemaking from a flourishing playwriting career on
the London ''fringe'' and, in 1986, on the West End
with the play
Made in Bangkok,
a hard-hitting look at
the sexual mores of a British tour group in Thailand.
He worked as a
television script editor before making his directing debut
with
Truly, Madly, Deeply,
a comedy about love
and grief starring Juliet Stevenson and Alan Rickman.
Producer David
Puttnam told the BBC that Minghella was ''a very special
person.''
''He wasn't just
a writer or a writer-director; he was someone who was
very well-known and very well-loved within the film
community,'' Puttnam said. ''Frankly, he was far too
young to have gone.'' (AP)
