Remembering Anthony Minghella, 1954-2008
Director/writer/producer Anthony Minghella died of a hemorrhage today at the age of 54. He had been undergoing surgery for a growth on his neck. Moviegoers will probably know him best for The English Patient, which won nine Oscars in 1997, including Best Picture and Best Director for Minghella, who also adapted the screenplay. The film, gushed over by many and mocked on Seinfeld, also marked the beginning of Miramax’s reign and independent film’s presence during awards season (yes, the film, which cost $27 million to make, was lumped into the term “independent” at the time).
Minghella, the son of Italian immigrants, grew up in England and started his career directing theater and writing for BBC shows, including Inspector Morse. His first feature film, 1990’s Truly Madly Deeply, starred Juliet Stevenson as a woman visited by her dead boyfriend’s ghost (Alan Rickman) and launched his career as a writer/director. He followed with 1993’s Mr. Wonderful, and then English Patient in 1996.
Jude Law and Juliette Binoche could feasibly owe their Hollywood careers to Minghella; He directed Binoche to a surprise Best Supporting Actress Oscar in English Patient and cast Law in his Patient follow-up, The Talented Mr. Ripley, another literary adaptation. Law was cast as both the object of obsession and victim to Matt Damon’s Tom Ripley. Minghella’s next epic, Cold Mountain, reunited him with Law and won Renee Zellweger an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress. He would work with both Law and Binoche one more time on his final film, Breaking and Entering, also starring Robin Wright Penn (pictured, left).
Minghella directed just six feature films in his career, but he wrote each of them and exec-produced countless others, including Michael Clayton. He even turns up on screen in last year’s Atonement, as the interviewer of Vanessa Redgrave’s Briony. His death comes five days before the British television premiere of his latest project, The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. Here’s to a celebrated–and too short–film career. — Ellen Continue …
PIEDMONT, Missouri (AP) — Flooding forced hundreds of people to flee their homes and closed scores of roads Wednesday as a huge storm system poured as much as 10 inches of rain on the nation’s midsection. FedEx driver Jay McMullin helps Odell Bunch, 78, Continue …
We were sorry and very surprised to hear that Anthony Minghella, the director and screenwriter behind The English Patient, The Talented Mr. Ripley, and Cold Mountain, died today following cancer surgery at the age of 54. We’ll leave it to our Movies colleagues to say more about him, but I did want to mention a favorite book of mine that’s full of his spirit. It’s one of those oddball books that fits no obvious category and likely missed a lot of attention: disguised as a technical guide but one of the most interesting books on filmmaking (a favorite subject) I’ve read recently. A few years ago, New Riders, a publisher mostly of computer manuals, released Behind the Seen: How Walter Murch Edited Cold Mountain Using Apple’s Final Cut Pro and What This Means for Cinema (an unwieldy subtitle but total catnip to me). Murch is the legendary editor of such movies as The Conversation and Apocalypse Now (and The English Patient), and he’s also perhaps the most fascinating writer on the inside of moviemaking (see In the Blink of an Eye and The Conversations, his book with Michael Ondaatje). He didn’t write Behind the Seen (Charles Koppelman did) but you see the very modern process of digital moviemaking (in which tech support from Apple can be important as the key grip and the best boy) through his eyes. Full of interest in its own right (although it was a bit of an anticlimax for me to watch Cold Mountain after reading so much about its production and find I didn’t think the final result was very good), but of note today for the side portrait it paints of Minghella (standing behind Murch in the photo above), who replaced Francis Ford Coppola as Murch’s most frequent collaborator, and who comes off, as he does in every other account, as a complete prince of a guy: imaginative, open-minded, tireless, and wonderful company. –Tom
