LONDON — Anthony Minghella, a screenwriter, opera director and the Oscar-winning filmmaker of “The English Patient,” died of a hemorrhage Tuesday. He was 54.
Minghella’s death came five days before the British TV premiere of his final film, “The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency.” Spokesman Jonathan Rutter said Minghella died early Tuesday at London’s Charing Cross Hospital. Rutter said Minghella underwent surgery last week for a growth in his neck. He said the operation “seemed to have gone well. At 5 a.m. today, he had a fatal hemorrhage.”
Britain’s arts community reacted with shock to the loss of one of its best-known and best-liked figures. Tributes poured in from people as diverse as movie star Jude Law, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and the president of Botswana.
Minghella was in Botswana recently, filming an adaptation of Alexander McCall Smith’s novel “The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency,” which the BBC plans to broadcast Sunday. The project was the latest of Minghella’s literary adaptations, which also included the Italy-set thriller “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” the U.S. Civil War saga “Cold Mountain” and the World War II-era story “The English Patient,” which came out in 1996 and earned the Academy Award for best picture, with Minghella winning an Oscar for best director.
But Minghella, who began his career as a writer, confessed he was not sure of his place as a director.
“It is a naked thing to admit, but I feel very strongly that I want people to appreciate that I am not just a flash in the pan,” he said.
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 — choreographed by Minghella’s wife, Carolyn Choa. The following year, he staged it as the season-opener of New York’s Metropolitan Opera.
Minghella was working with composer Osvaldo Golijov on a new opera titled “Daedalus,” for which he was to write the libretto and direct. It was to have premiered in the Metropolitan Opera’s 2011-12 season.
Born in 1954, Minghella grew up on the Isle of Wight, a holiday island off England’s southern coast where his Italian parents ran an ice cream factory, and studied at the University of Hull in northern England.
Minghella came to moviemaking from a playwrighting 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 also wrote for radio and television. Film was a natural progression.
“I was never happy writing plays just set in rooms,” Minghella said in a 1996 interview. “I wanted the plays to move and for time to shift — a more liquid way of storytelling.”
He made his film directing debut in 1990 with “Truly, Madly, Deeply,” a comedy about love and grief starring Juliet Stevenson and Alan Rickman. His biggest hit was “The English Patient,” a romantic epic set against the backdrop of World War II that won nine Oscars. The success of the film, which starred Ralph Fiennes and Kristin Scott Thomas, was evidence of Minghella’s strengths. It was adapted from a poetic, multi-stranded novel by Canadian writer Michael Ondaatje that many considered unfilmable. In Minghella’s hands it was lush, evocative and epic.
Minghella is survived by his wife, his actor-son, Max Minghella, and his daughter, Hannah, who recently was named president of production at Sony Pictures Animation.
