Anthony Minghella

Anthony Minghella CBE (6 January 1954 – 18 March 2008) was a British playwright and filmmaker. He was chairman of the board of Governors at the British Film Institute between 2003 and 2007. He directed Truly, Madly, Deeply (1990), The English Patient (1996), The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), and Cold Mountain (2003), and produced Iris (2001).

He received the Academy Award for Best Director for The English Patient. In addition, he received three more Academy Award nominations; he was nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay for both The English Patient and The Talented Mr. Ripley, and was posthumously nominated for Best Picture for The Reader (2008), as a producer.

Minghella was born in Ryde on the Isle of Wight. His family are well known on the island, where they ran a café in Ryde until the 1980s and have run an eponymous business making and selling Italian-style ice cream since the 1950s. His parents were Edoardo Minghella (an Italian immigrant) and Leeds-born Gloria Alberta (née Arcari). His mother's ancestors originally came from Valvori, a small village in southern Lazio, Italy. He was one of five children, his sisters Gioia Minghella-Giddens, Edana Minghella and Loretta Minghella, and a brother Dominic Minghella who also became a screenwriter and producer.

Minghella attended St. Mary's Catholic Primary School, Ryde, Sandown Grammar School, and St John's College, Portsmouth. Early interests suggested a possible career as a musician, with Minghella playing keyboards with local bands Earthlight and Dancer. The latter recorded an album titled Tales of the Riverbank in 1972, although it was not released until 2001.

He attended the University of Hull, studying drama. As an undergraduate he had arrived at university with an EMI contract for the band, in which he sang and played keyboards; while at university he wrote words and music for an adaptation of Gabriel Josipovici's Mobius the Stripper (1975) .

Minghella graduated after three years and stayed on to pursue a PhD. He also taught at the university for several years, on Samuel Beckett and on the medieval theatre. Ultimately, he abandoned his pursuit of a PhD to work for the BBC.

Minghella's debut work was a stage adaptation of Gabriel Josipovici's Mobius the Stripper (1975) and it was his Whale Music (1985) that brought him notice. His double bill of Samuel Beckett's Play and Happy Days was his directorial debut and debut feature film as a director was A Little Like Drowning (1978). During the 1980s, he worked in television, starting as a runner on Magpie before moving into script editing the children's drama series Grange Hill for the BBC and later writing The Storyteller series for Jim Henson. He wrote three episodes of the ITV detective drama Inspector Morse and an episode of long-running ITV drama Boon. Made in Bangkok (1986) found mainstream success in the West End.

Radio success followed with a Giles Cooper Award for the radio drama Cigarettes and Chocolate first broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 1988. It was revived on 3 May 2008 as a tribute to its author director following his death. His production starred Juliet Stevenson, Bill Nighy and Jenny Howe. His first radio play Hang Up, starring Anton Lesser and Juliet Stevenson, was revived on 10 May 2008 as part of the BBC Radio 4 Minghella season.