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Industry mourns champion of British film who excelled at opera and TV as well as winning Hollywood acclaim writes Mark Brown and Charlotte Higgins. Anthony Minghella, a central figure of the British film industry and one of the most renowned filmmakers the country has produced, died last week aged 54 from a haemorrhage in hospital - days after an operation was judged to have gone well.
Tributes came from all corners of the arts, including film, television and opera; from his colleagues at the British Film Institute, which he led for five years; and from politicians including the prime minister, Gordon Brown, who counted Minghella as a friend and called him "one of Britain's greatest creative talents".
Minghella will chiefly be remembered for his films, from Truly, Madly, Deeply to The English Patient - for which he won an Oscar - to The Talented Mr Ripley to Cold Mountain. But he was also an accomplished playwright and a significant influence in television when he worked on shows such as Grange Hill, Boon and Inspector Morse. When he tried his hand at opera, with Madame Butterfly for the English National Opera in 2005, it was a sensation.
His death was all the more shocking because it was out of the blue. His American publicist Leslee Dart said doctors performed surgery on Minghella last week for cancer of the neck and tonsils. "The surgery had gone well and they were very optimistic," she said. "But he developed a haemorrhage and they were not able to stop it." He died at 5am and leaves a wife, Carolyn Choa, and two grown-up children.
Actor Ralph Fiennes said he was devastated. "He directed most of The English Patient with an ankle in plaster, never losing his gentle humour and precision. He delighted in the contribution of everyone - he was a true collaborator. His films deal with extreme aloneness and the redemptive power of love, even at the moment of death. I will remember him as a man who always wanted to get to the heart of the matter."
Jude Law, who appeared in three of Minghella's films, said he had come to regard him more as a friend than a colleague. "He was a brilliantly talented writer and director who wrote dialogue that was a joy to speak and then put it onto the screen in a way that always looked effortless."
The director and former chairman of the UK Film Council, Sir Alan Parker, recalled flying to Romania to persuade him to take the job of chairman of the BFI. "He was very gracious and he was amazingly generous to me. He asked 'Is this a poisoned chalice,' which of course it was, but he accepted in the end." He added: "He had grace, charm, eloquence and good manners in a business that is not generally known for these things."
At the time of his death Minghella was producing a film version of Bernard Schlink's novel The Reader, starring Kate Winslet and Fiennes, and adapted by Sir David Hare.
Hare said: "He was a very unusual combination - a writer of great quality who also had the vision to see a project all the way through. That put him in an extremely distinctive category. He never lost sight of the value of theatre - like Mike Leigh and Stephen Frears, you could say he was a theatre director who made films."
