Oscar®-winning director Anthony Minghella, whose brief film career included much praise for highly literate films as The English Patient, The Talented Mr. Ripley and Cold Mountain, died in London on March 18 of complications of surgery for tonsil cancer. He was 54.

He was born on January 6, 1954 on the Isle of Wight, England to Italian immigrant parents. Educated at the University of Hull of North Yorkshire, Minghella began writing plays while teaching there. In 1986 he scored a huge hit with Made in Bangkok, a study of sexual hijinks among British tourists on holiday in Thailand. It won the London Theater Critics Award and raised his profile enough to where he moved into television and began working on some of the biggest shows of the day including Boon, for the comics Mel Smith and Grif Rhys Jones, and a long-standing association with the internationally popular Inspector Morse crime series.

Minghella made the move to cinema with a charming ghost comedy Truly, Madly Deeply (1990) which starred Alan Rickman and Juliet Stevenson. The film won him a BAFTA (British Oscar®) for best screenplay and his next film also mined the romance field with Mr. Wonderful (1993) about a troubled couple (Matt Dillon and Anabelle Sciorra) moving on after their break-up. By his third film, The English Patient (1996), Minghella had clearly grown as a director with clear ideas and ambition. Based on the novel by Michael Ondaatje, the movie was far from a conventional tale of war survival as it centers on a burn victim's (Ralph Fiennes) harrowing memories of his life during wartime. Emphasizing mood, ambience and a non-linear narrative, Minghella effectively captured the troubled sense of guilt and horror that survivors of such trauma experience, and the film was critically lauded in the process, winning nine Oscar®s including best picture and best director.

Although Minghella's output would be brief after the success of The English Patient, he did direct an acclaimed adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's dark, suggestive novel The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999) which cast Matt Damon as a vicious social viper. It earned the actor some of the best reviews of his career and garnered Minghella another Oscar® nomination for his screenplay adaptation. Minghella also helmed Cold Mountain (2003), a moody Civil War drama shot partially in Romania, which garnered a best supporting actress Oscar® for Renee Zellweger (although was a box-office disappointment); and the muddled production Breaking and Entering (2006), which was resulted in the only negative reviews of his career.

Still, Minghella rebounded as the executive producer on Michael Clayton (2007) which starred George Clooney as a fixer for a powerful law firm. Earning critical raves and seven Oscar® nominations (including a Best Supporting Actress win for Tilda Swinton), Minghella returned to direction for an HBO miniseries The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency that is due to air soon. For his contribution to the arts, he was awarded a CBE in 2001. He is survived by his wife, Carolyn; a son, Max; and a daughter, Hannah.

by Michael T. Toole