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Writer/director Anthony Minghella died at the tragically early age of 54, robbing Britain of one of its finest film-makers.
He was truly one of a kind. It's easy to say that in the first flush of shock and sadness when someone unexpectedly passes, but I really can't think of another film-maker like him.
I met him around the time of The Talented Mr Ripley, and he wore his substantial intellect and artistic integrity very lightly – a self-effacing, jolly man who just happened to have made the leap from penning episodes of Grange Hill in the mid-1980s to raising aloft the best director Oscar for The English Patient in 1997.
He'd adapted the Booker Prize-winning novel by Michael Ondaatje himself, creating a torrid, old-fashioned wartime epic out of a difficult text. And it was a box-office smash, taking $232 million worldwide. Minghella was made in Hollywood. The English Patient was only his third movie.
It was while watching his most recent cinema film, Breaking and Entering, about the pressures of multicultural, gentrified London life, that I realised how important Minghella was. The story – his first original screenplay since 1990 drama Truly Madly Deeply – concerns an architect who has an affair with a Bosnian seamstress. And not only a seamstress, but the mother of a boy who burgled his practice in King's Cross – an area of London he is charged with regenerating.
It was seen by many as pretentious and contrived – at one point Jude Law's central character says, "I don't know how to be honest, that's why I'm so fond of metaphor." Certainly, it's not the sort of thing you hear in everyday conversation, but I think critics were too quick to mock.
Imagine if the film had been shot not in London but Paris, and spoken in French – they would have been falling over themselves to declare it an existential masterpiece.
Minghella was born to Italian parents on the Isle of Wight in 1954. One wonders if this combination of passionate Mediterranean spirit and the splendid isolation of his early life (he was heavily involved in the island's 1970s rock and folk scenes) catapulted him, as if from a circus cannon, into the maelstrom of the arts in England.
He wrote plays and music in Hull, where he studied, and was named most promising playwright by the London Theatre Critics in 1984. And after a grounding in television (he also wrote episodes of Inspector Morse) and the release of Truly Madly Deeply, Minghella went to Hollywood.
But he never forgot his roots, finding small roles for his parents in The English Patient and, on accepting his Oscar, calling it "a triumph for the Isle of Wight".
He was also an accomplished director of opera (his Madam Butterfly with the English National Opera won an Olivier Award in 2006) and until recently chair of the BFI, but still found time to support his beloved Portsmouth FC. He spent a total of 18 days in England in 1995, yet was determined to see his team play. Abroad, he followed Pompey's fortunes via the internet. He was the kind of intellectual you wouldn't mind having to dinner.
There are strands that run through much of his seemingly disparate work – by Jude Law's phone in Breaking and Entering is a copy of Tears of the Giraffe from the same series of books by Alexander McCall Smith as The No.1 Ladies' Detective Agency. We shall miss such literate continuity.
Andrew Collins, RT film editor
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