Anthony Minghella
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Categories: 1954 births | Alumni of the University of Hull | Anglo-Italians | Best Director Academy Award winners | English film directors | English screenwriters | English television writers | Italian-Scots | Living people | People from the Isle of Wight
Anthony Minghella (born January 6, 1954) is an Academy Award-winning English film director, playwright and screenwriter. He is currently the chairman of the British Film Institute.
BiographyEarly lifeMinghella was born on the Isle of Wight, the son of Gloria and Edward Minghella, ice cream factory owners.[1] His father was Italian/Scottish and his mother came from Leeds; her ancestors originally came from Valvori, a small village in the Lazio region of central Italy. Minghella attended Sandown Grammar School and St John's College (Portsmouth). He is a graduate of the University of Hull, where he completed undergraduate and graduate courses, but eventually abandoned his doctoral thesis. CareerHis first piece of produced work was a 1975 stage adaptation of Gabriel Josipovici's Mobius the Stripper, however it was his 1985 piece Whale Music that kickstarted his career.[2] He made his directorial debut with a souble bill of Beckett's Play and Happy Days. During the 1980s, he worked in television, script editing the children's drama series Grange Hill for the BBC and later writing The Storyteller series for Jim Henson. He also worked on episodes of the ITV detective drama Inspector Morse. His 1986 play Made in Bangkok found mainstream success in the West End. His 1990 feature Truly, Madly, Deeply, a drama he had written and directed for the BBC's Screen Two anthology strand, bypassed its expected TV broadcast and received a cinema release. In order to make the film, he had turned down an offer to direct another episode of Inspector Morse, which he had thought would be a much higher-profile assignment. In 1996, he won the Academy Award for Directing for The English Patient. He was nominated for the Academy Award for Adapted Screenplay for 1999's The Talented Mr. Ripley and 2003's Cold Mountain. He vocally supported I Know I'm Not Alone, a film of musician Michael Franti's peacemaking excursions into Iraq, Palestine and Israel. He directed a party election broadcast for the Labour Party in 2005. The short film depicted Tony Blair and Gordon Brown working together and was criticised for being insincere: "The Anthony Minghella party political broadcast last year was full of body language fibs", said Peter Collett, a psychologist at the University of Oxford. "When you are talking to me, I'll give you my full attention only if I think you are very high status or if I love you. On that party political broadcast, they are staring at each other like lovers. It is completely false."[3] Minghella made his operatic debut directing Puccini's Madama Butterfly. It was first seen at the English National Opera in London in 2005, at the Lithuanian National Opera and Ballet Theatre in Vilnius in March 2006 and at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City in September 2006. The Anthony Minghella Theatre at Quay Arts Centre on the Isle of Wight is named in his honour. Personal lifeMinghella is married to Hong Kong-born choreographer Carolyn Choa. His brother, Dominic, is also a successful scriptwriter, and his son, Max, is an actor. His sister Edana is currently involved in a Jazz event on the Isle of Wight, and his nephew Dante is one of the participants in Channel 4's Child Genius series. He is a big Portsmouth FC fan and appeared in the Channel 4 documentary Hallowed Be Thy Game. FilmographyDirector
Producer
Selected plays
Awards
References
External links
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