Anthony Minghella, who has died in hospital after a haemorrhage following an operation aged 54, made an impact in various fields – as director of theatre, television, cinema, radio and opera – as well as being a playwright, screenwriter, producer and chairman of the BFI.
The talented Minghella's eclectic oeuvre stretched from a short film of the three character Play (2000), as part of Channel 4's Samuel Beckett cycle, to the $83m (£41.5m) Hollywood epic, Cold Mountain (2003); from the intimate fantasy, Truly Madly Deeply (1990), made for the BBC, to the vast panorama of the Oscar-winning The English Patient (1996), financed by Miramax.
Minghella, whose ample figure and cheery countenance exuded a love of life, seemed to be Harold Pinter, Orson Welles, David Lean and Richard Attenborough all rolled into one.
A passionate supporter of Portsmouth football club, he was also a mixture of English restraint and Italian exuberance. Some critics stressed the adjectives in the titles of The English Patient and Cold Mountain to describe his work, while others saw his films as truly, deeply romantic. His background might explain this dichotomy.
Minghella was born on the Isle of Wight, the son of ice-cream factory owners. His father was Italian/Scottish and his mother came from Leeds. But, according to Minghella: "My maternal grandmother was a real figurehead in my life. She was a tiny peasant woman from Valvori, near Monte Cassino, in the south of Italy… She'd run a cafe in the Gorbals in Glasgow so she spoke this coarse Italian/Scottish. I'd listen to her talk in a very superstitious, Catholic way about men and women and how the world worked: men are weak, women are strong; women survive, men are helpless and stupid." It was she who influenced his play, A Little Like Drowning (1989), a moving and funny drama about an Italian grandmother and her English grandchildren.
Before going to university, Minghella had dreams of being a pop musician, and played keyboards in a couple of bands - Earthlight and Dancer. "That was a really important part of my life. There was a rich music scene on the island at the time and for me writing songs developed later into writing plays. Music was a very vibrant ingredient in my life, and I originally saw my early plays as being a format for music," he explained.
Minghella graduated from the University of Hull, where he eventually abandoned his doctoral thesis on Beckett. "There was a time, for five years, when I read Beckett almost on a daily basis. The sense of language and poetry in his writing has been the single biggest influence on me as a writer," he declared, which may come as a surprise to those who know only his blockbusters at the literary end of the middlebrow.
During the 1980s, after lecturing in drama at his alma mater, he worked in television, mainly writing scripts for Grange Hill, Jim Henson's puppet series, The Storyteller: Greek Myths and Inspector Morse. At the same time, he was writing plays, winning the London Theatre Critics Award for most promising playwright in 1984, and for best play for Made in Bangkok in 1986, an examination of the exploitation of women in Thailand by westerners.
Minghella's international breakthrough came with Truly Madly Deeply, which he wrote and directed, about a bereaved woman (Juliet Stevenson) who literally wills her dead lover (Alan Rickman) back to life. This rather sentimental drama, a very English riposte to the Demi Moore vehicle, Ghost, was transcended by sincere performances and some telling dialogue. Perhaps the lure of Hollywood was so strong that Minghella accepted to direct a fluffy romantic comedy, Mr Wonderful (1993), for which, exceptionally, he did not write the screenplay.
He did not make the same mistake with The English Patient for which he sequestered himself for 18 months away from friends and family while writing the adaptation of Michael Ondaatje's 1992 Booker Prize-winning novel. This was followed by two years filming in Tunisia and Italy.
The result, a considerable leap in scale and ambition for Minghella, was an impressive, if somewhat languorous, epic love story set during the second world war, which won nine Academy awards, including best director and best picture. Certainly Minghella showed that he was able to get fine performances from his cast and control a complex structure – the plot moves between the Italian front near the end of the war, where a French-Canadian nurse (Juliette Binoche) cares for a seriously-burned patient (Ralph Fiennes), and north Africa during the late 1930s, when the patient, revealed as a Hungarian count and mapmaker, fell in love with a married woman (Kristin Scott Thomas).
The Talented Mr Ripley (1999), the second film to be based on the novel by Patricia Highsmith, was a sleek and intelligent thriller with Matt Damon in the title role. Cold Mountain, based on Charles Frazier's sombre bestselling American civil war novel, another meticulously crafted picture in the epic mode, was stunningly shot (in Romania) by cinematographer John Seale. Starring Jude Law and Nicole Kidman – he as a wounded confederate soldier who makes the decision to desert his army at the end of the war to return home to his love - it was reminiscent of the lush historical pictures of yesteryear. Comic relief was provided by Renee Zellweger, as a hillbilly, a role that won her the Best Supporting Actress Oscar.
Returning to England, and his first original screenplay since Truly Madly Deeply, Minghella was literally more at home with Breaking and Entering (2006), starring Jude Law as an architect involved in the gentrification of Kings Cross. Pleasant but rather pat, the film made little impression.
Minghella's last completed film, The No 1 Ladies Detective Agency, written with Richard Curtis, is to be shown on BBC 1 this Easter Monday. It has already caused controversy, unrelated to the subject or quality of the film, because it gives a rosy picture of Botswana, where it was filmed and where hundreds of Bushmen have been relocated from their ancestral lands.
In 2005, Minghella, who was given a CBE in 2001, also courted controversy with his party political broadcast on behalf of the Labour party which showed Tony Blair and Gordon Brown working together lovingly. In the same year, Minghella directed Madame Butterfly, of which the Guardian's Tom Service wrote: "Anyone expecting images of cinematic brilliance from Anthony Minghella's new production of Puccini's Madam Butterfly for English National Opera will not be disappointed", although the critic went on to express mixed feelings about the production, which went on to the Metropolitan in New York, where it met with success.
Minghella is survived by his wife, Hong Kong-born choreographer Carolyn Choa, a son and a daughter.
Robert Cooper writes: I read Anthony before I met him. It was his stage play, Two Planks and a Passion," which I was hoping to direct for the radio in the mid-1980s. The play was about members of one of the smaller guilds in 14th century York who were rehearsing The Passion as their contribution to the city's Miracle Plays during a time of cutbacks in the local council's arts budget.
Then news gets out that the king is coming and suddenly the dull burghers of York are hurling money at their humble plays in an orgy of self-aggrandisement. It was an extraordinary combination of razor-sharp observation of human frailty coupled with characters of genuine sincerity, complexity, warmth and charm.
Meeting Anthony was the same experience. A quiet wit, an extraordinary insight into people and situations, a massive intelligence which he never used to make you feel inadequate, and most of all a relaxed presence that made you feel that somehow, you "belonged". And as you got to know him you found his genuine delight in the simple treats of life – food, friendship, conversation, music and especially family.
Watching him direct his first film was a revelation. It was Truly Madly Deeply in Bristol in 1989. As soon as Anthony began, I realised he had somehow discovered how you direct – he had not tried to learn everyone's job – he just treated people in a way that ensured they did the best work they had ever done in their life for him. It was as simple as that. And of course it was as hard as that. The pressures of film-making reveal can character in a very unforgiving way – but no matter how difficult the situation, I never saw Anthony anything other than intensely interested in and understanding of other people's artistic process. Nor was this apparent only on set – after working with the cast and crew for 12 hours, he would meet with them half an hour later to watch rushes, have dinner with them and round the evening off with a game of squash with the assistant designer - cheered on by those who had not by this time given up and gone to bed. With Anthony you simply couldn't not do your best for him. He is an immeasurable loss to the culture of this country.