What a shock to learn last Tuesday that writer and director Anthony Minghella had died in London’s Charing Cross Hospital of a hemorrhage following surgery for a growth on his neck.
Only 54, Minghella enjoyed a rapid rise to the top of the filmmaking world, with excellent film versions of the novels “The English Patient,” “The Talented Mr. Ripley” (right) and “Cold Mountain,” but who knows what he might have done over the next decade or so?
Minghella was the rare major league director who wrote all of his own scripts and who had a special knack for adapting tricky novels to the screen.
When I heard they were making a movie out of Michael Ondaatje’s “The English Patient” in the mid-1990s I thought whoever was behind the project must be mad.
A novel set during World War II, mostly within the mind of a man dying from terrible burns, Ondaatje seemed unadaptable, but Mingella did a fine job of picking and choosing plot threads to bring to life, assembled a superb cast and technical crew, and came up with an Oscar-winning box office hit.
Minghella won an Oscar for directing and suddenly found himself in that rare position of being able to do any project he wanted. Instead of going in an obviously commercial direction, however, he decided to bring Patricia Highsmith’s early 1950s thriller, “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” to the screen.
Rene Clement made a French version of the story in 1960 (“Purple Noon”) but gave the amoral book a fairly straight forward Hollywood-style treatment, with a pat ending that was contrary to Highsmith’s enigmatic original.
Minghella came up with a script that honored its source but contained dramatic embellishments that many people believe improved on Highsmith’s book.
Four years later, Minghella undertook his largest production with the very expensive “Cold Mountain,” a three-hour adaptation of Charles Frazier’s acclaimed Civil War drama. Again, Minghella took someone else’s good story and brought it vividly to life (Renee Zellweger earned an Oscar for her performance).
Minghella didn’t think of his three movies as replacements for the novels but as his own personal interpretation of writing he loved — the films stood on their own for non-readers, but were even more impressive to those who knew and loved the books.
Just before he died, the writer-director finished work on a film version of Alexander McCall Smith’s best-selling crime novel, “The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency,” which was shown by the BBC in Great Britain last weekend and will debut in this country on HBO in the fall.
