Anthony Minghella (1954-2008)

Though Anthony Minghella first found success as a writer and director of theatre and radio plays, and always considered himself a writer first and foremost, the UK film world is none the less appalled at the unforeseen loss of a prodigious film-making talent it considered its own. It's a devastating blow that this should happen just as he was about to present his new BBC adaptation of The No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency this coming Easter.

After a serving an apprenticeship writing Jim Henson's Storyteller series and directing episodes of Inspector Morse, Minghella made his first impact on the cinema in 1990 with his humorously ghost-ridden, unashamedly sentimental study of a widow's grief, Truly, Madly, Deeply. This brought him the attention of people who would form some of the key creative partnerships of his life, such as producer Saul Zaentz and Miramax head Harvey Weinstein, and later Sidney Pollack. But it was his vivid, epic adaptation of Michael Ondaatje's novel The English Patient that launched him to the very top of the film-making profession. The film won nine Academy Awards, including the Award for directing for Minghella.

The follow-up was his 1999 cinema masterpiece, The Talented Mr.
Ripley, a superb evocation of America's idle rich set in 1960s Italy with its keen insight into the mind of Patricia Highsmith's sociopathic social misfit Tom Ripley. This brought another Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. It was while he was on set in Romania shooting his next epic adaptation, the American Civil War romance Cold Mountain, that Alan Parker flew out and convinced him to take on the role of Parker's successor as Chairman of the British Film Institute.

Driven multidisciplinary talent that he was, Minghella didn't flinch from helping to reshape the BFI into a 21st Century organisation. His chairmanship oversaw the opening of BFI Southbank, the rise of the London Film Festival to new prominence, and the granting of vital government capital to help preserve the holdings of the BFI Archive. The cruellest irony is that, in David Lean's centenary year, his natural successor as a maker of epic cinema - as demonstrated by The English Patient - should have passed on when there were so many more films to come.

Nick James, Editor, Sight & Sound