Director Anthony Minghella Dead at 54
Fifty-four-year-old U.K. filmmaker Anthony Minghella, whose 1996 The English Patient scored a remarkable 12 nominations and won nine (including best picture and best director), died Tuesday morning of a brain hemorrhage as he recovered from what a spokesman termed "routine surgery" at London's Charing Cross Hospital. Minghella’s remarkable career spanned television, theater and film, and ranged from children’s programs to grand opera.Minghella grew up on the Isle of Wight, three miles off the coast of England, where his Italian-immigrant parents ran an ice-cream factory. By the late 1980s, sharp-eyed observers had noticed his scripts for the Jim Henson television series The Storyteller. Minghella's supernatural romance Truly Madly Deeply (1990), starring Juliet Stevenson and Alan Rickman, inspired a modest but intensely devoted following. The English Patient, a favorite target of Oscar detractors who claim the awards are profoundly out of touch with the tastes of ordinary ...
