In the U.S., the British writer-director Anthony Minghella's best-known film is The English Patient, a lush tale of amorous fixation. If one did not know any better, one might think that Minghella was the one fixated--on tales of tragic and triumphant love. A brief perusal of his other films--Truly, Madly, Deeply and Mr. Wonderful--gives one the impression that he is an incurable romantic. But in fact, his interest in exploring the theme of love is a relatively recent development. For over a decade, he has produced acclaimed works for television, radio, and the stage in England. This training prepared Minghella well for his entry into film, and knowledgeable critics have detected an accomplished literary sensibility in his screenplays. In a review of Minghella's debut film, Truly, Madly, Deeply, Matt Wolf wrote in the New York Times (April 28, 1991), "The director's interests lie in those 'strange ricocheting emotional dynamics' that have always marked his earlier work, as a dramatist, in theater, and television." It is Minghella's studied and incisive portrayal of human relationships that inspired one critic for Rolling Stone (November 28, 1996) to declare him "a master of intimate emotion."

    Minghella started his career as a lecturer in drama at his alma mater, the University of Hull, in England. In 1981, he decided that he had had enough of academia and began a career as a playwright. Three of his plays gave him a reputation as a talented, up-and-coming writer. Love Bites is a comedy about a man who marries a woman in order to become head of an ice cream business. In Two Planks and a Passion, he exposed the universality of Hollywood-style pettiness and self-promotion by detailing the ugly rivalry between two groups staging competing miracle plays in medieval England. A Little Like Drowning deals with themes of loss and grief. Because of those three works, the London Theater Critics named him the most promising playwright in 1984 and his next play, Made in Bangkok, seemed to live up to that expectation. A farcical look at British tourists who visit Thailand and engage in all sorts of debauchery, the drama was honored as the best play of the year in 1986 by the London Theater Critics, despite poor ticket sales.

    Minghella was dissatisfied with his work in theater, however, and Made in Bangkok turned out to be the last play he wrote. "I don't know what constitutes the sort of material that's best expressed in the theater anymore," he confessed to Matt Wolf. Instead, he branched out into radio and television. The radio play Hang Up won the Prix d'Italia in 1988 and a subsequent work, Cigarettes and Chocolate, was a finalist for the same prize in 1989. His television trilogy What if it's Raining aired throughout Europe and received much praise; he was also a regular contributor to the award-winning British television series Inspector Morse.

    In the late 1980s, he collaborated on several projects with Jim Henson. Minghella adapted nine folktales for Henson's Emmy Award-winning television series The Storyteller, and he also wrote the script for Henson's 1989 television film Living With Dinosaurs, which subsequently won an international Emmy. Henson's imagination had a profound effect on Minghella's style. "Before my Henson period, all my narrative solutions were extremely naturalistic, extremely in the realm of what is possible," Minghella told Matt Wolf. "Then I worked on 'Storyteller' and spent two years really reading folk tales and myths and fantastical pieces of literature." From reading and adapting tales in which hedgehogs married princesses and boys named Fearnot went on quests to find out how to get scared, Minghella learned the possibilities of magical realism. For his debut film, he decided to write a ghost story.

    As writer and director of Truly, Madly, Deeply (1991), Minghella subtly reinvented the ghost-film genre. Working in the shadow of the immensely popular movie Ghost, and limited by a $1.8 million budget, he eschewed typical "ghost effects": no walking through walls or tender, intangible kisses appeared in his film. He dispensed with questions of the ghost's reality and focused on the emotional changes caused by the ghost's presence. "[The film is] about all forms of loss--about all forms of hanging on to versions of the past which actually impede any sort of progress in relationships," he explained to Matt Wolf. Nina, played by Juliet Stevenson, is a woman incapacitated in her work and relationships by the death of her lover, Jamie, portrayed by Alan Rickman. The film appears at first to be a realistic documentation of her everyday life until an underplayed moment in the film arrives: while Juliet is rehearsing on the piano, the camera pans to reveal Jamie's ghost accompanying her on the cello. Jamie is willed into existence by her pain, and his arrival marks a comedic shift in the film as Nina is forced to compare her idealized conception of Jamie with his actual physical, sometimes annoying, presence. The film won awards from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, and Minghella was voted best newcomer to film by the London Film Critics Circle. In the United States, one reviewer for the New Republic (May 27, 1991) thought that the movie was full of "sentimental slush," while another critic wrote in the New Yorker (May 6, 1991), "Minghella writes dialogue that sounds casual but somehow takes us straight to the heart of his work's larger concerns, and he directs the actors beautifully."

    Minghella's second directorial effort and first production with a U.S. studio, Mr. Wonderful (1993), was a disappointment to many who had high expectations of him because of his first film. Although he did not use any magical-realist elements, several commentators found the second film even less believable. The movie features Matt Dillon as a utilities worker who attempts to marry off his ex-wife (Annabella Sciorra) in the hope of redirecting his alimony payments toward the purchase of a bowling alley. "This is a film for the moviegoing-impaired," Roger Ebert proclaimed in the Chicago Sun-Times (October 15, 1993). Ebert, among other reviewers, criticized the premise that alimony payments would be substantial enough to purchase a bowling alley, or that Annabella Sciorra's intelligent character would stoop to going on blind dates set up by her ex-husband. Minghella did not write the script, however, and one reviewer for the Spectator (October 23, 1993) actually credited him with making a bad screenplay more subtle.

    Minghella's third and most recent film, The English Patient (1996), put to rest any lingering doubts regarding his filmmaking capability. After reading Michael Ondaatje's 1992 Booker Prize-winning novel of the same title, he approached his friend, the producer Saul Zaentz, with the idea of creating a movie out of the book. Perhaps having learned from his experience with Mr. Wonderful on the danger of working with someone else's script, Minghella took it upon himself to write the screenplay. This proved to be a daunting task, given the novel's non-linear structure and a plot that revolves around the feverish memories of the disfigured title character, Count Almasy. "The book's oblique, mosaic-like prose doesn't automatically offer a narrative route," he told Bruce Dorminey for the Toronto Globe and Mail (November 11, 1995). "It's got a lot of stories, decentralized characters, and no obvious point of view. So, to find a way of dramatizing something that is essentially an interior series of visions is a foolhardy project." Minghella used creative license in restructuring the book's sequence of events to make it work as a two-and-a-half-hour cinematic experience.

    The film was widely hailed as one of the best movies on romantic obsession, with desert scenery comparable to that captured in Lawrence of Arabia. "Nothing in recent cinema or in Minghella's previous films . . . prepared me for the palpitating shock of The English Patient," Anthony Lane wrote in the New Yorker (November 25, 1996). Some reviewers felt that the film focused too much on the relationship between Count Almasy and Katharine Clifton, at the expense of the other characters. Yet even Ondaatje recognized that concessions had to be made to prevent an already long film from turning into an eight-hour epic. "It's not my story anymore," Ondaatje, who participated in the shooting of the film, told Bruce Dorminey. "It's Anthony's version on a grand scale." For his efforts, Minghella won the University of Southern California Scripter Award for the year's best adaptation of a book. The film itself was nominated for a dozen Academy Awards, including those for best adapted screenplay and best director, and earned Minghella the Oscar for best director.

    The second of five children, Anthony Minghella was born in 1954 on the Isle of Wight, England, to emigrants from southern Italy. His parents owned a seaside cafe, and their home was just upstairs. He remembered the kitchen as the center of a bustling social life. Later, living the cloistered life of a writer, Minghella felt isolated. "I found myself going to university as far away from that kitchen as possible into a career and job that couldn't be more of an antithesis, quietly writing in a room," he told the New York Times (April 28, 1991). When he started directing, he had an epiphany. "I looked up and realized there were 70 people shouting and trying to get gear into place. For one blinding moment, I'd gone back into the kitchen again. It felt great."

    Minghella is married to the Hong Kong-born dancer Carolyn Choa, who had a brief appearance in his first film.