His first piece of produced work was a 1975 stage adaptation of
Gabriel Josipovici's Mobius the Stripper, however it was his 1985 piece
Whale Music that kickstarted his career
http://www.hollywood.com/celebrity/Anthony_Minghella/190042. He made his directorial debut with a souble bill of
Beckett's Play and
Happy Days. During the 1980s, he worked in
television, script editing the children's drama series
Grange Hill for the
BBC and later writing
The Storyteller series for
Jim Henson. He also worked on episodes of the
ITV detective drama
Inspector Morse. His 1986 play
Made in Bangkok found mainstream success in the
West End.
His 1990 feature
Truly, Madly, Deeply, a drama he had written and directed for the BBC's
Screen Two anthology strand, bypassed its expected TV broadcast and received a cinema release. In order to make the film, he had turned down an offer to direct another episode of
Inspector Morse, which he had thought would be a much higher-profile assignment.
In 1996, he won the
Academy Award for Directing for
The English Patient. He was nominated for the
Academy Award for Adapted Screenplay for 1999's
The Talented Mr. Ripley and 2003's
Cold Mountain.
He vocally supported
I Know I'm Not Alone, a film of
musician Michael Franti's peacemaking excursions into
Iraq, Palestine and
Israel.
He directed a
party election broadcast for the
Labour Party in 2005. The short film depicted
Tony Blair and
Gordon Brown working together and was criticised for being insincere: "The Anthony Minghella party political broadcast last year was full of body language fibs", said Peter Collett, a psychologist at the
University of Oxford. "When you are talking to me, I'll give you my full attention only if I think you are very high status or if I love you. On that party political broadcast, they are staring at each other like lovers. It is completely false."
Minghella made his
operatic debut directing
Puccini's Madama Butterfly. It was first seen at the
English National Opera in London in 2005, at the
Lithuanian National Opera and Ballet Theatre in Vilnius in March 2006 and at the
Metropolitan Opera in
New York City in
September 2006.
rss feed