The Magazine

The Conductor

Anthony Minghella (1954-2008) made music in film.

Apr 21, 2008, Vol. 13, No. 30 • By KELLY JANE TORRANCE
Single Page Print Larger Text Smaller Text Alerts

Anthony Minghella died of a hemorrhage last month at London's Charing Cross Hospital, and the news took the creative world by surprise. The filmmaker was just 54 years old and few knew that he had been operated on the week before for cancer. With the astonishing critical and commercial success of The English Patient (1996), Minghella became one of the world's leading writer-directors after just his third film. He left only eight, however. (His last was the made-for-television The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency.) One of those seven he didn't write, and four were adaptations of novels. In the book of interviews, Minghella on Minghella, he says he did this to make as many films as possible while learning the craft: "The reason I've been tempted not to write my own work, but to adapt existing material, is because I've only made a few films and I want to make forty," he said. "It's a job you can't practice; you have to do it."

He never got the chance to make those forty. Some might think that Minghella will be remembered as a capable but not particularly creative interpreter of other people's work. That's like calling Alfred Hitchcock or David Lean mere translators rather than the genre-changing geniuses they were. Of course, Minghella hasn't left a legacy as rich as theirs, but his body of work is stunning, and includes one film every bit as masterful as their best.

Minghella's films--besides the instant classic The English Patient, his best known are Cold Mountain (2003) and The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999)--are a varied lot, but just about every one features the music of Bach.

To read more, you must be a Weekly Standard Subscriber

We're Sorry,

the rest of this article is available only to subscribers.

You have two options:

Subscribing today will provide you with immediate, complete access to the current issue, as well as to all back issues on the site. Each week you will be able to read articles from the newest issue even before print copies are mailed!

Privacy Policy