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

"I listen to Bach every day," he told me when I interviewed him at the Toronto International Film Festival a year and a half ago, noting that he keeps two photographs on his desk: one of Samuel Beckett and the other of the pianist and Bach interpreter Glenn Gould. (Minghella was a very learned man, but wore his learning lightly.) Like many English actors and directors, he began his career in theater and television; he actually got his start as a student at the University of Hull writing incidental music for the theater. He wanted to become a pianist or a composer but didn't feel he had the talent. Instead, more than any other contemporary filmmaker, he brought a distinctly musical sensibility to the cinema.

All the films Minghella wrote are small dramas writ large. "I love scale in movies, I love the cinema of cinema," he told me. "But I have very small handwriting and I think my interests are very small. So there's an interesting tension between what I want to write about and what I want to look at."

The English Patient, a sweeping epic that swept the Oscars with nine wins, is about a burn victim remembering his failed love affair against the backdrop of World War II. Cold Mountain is The Odyssey retold, simply the story of a man trying to make his way back to a home that's changing faster than he can get there. Breaking and Entering (2006), his final feature film, was, like The English Patient, just the age-old story of an adulterer, but one whose affair takes place in a changing London facing the clash of multiculturalism. Minghella never had a life's theme, like Hitchcock, but there are common threads amongst his work: His films are about people who can never be together because of the larger, complicated world in which they live.