Anthony Minghella, 54, Oscar-Winning Writer/Director Who Staged Acclaimed Butterfly, Has Died

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Anthony Minghella, 54, Oscar-Winning Writer/Director Who Staged Acclaimed Butterfly, Has Died
23rd April, 2008

Anthony Minghella, the Oscar-winning British filmmaker who wrote and directed movies including The English Patient, The Talented Mr. Ripley and Cold Mountain, before putting his stamp on the opera stage, mounting a spectacular production of Madama Butterfly for the English National Opera and the Metropolitan Opera, has died. He was 54.

Minghella suffered a fatal hemorrhage early today at London's Charing Cross Hospital, according to a statement released to the press by a spokesman. The director reportedly underwent an operation last week for a growth on his neck.

At the time of his death, Minghella was reportedly at work on a libretto for a future Metropolitan Opera commission with Argentinean composer Osvaldo Golijov. Speaking of the commission during the company's 2008-09 season announcement on March 4, Metropolitan Opera general manager Peter Gelb reported that the work, tentatively titled Daedalus, had been slated to take the Met's stage during the 2011-12 season.

"He was a brilliant renaissance man. This wasn't just a gifted filmmaker," Gelb told the Associated Press. "He was a musician, played the piano, was a playwright. It's a tremendous loss. It's very sad for me and the Met. He was deeply loved by everybody he came into contact with at the Met, from the performers to the stage crew. They respected him and his clarity of thinking and his kindness."

Minghella was born on the Isle of Wight, where his parents owned an ice-cream factory. He began his career as a playwright, penning a number of award-winning radio plays before making his film directing debut in 1990 with Truly Madly Deeply, which he also wrote. The made-for-TV comedy, which starred Juliet Stevenson and Alan Rickman, found such acclaim that it was eventually given a cinematic release. His 1996 screen adaptation of The English Patient won nine Academy Awards, including "Best Director" and "Best Picture," and he was also nominated for an Oscar for his 1999 screenplay for The Talented Mr. Ripley. He was an executive producer on the Oscar nominated Michael Clayton.

Minghella was recently in Botswana, filming an adaptation of Alexander McCall Smith's The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, and had recently been tapped to create a thirteen-part television series by HBO.

It seemed inevitable that Minghella would eventually try his hand at directing opera. The director spoke in interviews of his abiding love of music, having grown up in an immigrant Italian household, listening to recordings of Giuseppe di Stefano and Enrico Caruso. Minghella said that the idea for Truly Madly Deeply first came to him in the form of a Bach duet. During his college years at The University of Hull, Minghella composed incidental music as well as a musical titled Mobius the Stripper. He also put opera to notable use in his films, employing the Act II finale of Eugene Onegin during a pivotal scene in The Talented Mr. Ripley.

"I was exposed to it fairly early on in my childhood," Minghella said of opera during a 2006 interview with OPERA NEWS editor in chief F. Paul Driscoll. "But the real process of being drawn in to this world began during the year when I was first living in London, after finishing my university studies in Hull. I stayed with friends at their flat in London, and one of them was an opera coach. So all day long there would be a parade of singers going in and out of the apartment in order to meet with my friend to go over their music. As they were in singing in one room, I was trying to write in another — so I was sort of marinating in opera. That coach, by the way, was David Parry, who conducted the first performances of our Butterfly at English National Opera."

Minghella's Olivier Award-winning production of Madama Butterfly, which first arrived at the English National Opera in the fall of 2005, was eventually selected to open the Met's 2006-07 season, the first of Gelb's tenure. The production was choreographed by Minghella's wife, Carolyn Choa, who also served as its associate director. Notable for its naturalistic acting, lush color scheme and inventive use of Japanese theater techniques — most strikingly in its use of bunraku puppetry — Minghella's Butterfly proved a season-opening coup, warmly received by critics, the live audience at the Met, as well as simulcast audiences in Lincoln Center's plaza and Times Square. It was revived this season, and is due to play on the Met's stage next season as well.

Speaking of adapting himself to the operatic stage while directing Butterfly, Minghella said: "What was different [from directing a movie] was taking on this palimpsestic process, in which the work at hand has a century's worth of performing tradition and orthodoxies attached to it — orthodoxies that can be acknowledged but not necessarily observed. It was odd being asked by people, 'What are you going to do with it?' — which, I gather, is a fairly common question when one takes on these big works that have become classics in the opera house. But I'd have to be crazy to do anything other than tell the story. At the very least, trying to do something with Butterfly — to impose some kind of directorial conceit or tricks on a work that has such great integrity, and that has been beloved for so long — would have been a foolish act of presumption. The job for me is to tell the story, no matter where I am working. That purpose has been constant."

Release link: http://www.metoperafamily.org/operanews/news/pressrelease.aspx?id=1506