Anthony Minghella ✝

Anthony Minghella, CBE (6 January 1954 – 18 March 2008) was a British film director, playwright and screenwriter. He was chairman of the board of Governors at the British Film Institute between 2003 and 2007. He won the Academy Award for Best Director for The English Patient (1996). In addition, he received three more Academy Award nominations; he was nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay for both The English Patient and The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), and was posthumously nominated for Best Picture for The Reader (2008), as a producer. Minghella was born in Ryde, on the Isle of Wight, an island off the south coast of England that is a popular holiday resort. His family are well known on the Island, where they ran a café in Ryde until the 1980s and have run an eponymous business making and selling Italian-style ice cream since the 1950s. His parents were Edoardo Minghella (an Italian immigrant) and Leeds-born Gloria Alberta (née Arcari). His mother's ancestors originally came from Valvori, a small village in southern Lazio, Italy. He was one of five children, his sisters Gioia Minghella-Giddens, Edana Minghella and Loretta Minghella, and a brother Dominic Minghella who would also become a screenwriter and producer.