Early life – Anthony Minghella, MBE

Minghella was born on the Isle of Wight, the son of Gloria and Edward Minghella, ice cream factory owners. His father was Italian/Scottish and his mother came from Leeds; her ancestors originally came from Valvori, a small village in the Lazio region of central Italy. Minghella attended Sandown Grammar School and St John's College (Portsmouth). He is a graduate of the University of Hull, where he completed undergraduate and graduate courses, but eventually abandoned his doctoral thesis.

Career

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.^[2] He made his directorial debut with a double 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. In 2007, he was co-writing and directing the film, The No 1 Ladies Detective Agency.

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. The Anthony Minghella Theatre at Quay Arts Centre on the Isle of Wight is named in his honour. He is Chairman of the British Film Institute.

Personal life

Minghella was married to Hong Kong-born choreographer Carolyn Choa. His brother, Dominic, is also a successful scriptwriter, and his son, Max, is an actor. His sister Edana is currently involved in a Jazz event on the Isle of Wight, and his nephew Dante is one of the participants in Channel 4's Child Genius series.

He was a big Portsmouth FC fan and appeared in the Channel 4 documentary Hallowed Be Thy Game.

Whale Music

These quotes are from the Introduction to Anthony Minghella: Plays 1.

“I find myself in similar thrall to the theatre as I do to Catholicism. It informs a great deal of what I think and do – like it or not; I find it hard to practice, increasingly marginalised, excluding, often infuriating. Then once in a while I experience an epiphany, some small miracle, which excites a spate of consuming evangelism. Perhaps it is beyond the scope of a brief introductory note to wrestle with such dilemmas – what is theatre for? Who is it for? What is the appropriate relationship between the dramatist and the community. But I do know that these lumbering and clumsy debates obscure my vision when I try to settle with a play as writer, and often as audience.”

“It has often seemed to me that there are two kinds of writer at least: those who understand the world and tell us about it; and those who don’t understand the world and share their confusion with the audience. I have always admired the first group and resided in the second. And I can identify in each of the plays in this volume a question or a problem or a puzzle which informs and orders the material. In Whale Music I tried to make sense in my own mind of some of the issues surrounding an unplanned and unwanted pregnancy. A Little Like Drowning was prompted by a conundrum in my family history, where my grandfather appeared to have maintained a loving relationship with two women over the larger part of his life.”

“But these issues, along with the perennial concerns of style and mechanism and beauty in play-making, exercised me less than the attempts, however rudimentary, to create a world of feeling, to emulate what I have responded to in the work of others: moments of insight which enlarge upon the narrow range of direct experience possible for any of us. And here, with the obligation to be accurate, is where drama acquires something like a moral responsibility. The world offered back to the audience, be it magical, funny or tragic, had better be scrupulous: or else, like Flute’s Thisbe in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, we kiss the wall’s hole and not the lips at all. Which is why the theatre – of all the dramatic media least disposed to adornment or mediation, roughest, live, and the harshest arena of judgement – is finally the one I most respect, most care for, and most fear.”

The Play

Caroline is pregnant. Was the father Robin or John? Does it matter? Should she have the baby, or not? Should she keep the baby, or not? “I didn’t know there was an easy way out. If there had been I would have grabbed it.”

The play is about the relationships amongst the women in the play – there are eight. Caroline has come back to the Isle of Wight where she was born, to be near her best friend, Fran. Caroline rents a room with Stella who has a flat on the sea front at Ryde. Then Kate, her former schoolteacher, who is in love with Caroline, comes for her 21^st birthday – and brings D, her new protégée with her. This is a close and intimate play, especially well suited to our studio and it will be performed “in the round”. The play runs at the Maskers Studio in Emsworth Road, Shirley, Southampton from Monday, May 19 until Saturday, May 24, starting at 7:30.

I have set the play in the 1980’s when it was originally performed. That gave me and the Sound Designer plenty of opportunities to add bits of nostalgic music from Sinéad O’Connor, Tina Turner, R.E.M, Alison Moyet, and so on. To book your seats, and remember we can only seat 45 per performance, call Christine Baker on 023 8055 1489. An absolute bargain at £5.00 per ticket.

Sadly Anthony Minghella died today, March 18^th, 2008. I had hoped to invite him to our show – he lived near Stockbridge. We hope he would have enjoyed our production.