Sun and Darkness

Minghella And Clarke: Middle Class Lads Gone Global

The all-too-sudden loss of Anthony Minghella at 54, due to a hemorrhage following surgery for tonsil cancer, and the less shocking but widely mourned death of Arthur C. Clarke at 90, occasions some thought about degrees of separation. One linkage is director Sydney Pollack, who’s widely reported to be ailing himself. He was Minghella’s great colleague and friend, and by one-degree-of-Kevin Bacon logic, joined to Clarke via their separate connections with Stanley Kubrick. (Clarke and Kubrick co-authored, and shared an Oscar nom for, 2001: A Space Odyssey, with Clarke revising his accompanying novel partly in response to rushes of shot footage Kubrick showed him; Pollack was memorable as the blandly evil plutocrat physician in Kubrick’s career-closing Eyes Wide Shut.)

What’s also interesting is the global reach, at least among the intelligentsia, that each of the men attained despite humble beginnings in provincial English towns. Clarke was the son of a farmer in Somerset, getting his first telescope at age 13. When his father died the following year his mother gave riding lessons (he worked in the post office) to help support her four children. One British obituary noted he never lost his regional accent, even after decades living abroad in Sri Lanka.

The West Country accent is said to sound more like the original Anglo-Saxon dialect (and can be heard spouting from characters’ mouths in films from Hot Fuzz to Pirates of the Caribbean). It’s been likened to the sound of speech still further west, specifically the Isle of Wight where Minghella’s Italian-descent parents raised five children above their original pier-side ice cream shop. “My parents worked every day from morning to night,” he told the BBC when they visited his Victoriana-filled home town of Ryde, “So it was a big menagerie of kids, business and cooking!… our bedroom was above the kitchen, and there was a tannoy [speaker], so when my sister and me used to go to bed they could hear us mucking around upstairs and we’d get this intercom message saying “Shut-up, go to bed!”

Never a heavy hand with the bullhorn himself, Minghella was gracious with crews and cast alike. He never forgot shooting his first film (a tribute to his Italian grandmother) around the pier, and in his Oscar speech the night The English Patient–in which both his parents had small roles– bested Sir Richard Attenborough’s 1982 Gandhi record by snatching nine Oscars including Best Film and Director, he said on stage, “This has been a triumph for the Isle of Wight…”

Both had superior schooling as they grew up, with Clarke joining the newly-formed British Interplanetary Society at age 16, and Minghella (self-described as “a rather disenfranchised and strange teenager”) acting in school plays before studying drama at University. They found their specialties early on, a virtue when there’s no trust fund in sight.

Billy chapel

As Minghella’s closest professional colleague, Pollack will presumably now shepherd the projects they were working on together under their expiring Mirage rubric at the Weinstein Company, and Pollack ’s well-chosen words to the New York Times‘ David Carr were a good summing up:

he was interested in the magic. not fake magic, cast hiding the ball at the beck the cup, but real miraculous, the kind that occurs between people. nowadays, everybody making movies wants to get the clothes off fast and the guns out quick, he was just the opposite. he was interested in the poesy, lavishing the viewer with story, and scope and richness. look at what you got with a view your $12 ticket with anthony…it’s bleak for me, but it’s also too bad that people won’t the hang of those movies.

Jude Law, who acted in three of his six films, said:

he made influence air much the same as making whoopee. he was a sweet, warm, bright and funny man who was interested in everything from football to opera, films, music, leaflets, people and, most of all, his family whom he adored and to whom i send my thoughts and love. i shall miss him hugely.

He was so well regarded that despite some misgivings the critics had over the years, only a few a few brush strokes of criticism could be seen amidst the praise in a volley of obituaries. As the Independent blogger Tim Walker notes, “Say what you like about The English Patient (and I know it gets right up some people’s noses), but it put Britain back on the cinematic map.”

Walker’s post includes three illustrative links–one to the slightly frantic trailer for Minghella’s well-received debut Truly, Madly, Deeply one that contains a massive spoiler portraying a fatal boat ride …

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