Anthony Minghella

A director, writer and producer, Minghella won a Bafta award for best original script for his first film, Truly Madly Deeply (1990). It was an intimate little tale of a grieving woman (Juliet Stevenson) still haunted by her dead partner's spirit (Alan Rickman). It was overshadowed by Ghost, which had a similar storyline, but was a minor international hit and got Minghella noticed.

After The English Patient, which won nine Oscars in all, Minghella became one of Hollywood's preferred directors of big period dramas.

The Talented Mr Ripley (1999) gave him another major hit, though the civil war film Cold Mountain (2003) struggled to recoup its huge budget. Minghella used Romania to double for the United States in an attempt to save money, but the decision prompted considerable controversy and anger in the US.

Minghella featured prominently in an ongoing and slightly schizophrenic debate about the nature of British cinema, with many commentators preferring the austere contemporary dramas of Ken Loach to the grand historical and geographical sweep of Minghella. His detractors saw his films as overblown and old-fashioned.

When he did tackle a rather smaller, contemporary British drama, Breaking and Entering (2006) he fell flat on his face, both commercially and critically. Law played a rich London architect who follows a thief home and then begins an unlikely affair with his Bosnian refugee mum (Juliette Binoche).

But Minghella clearly was not prepared simply to rest on his laurels. Later work ranged from opera to a party election broadcast for the Labour Party. This probably attracted more criticism than anything, much of it focused on the insincere performances by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown as the central couple, supposedly truly, madly, deeply in love with each other, but convincing no-one.

Minghella was born on the Isle of Wight in 1954 to a Scots/Italian father and a mother from Leeds.

His parents had their own ice-cream business, but Minghella showed little enthusiasm for the idea of a life selling cones and wafers.

An early interest in drama was nurtured by his English teacher, Gareth Pritchard, who directed Minghella in school plays. Minghella later singled him out for thanks in his Oscar speech. Coincidentally Mr Pritchard died earlier this month.

Minghella played keyboards in a rock band before going to Hull University, where he studied and then taught drama. In the mid-1980s, he became a script editor and writer on the BBC children's school drama Grange Hill. Around the same time, his plays were beginning to attract attention and he picked up a couple of awards from the London Theatre Critics Circle Award.

He wrote for Inspector Morse (1987-90), for the award-winning Jim Henson series The Storyteller (1988) and Living with Dinosaurs (1989), before his film career kicked off with Truly Madly Deeply.

Hollywood hired him for another romantic drama, Mr Wonderful (1993). The English Patient was his third film. He adapted Michael Ondaatje's novel, as well as directing it.

Ralph Fiennes and Kristin Scott Thomas are the lovers whose romance is threatened by the Second World War and a vengeful husband (Colin Firth). When Scott Thomas's character is badly hurt, Fiennes leaves her in a cave and goes for help. But his plane is shot down and he loses both his good looks and his memory in the resulting fire.

It was shot in Italy and Tunisia, and cost an estimated $27m but grossed 10 times that on its initial cinema release.

Minghella does not rely on pretty locations, but effectively interweaves complex story strands, managing to translate the poignancy and fatalism of the original novel to the big screen.

As well as writing and directing films, he served as producer on several others, including Iris (2001), The Quiet American (2002) and Michael Clayton (2007), for which Tilda Swinton recently won an Oscar.

The No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency prompted as much interest as any of his films, partly because the budget and the scale of the project was huge by BBC standards, and also because of the strong Scottish connection.

Minghella and co-writer Richard Curtis adapted it from the novel by Alexander McCall Smith, who was born in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), but lives in Edinburgh.

McCall Smith's fiction has little in common with the detective fiction of Sherlock Holmes, being more interested in local colour than forensic science. The central character is a full-figured, female black African detective.

Minghella is survived by his wife, the Hong Kong-born choreographer Carolyn Choa. She had worked on several of his films and appeared in Truly, Madly, Deeply in a supporting role as the translator. His brother, Dominic Minghella, is also a screen-writer, whose credits include Hamish Macbeth and Robin Hood. His son, Max, is an actor and he also leaves a daughter, Hannah.