Juliet Stevenson pays tribute to Anthony Minghella
March 28th, 2008, 4:14 pm Hobbies Ideas
This is absolutely ghastly. As soon as I heard the news I fell apart and ever
since I%26rsquo;ve been staggering about trying to take it all in. The death of
people you know is always a shock but with Ant the particularly difficult
thing is that he was amazing at enabling and empowering everyone around him.
This random thing that seems to have killed him is impossible to imagine %26ndash;
as a writer and director he made things happen, he sorted things, he brought
out the best in people%26rsquo;s talents. So to have something as mad as this to end
all that doesn%26rsquo;t make sense.
When I think of Ant I think of him walking towards me, my heart opening up. It
didn%26rsquo;t matter how long it had been since our last conversation. He had held
it all, nothing was forgotten, almost as if some part of me was being
carried around by him. He did that for so many people. I remember his smile,
being bathed in it for the next few seconds or hours, this joyous exchange.
He was complicated, funny, challenging, never banal. Any encounter with him
was intensely rich.
Ant was sophisticated, intelligent and creative, both in his life and
everything around him. He was a huge person in so many people%26rsquo;s lives, he
was loved by so many people; and he fuelled that love with charm, and seemed
fuelled by charm in return. That was perhaps part of his Italian/English
upbringing: he was a big-hearted, passionate, tactile person. He would be
talking to you and rubbing your shoulder at the same time, but without any
sense he was invading your space. He was a great celebrator. And yet he had
a huge area of privacy reserved for his family life.
I%26rsquo;d known him for years, I was in the first play he directed for radio. I knew
him as a writer and how very different an existence that is to directing %26ndash;
he would lock himself away, be very solitary. It%26rsquo;s a lonely process that
requires great self-discipline. The obituaries so far have focused on his
directing; no one is talking about his writing and in my view he was one of
our greatest writers. In Truly, Madly, Deeply he understood that the
rhythms of human speech connect to complicated internal loss. The dialogue
is extraordinarily rhythmic, coming from the heart, head and the mouth. With
beautiful music, it%26rsquo;s the same thing: so many emotions can be elicited in
one movement. Ant understood that people write in sentences but rarely speak
or think in sentences and so wrote films that are complex maps of how we
experience ourselves, relationships and language. It was a great gift.
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