He directed Truly, Madly, Deeply (1990), The English Patient (1996), The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), and Cold Mountain (2003), and produced Iris (2001).

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.

Early interests suggested a possible career as a musician,[6] with Minghella playing keyboards with local bands Earthlight and Dancer.

[9] Minghella's debut work was a stage adaptation of Gabriel Josipovici's Mobius the Stripper (1975) and it was his Whale Music (1985) that brought him notice.

[12] Truly, Madly, Deeply (1990), a feature drama written and directed for the BBC's Screen Two anthology strand, bypassed TV broadcast and instead had a cinema release.

1 Ladies' Detective Agency, which he co-wrote and directed, was broadcast posthumously on BBC One (23 March 2008) as a TV movie; watched by 6.3 million viewers.

He vocally supported I Know I'm Not Alone, a film of musician Michael Franti's peacemaking excursions into Iraq, Palestine and Israel.

The short film depicted Tony Blair and Gordon Brown working together and was criticised for being insincere: "The Anthony Minghella party political broadcast last year was full of body language fibs", said Peter Collett, a psychologist at the University of Oxford.

His last work was the screenplay of the film adaptation of the Tony Award-winning musical Nine (1982); Arthur Kopit (book) and Maury Yeston (score).

His home had two double bedrooms dedicated to the display of Portsmouth memorabilia dating back to the club's founding in 1898.

[18][19] Minghella died of a haemorrhage on 18 March 2008 in Charing Cross Hospital, Hammersmith, following an operation the previous week to remove cancer of the tonsils and neck.

[20][21] A memorial plaque to Minghella was unveiled on 2 March 2016 by Jude Law, at Western Gardens, Ryde, Isle of Wight.