Anthony Minghella Anthony Minghella Anthony Minghella, (6 January 195418 March 2008) was a British film director, playwright and screenwriter. He was chairman of the board of Governors at the British Film Institute between 2003 and 2007. He won the Academy Award for Best Director for "The English Patient" (1996). In addition, he received three more Academy Award nominations; he was nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay for both "The English Patient" (1996) and "The Talented Mr. Ripley" (1999), and was posthumously nominated for Best Picture for "The Reader" (2008), as a co-producer. Minghella was born in Ryde, on the Isle of Wight, an
Tom Ripley Tom Ripley Thomas "Tom" Ripley is a fictional character in a series of crime novels by American novelist Patricia Highsmith, as well as several film adaptations. The five novels in which he appears—"The Talented Mr. Ripley", "Ripley Under Ground", "Ripley's Game", "The Boy Who Followed Ripley", and "Ripley Under Water", published between 1955 and 1991—are referred to collectively as the "Ripliad". Highsmith introduced Tom Ripley in "The Talented Mr. Ripley" (1955) as a young man making a meager living as a con artist. The novel also supplies him with a back story: orphaned at age five when his parents drowned,