A Requiem for Anthony Minghella, a short story from 30 Years, 30 Stories
By Andreja Brulc
AlI I ever wanted is a world without maps.
– Count Almásy, in The English Patient (1992) by Michael Ondaatje
The 30th anniversary of diplomatic relations between the United Kingdom and Slovenia and the presence of the British Council in independent Slovenia coincides with 30 years of my living in the UK and it being 30 years since I met Anthony Minghella (1954–2008) for the first time. Anthony, the Oscar-winning filmmaker and a citizen of the world, inspired and encouraged me to follow my heart into creative work.
In the autumn of 1992, I started working for Anthony and his wife, Carolyn Choa, a dancer and choreographer, looking after their seven-year-old son, Max – now following his father’s footsteps into the film industry, his talent recently shining through in his performance in the recent television adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid's Tale. Both Anthony and Carolyn were children of immigrant ancestry – Italian and principally Cantonese Chinese respectively. They understood the surreal and disconcerting experience I had when entering the United Kingdom through the port of Dover in 1991 where I was classified as a refugee from war-torn Yugoslavia, and they helped me get through it emotionally, for which I am hugely grateful.
At the time, Anthony was writing the script for The English Patient, which was released in 1996. A grand-scale romantic drama set just before and during World War II based on a 1992 novel by Michael Ondaatje, it won nine Oscars out of eleven nominations, with Anthony himself winning as best director. Anthony wrote in an attic room full of well-ordered books and recorded music – which he often listened to while writing – and surrounded by artworks he had collected. I remember how he often struggled in the mornings after having spent countless nights burning the midnight oil writing the script in his notebook – an experience that has years later become all too familiar to me whenever I have to overcome mental blocks on how to solve design problems while working in my sketchbooks. I helped him overcome his writing obstacles with cups of my strong Turkish coffee and what Anthony called the best bowls of Italian spaghetti bolognese ever, followed by a delicious English apple crumble topped with custard or ice cream. This was high praise from someone of Italian ancestry whose parents made themselves famous by producing Minghella ice cream on the Isle of Wight. The kitchen was an important space in making The English Patient.
The Minghellas were a close and extended family, and I met many of them. When Anthony was away for work, as he was regularly, he would call every day to chat to Max and often to me to see how everything was getting along. After his trip to the Academy Awards in Los Angeles, Anthony returned with an Apple laptop. It was both the first laptop and the first Apple computer I had seen, and at the time seemed almost unimaginably expensive! However, in the end, to aid my MA in Art History at University College London, I was inspired to track down something a little more affordable, which was paid for by my earnings from many overnight sleepovers looking after Max while his mother was visiting Anthony on film sets in Tunisia and Italy. During these times, the Apple laptop served Max and me as an essential tool for playing games after school, although now such a machine has become my main tool for both work and life. My favourite game, introduced to me by Max, was Mahjong solitaire – a game I later passed on to my niece when she reached the same age.
The Minghella household was what one might call a world family, and was regularly visited by A-list film stars. My jaw would drop as they filed through the front door unexpectedly. One night Max shouted through the four-storey house, “Andredža” (which was what he and Anthony uniquely called me with the unpronounceable “j” in my name) “come down and meet the man you fancy!” It was perhaps the most embarrassing moment in my life – I had told Max I fancied Julian Sands having seen him in A Room with a View. Julian was just as embarrassed! Indeed, I might have fancied many of the glamorous men who came through the door, including Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, Jude Law and many of the cast of The English Patient. But perhaps the ones that impressed me most were Alan Rickman and Juliet Stevenson, the heroes of Truly, Madly, Deeply (1990), a film I loved, set entirely in the neighbourhood I would later live in.
I recently produced a wall installation, Tales of Two Cities, a specially created project for the France Balantič Library in Kamnik (as part of the international exhibition of contemporary art Expect the Unexpected (ETU 22) put on by ArtKam). Playing on the somewhat clichéd title borrowed from the novel by Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities – a book I read on Anthony’s recommendation – my artwork is an experimental “cartographic” journey representing two places, the small Slovene town Kamnik and London, in which I have woven my stories based on memories and experiences of the town where I grew up and of the city of my residence as an adult. Like one of the lead characters in The English Patient, the Hungarian cartographer Count László de Almásy, employed in the 1930s by the Royal Geographical Society to draw maps of the Sahara in pencil, I render my two maps, but in yarn. The visual representation of each place, consisting of multiple crocheted circles, each different in size and colour, stitched together following the outline of each map, is my imagination of mapmaking, a vision of a multicultural world without borders. Like The English Patient, the fragmented and fragile installation symbolically and metaphorically plays with the concept of identity and nationality. The installation is a therapeutic project, a reconciliation in combining Kamnik and London, my past and present, and the question of the future and to what extent I want the feeling of displacement as a newcomer and foreigner in both countries.
Today, looking back, I am extremely fortunate that I met Anthony in the year of my migration to the United Kingdom, as he became a role model for values I have started to appreciate in my adopted country. Like me, he was a pacifist and feminist, as well as a humanist who hated misanthropy more than anything. He was full of wit and generosity, and the warmest, kindest and most genuine person I ever met. Without him and his wife, I would not have achieved what I have become. In 1996, upon completion of my MA, I was offered the job of PA to Anthony, but by then my eyes were fully set on pursuing a career in the art world – which had been my ambition since my first visit to London in the summer of 1986. A few years later, while working on exhibitions at the Royal Academy of Arts, where I spent more than ten years, I attended life drawing classes for staff after work. On the very first night of the class, I remembered what Anthony had meant when he had said that I should follow my heart. The act of drawing reminded me of my childhood and how much I had enjoyed producing arts and crafts at school. It was that night that I made up my mind that working in a creative field was above all what I wanted. I soon went on to enrol in part-time professional training in design and illustration at the London College of Communications for two years.
When my hardback book designs for a literary publishing house from Ljubljana, for whom I worked from London for ten years, were launched in 2007, a Slovene journalist called me “a British talent with a Balkan temperament”. So, here I am, 30 years on, living in no man’s land, a Slovene patient who grew up in Yugoslavia that no longer exists, and a British patient feeling like Count Almásy who says, “AlI I ever wanted is a world without maps.”
I learned of the death of Anthony by an SMS from my sister in the morning just before a meeting at my publisher in Ljubljana. I do not remember how the meeting went.
Andreja Brulc (1968) is a British-Slovene graphic designer, illustrator, art maker, art historian, exhibition curator, educator, and children’s workshop facilitator. She has 25 years of involvement in the design and art worlds, including working for the Slovene literary publisher Beletrina and in the Exhibitions Department at the Royal Academy of Arts. Her designs and illustrations have won awards, her illustrations have been presented at many international individual and group shows, and she has worked on a number of art projects. She is currently completing her first children’s picture book as both writer and illustrator.
The project, marking 30 Years of Diplomatic Relations between the UK and Slovenia, was commissioned by the British Council in Slovenia. It was originally published in Slovene by RTV SLO (Kultura/Knjige), MMC RTV Slovenia, and later on as an e-book by Istros Books, London.
