Anthony Minghella graduated from writing for Grange Hill, EastEnders and the British stage to big-budget Hollywood epics, winning an Oscar in 1997 as Best Director for the wartime love story The English Patient. Though he directed only six feature films — and Jude Law starred in three of them — he wrote and produced several others, and made an indelible mark on British and international cinema.

Minghella prompted considerable debate on the direction and nature of British cinema. His detractors saw films such as The English Patient and the American Civil War drama Cold Mountain (2003) as old-fashioned, as throwbacks to the cinema of David Lean, and they were sceptical about his association with Hollywood and his taste for big budgets.

The English Patient was only his third feature film. Oddly enough, the first, Truly Madly Deeply (1990), the story of a woman (Juliet Stevenson) and her dead partner’s ghost (Alan Rickman), was admired by critics for its sense of intimacy, but it was overshadowed by Ghost, which had a similar storyline, bigger stars and a bigger budget.

The scale and the lush, foreign locations that subsequently attracted derision from some were the very elements that appealed to others. The English Patient was an old-fashioned epic story that played out in various bright, exotic settings (rather than the fashionably gritty northern streets of a Ken Loach movie). But Minghella did not rely on pretty locations to carry his film, and effectively interwove complex story strands and managed to translate the poignancy and fatalism of the original Michael Ondaatje novel to the big screen.

Minghella was to some extent a successor to Lean, but he also showed a penchant for crime drama and had a major hit with The Talented Mr Ripley (1999), with Matt Damon as the amoral impostor who inveigles his way into the lives of rich socialites, played by Law and Gwyneth Paltrow.

Recently Minghella had returned to crime fiction, and to television, for a feature-length pilot episode for The No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, which was adapted from the novel by Alexander McColl Smith and will be broadcast on BBC One on Sunday night. The central character is a full-figured, Black African detective. The stories have little in common with Sherlock Holmes, being more interested in local colour than serious criminality. Minghella shot on location in Botswana, and the crew reportedly had to construct electric fences to protect the cast from possible animal attack.

Anthony Minghella was born on the Isle of Wight in 1954. His ancestors were predominantly Italian, and his parents have an ice-cream business. Minghella showed little interest in following them into the business. An early enthusiasm for drama was nurtured at Fairway Grammar School, in Sandown, on the Isle of Wight, by Gareth Pritchard, who taught English and directed Minghella in school plays. Minghella thanked him in his Oscar acceptance speech. Pritchard died this month.

Minghella played keyboards in a rock band before going to Hull University, where he studied and then taught drama. He began in television not as a writer or director, but as a runner (general assistant) on Magpie, the cool ITV alternative to Blue Peter, and in the mid-1980s he became a script editor and writer on Grange Hill, the BBC’s school soap that had been praised for its realism and was by that time well established.

His plays were also beginning to have some impact. In 1984 he won the London Theatre Critics Circle Award as the most promising new playwright, for A Little Like Drowning, Love Bites and Two Planks and a Passion; in 1986 he won the Critics Circle award for best new play for Made in Bangkok; and in 1988 he won the Prix d’Italia for his radio play Hang Up.

He wrote several episodes of Inspector Morse (1987-90) and the entire run for the Bafta-winning series The Storyteller (1988). John Hurt played the old storyteller, introducing weird tales that served as a vehicle for the creations of the legendary puppeteer Jim Henson. Minghella and Henson worked together again on another award-winner, Living with Dinosaurs (1989).

Truly Madly Deeply (1990), which Minghella wrote and directed, was made by the BBC, essentially for television, but it also became a modest international cinema hit. It brought Minghella a Bafta award for best original screenplay and led directly to The English Patient, with an international cast that included Ralph Fiennes and Kristin Scott Thomas as the couple whose love affair is threatened by war and a vengeful husband. 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. Colin Firth was the cuckolded husband; Willem Dafoe was a thumbless man trying to track down the man he thinks betrayed him; Juliette Binoche played the nurse who cared for the anti-hero of the title; and Naveen Andrews her lover.

It was shot in Italy and Tunisia, cost an estimated $27 million and grossed around ten times that on its initial cinema release. It won nine Oscars and six Baftas, including Best Picture in each case, and turned Minghella into Hollywood’s director of choice for big-scale, exotic, period dramas.