I have been in the film industry a long time, but I can’t remember such outpourings of sorrow and sadness and such a sense of colossal loss as has followed the sudden death of my friend Anthony Minghella.

Hugh Hudson, the director, telephoned me with the news. I squeezed my eyes together and shouted “No!” Apart from my close family, I can’t imagine reacting that way to anyone’s death. But this was a man of 54 whose work – Truly Madly Deeply, The English Patient, Cold Mountain and much more – had been among us for less than 20 years and promised us so many riches in the 20 years that should have followed.

I was due to have dinner with Anthony last week to thank him for his five years at the British Film Institute (BFI), but it was cancelled because he had “double booked”. Actually he had checked into Charing Cross hospital for an operation for a lump on his neck due to cancer of the throat and tonsils. He had also pulled out of appearing at a screening of his latest film, The No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, based on the books by Alexander McCall Smith set in Botswana, due to laryngitis, which many who knew him found odd.

The operation for the growth on his neck apparently went well and everyone was optimistic, but he suffered a haemorrhage and died at five o’clock on Tuesday morning.

The telephone began to ring off the hook: I stumbled to say something relevant and adequate to justify Anthony’s life and his impact on the world of film. “He was a brilliant director and beautiful man” is what I kept stammering. Others added to the elegiac deluge perhaps more eloquently, but the reaction was universally the same.

One obituary said he was Orson Welles, Harold Pinter, David Lean and Richard Attenborough all rolled into one. Certainly he had a Wellesian presence with his bald football of a head atop a portly figure, often draped in Johnny Cash black.

He had a graceful way with words: on occasion I heard him make impromptu speeches that sounded as though he were reading verses from Keats. His Oscar acceptance speech – when he was named best director for The English Patient in 1997 – had us all scurrying to the dictionary for the meaning of the word “uxorious”.

He was kind, gentle, thoughtful, generous and humble. Trite as these words might appear, I’m talking about someone in the film industry – a world where such attributes are far from plentiful.

Why did one man affect all of us who knew him so much? After all, Anthony’s six feature films are a desperately brief legacy and not all were received by critics with the good grace with which they were made.

His nascent career as an opera director has left us only with his sublime production of Madama Butterfly created for the English National Opera and, uniquely for an operatic parvenu, rapturously received at the Metropolitan Opera in New York.

As chairman of the UK Film Council it was my job to persuade Anthony to take over as chairman at the BFI five years ago. The BFI at the time was at a very low point and in desperate need of reorganisation and new leadership.

The problem was that Anthony was in Romania in the middle of shooting Cold Mountain. I dutifully took a plane to Bucharest and was driven deep into the Carpathian mountains for my rendezvous with the “Hollywood people” hidden in the snow. As the car climbed upwards, passing hay carts and gypsy encampments, I could see why he had chosen this untouched, almost medieval place as the location for his film.

Anthony had first been given Charles Frazier’s novel Cold Mountain by Michael Ondaatje, author of The English Patient. On reading the proof copy Anthony described it in his inimitable fashion: “The prose is like denim, made for work: serious, steadfast sentences which talk of the land, of loss, of a terrible damage to the country, the end of something . . . the flakes of snow fall in the pages with tragic consequences.”

Choosing Romania as a location rebounded on Anthony as the American film unions were mortified that such a quintessential story of the American civil war should be made in a country they had never heard of. In truth the film was made in Romania partly because it was cheaper and partly for creative reasons.

The enormous, staggeringly shot battle scenes that open the film would not have been economically possible in the States and the untouched, pristine, pine-clad mountain valley of Poina Brasov was a wonderful natural film set, allowing an uninterrupted 360-degree shooting vista without a Burger King in sight.

My Romanian driver dropped me where they were filming. It’s fair to say that no director is comfortable on another’s set. I tiptoed to hide behind the crew as Jude Law, on repeated takes, ran out of a log cabin. It was clear that Anthony didn’t work like me. You would have been hard pressed to know that he was even there.

He subtly and charmingly worked with the actors, cinematographer and script supervisor without ever raising his voice as he softly guided them – convinced them more than directed them – to the vision of the scene he had in his head. He stroked their faces, cuddled them, hushed their protests with a finger to the lips and kissed them on cheeks barely visible beneath woollen balaclavas.

That evening I had dinner with Anthony at his rented Romanian farmhouse in the skiing village of Zarnesti. He was watching his weight, which often yo-yoed up and down, and there was an enormous exercise bike in the lobby. For dinner we were served carp in brine and pickled cabbage.

Gracious as ever, Anthony effusively complimented the housekeeper when she cleared the plates, even though we had both struggled to eat anything. He said: “The food’s crap, but she’s a lovely lady and very good for my diet.”

He thought that the job at the BFI sounded like a poisoned chalice. It would put him in the firing line of the film press, the employees of the BFI, the film community and the anoraks who habitually attend the National Film Theatre.

He chewed his carp, spat outa bone and said: “Alan, I’ll do it.” And do it he did. He reorganised and refocused the organisation by appointing a new director, Amanda Nevill. He revitalised the board. He helped to put the BFI on a more realistic economic footing and paved the way for the precious film archives at Berkhamsted in Hertfordshire to be protected, digitised and made more accessible.

What’s astonishing is that he did all this while pursuing his busy career and just swatted away his BFI detractors by being honest, frank, realistic and giving them a cuddle.

His gift for getting on with people was honed early. His Italian-Scottish parents ran an ice-cream parlour on the Isle of Wight and his first encounter with film was selling ice-creams at the local cinema.

It might sound an underprivileged beginning. But ice-cream vendors? Of Italian origin? When did a British film-maker ever have such a romantic start? He maintained there was nevera book in the house and he relied on the local library. But he also said: “It was a blessed childhood in the sense that I had a wonderful family. I don’t resent the lack of cultural information I had asa child. It made me inquiring and curious. I’ve always imagined that you find your culture rather than receiving it on a plate.”

At the Minghella ice-cream parlour, after each of Anthony’s films, his mother would name an ice-cream after the latest opus. Cold Mountain was easy, but The No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency will be a bit of a mouthful. Ironically, The No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency is being shown on BBC1 for the first time tonight. He co-wrote it with Richard Curtis. It was a gruelling production, made entirely in Botswana, and was Anthony’s attempt to show a joyous, different Africa compared with the violence and sickness of much of the continent.

It is impossible to imagine the pain and loss that his wife Carolyn, daughter Hannah and son Max are feeling. The entire film industry, on both sides of the Atlantic, is grieving with them.