Eulogy for Anthony
Remember the way he pinched your arm or massaged your shoulders?
It was great. And it hurt a bit afterwards.
I feel like that now. Like I’ve been massaged by this great, great guy. Loved by him. Touched by him, literally and metaphorically. Now he’s gone and I’m nursing the bruises.
What do you say, what do I say, in a few minutes, that can possibly do justice to a life so rich?
What’s surprising about Ant is what you can’t say. What you can’t quite put your finger on.
It’s not that there are secrets. I don’t think he had any. Except maybe volunteering for the Samaritans. And I think that was only hush hush because he knew we would try and ring in to speak to him, feigning suicidal tendencies in the hope of actually getting him on the phone.
Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised that words elude me. Anthony even wrote a play about how useless words can be, Cigarettes and Chocolate. A play about this noise we make – talking – and how redundant it can be.
I certainly don’t know what noises to make today. Like the character in his play, I feel like giving up words for Lent.
The words could never be grand enough, on the one hand, because on a day like today, good things are said about even the worst of men. And Anthony was the very best of men.
And on the other hand it feels like the little stories we have in the family, of Ant at three playing his home-made guitar at the top of the stairs, or Ant as a teenager skiving from school, or Ant saying ‘just because’, ‘just because’ whenever he was in trouble…. those stories feel too humble. They do him a disservice. They’re interesting only because, in their cuteness or ordinariness, they sit at odds with the man he went on to become.
So what good are the words in this situation? They give us banal tributes or inappropriate anecdotes. And not much in between.
But maybe it’s in the “in between” that the real Ant resided. He was great. He was a genius. But he was also a person; human, flawed, gorgeous and infuriating. His presence blessed you and his absence bruised you. But they were both part of him. The presence and the absence, the giftedness and the ordinariness, the genius and the humanity, the private and the public – they were all him, and coming to terms with that is tricky.
I think we were so swept along by the perpetual motion of him and his career that we haven’t yet put it all together. I guess we thought we had time; I guess we were expecting a whole other reel in the film of his story. Two reels. Or, knowing Anthony’s films, several reels.
We can only imagine how those extra chapters might have gone, and we haven’t had the time, and we haven’t yet worked out what this incredible life was all about, what it meant, how it might have felt to be him, so talented, so successful and yet so inexorably driven, so loving and so beloved, so perpetually absent, so hilariously a resident of the aeroplane. It feels like we loved him, we adored him, we worshipped him… but we haven’t yet got the measure of him.
Maybe next Easter will be the time, like in his play, for giving up words. For contemplation. And silence. Maybe we’ll understand more then.
But for now, we have to make a start, with the inadequate words and the still-raw emotions that are available to us.
He used to advise his daughter, Hannah, if in doubt, trust yourself, bet on yourself. I’m in doubt now. So I’m following that advice. I’m betting on my feelings, in the hope that they’ll resonate with yours.
And in that spirit, I’m going to tell you why I loved him.
I loved Anthony for his music
he was so full of song
always
I loved the music he wrote – it’s printed, indelibly, on my heart – songs like
We Didn’t Call It Love
Woman to woman
Is It For The Worse, This Change In Me?
America Wood
to name but a few
I loved the music he loved
and the way he loved it;
the great discoveries he shared over the years, like gifts –
John Martyn
Keith Jarrett
Michael Franti
sometimes they were literally gifts, like when he bought everybody
Vivaldi’s Stabat Mater
and the Matthew Passion on LP.
And the Goldberg Variations seem to me to belong more to Ant than they do to Bach or Glenn Gould
And I loved the way he celebrated the musicians and composers he worked with,
like
Gabriel Yared
Barrington Pheloung
Guy Barker
to name but a few
I loved Anthony
– of course – for the words he gave us
A great sea of them, a great tide of Ant wisdom
Essays on words – like the incredible Cigarettes and Chocolate
Celebrations of words, like the beautiful Storyteller series
I loved his trademark turns of phrase, his rosary of touchstones –
remember his penchant for the ‘epiphany’?
or the ‘litany’ of sorries
or ‘sins of commission and omission’?
He could construct, and get away with, the most abstruse sentences;
when I think of his words I smile
I want to lie back in them like a bath
to soak myself in a pathology of appertinances
to rejoice in plangent uxoriousness.
I loved his incredible ear for dialogue, his mastery of the unfinished sentence
his brilliant, breathtaking juxtaposition of pain and comedy
And not just his work, but that of others –
I loved the way he shared the poets and the poetry he discovered
Pablo Neruda, Maura Dooley, Michael Ondaatje, Ray Carver, CK Williams
to name but a few
I loved Anthony for his love of pictures, photographers, cinematographers
and I loved – of course – his own explorations, into the moving image
I remember watching the first playout of the English Patient with him and Duncan Kenworthy, it was about 5 and half years long and Duncan and I thought he had officially lost the plot; when it finished, we just shook our heads and said – What are you going to do?
He knew what to do.
And I’m so proud.
Because what became clear was that he was a visual poet as well as a wordsmith
And for me his films were the definition of moving pictures –
not just the EP, but also Truly Madly
and Ripley
to name but a few
I loved Anthony,
speaking of uxoriousness, for his love of family
he adored Carolyn, his wife, his precious Ding, who went on his journey with him, who tolerated him – a forbearance, by the way, which amazed him and for which he was frequently, vocally, so grateful.
He used to say it was hard to be married to a Minghella
and in that simple statement was his ‘sorry’
was his ‘thank you’
was his ‘I love you’
to Carolyn.
He loved his stunning children, Hannah and Max
what finer testament to Anthony than these two marvels of brains, beauty, charm and nous beyond their years?
He was one of five siblings, and the five of us shared something so unique and precious, it defined us all including him, in a way I can’t begin to describe.
I think I want to just say the names of the five: Gioia. Anthony. Edana. Loretta. And me.
Last, and hardly least, he was so proud of his parents, Edward and Gloria. He told me he inherited his intelligence and his warmth from them; our Dad’s integrity, our mum’s love of words, our Dad’s vice-like grip, their combined determination and ambition. He took them wherever he went, he put them in every movie – and the rest of the time, he called them, literally, daily.
He shared every beat of his success with them. He loved them.
He loved us all. Palpably, generously, extraordinarily.
It wasn’t just immediate family, of course.
I loved Anthony
for his love of others.
Every new person in his life, unit driver or world leader, was a gem,
to be delighted in, to be celebrated, to be nurtured
to be awarded a place in the family of his heart
so that he carried with him an army not just of real siblings but of acquired ones too
plumber brothers
politician sisters
sparks and stars
a democracy of devotees
I’m not going to list the names of the great and the good, but you’re here, and you know
his delight in you was genuine and that, like us, you really were his family- because in some ways, when he was at work, when he was on a set, he was most at home – so
the Juliets, the Judes, the Ralphs, the Renees – oh Lord I’m doing it now and it’s going to land me in hot water because this really is to name but a few – the Kristens, the Alans, the Matts, the Juliettes, the Brigittes, the Sydneys, the Tims, the Duncans, the Harveys, the Tonys, the Tessas and the Gordons, yes, you really were his brothers and sisters too
and his lovely crew in the office – Karen, Natalie, Caroline and Cassius – family
and of course, in a category of fabulousness all their own, Johnny and Amir – family
we really are one big family united by him, defined by him, made special by him
Maybe that was his biggest gift, bigger even than his creative talent:
his capacity to make us special
to augment
to make everything warmer
more meaningful
more joyful
somehow, with Ant around, everything mattered more,
everything was in sharper focus
the world was just better coloured in.
I loved Anthony because he eked out the best in each of us, reflected it back at us,
he showed us who we could be –
his integrity, it became our integrity
his wisdom, our wisdom
his passion, our passion
his big heart, our big hearts.
These are his gifts
to name but a few
And you know something? I STILL love Anthony
and I’m sorry I don’t think next Easter or any time soon I’m going to want to shut up about him
I think there are going to be more and more words
a torrent
the torrent
ever more beautiful
because his legacy exists in all of us
his near, his dear and his chosen ones
he is here, as Hannah says, in the spaces between us, in the connections between us
Anthony, husband, son, father, brother, is with us in so many ways
his spirit is the ‘happy wanderer’ among us, cajoling us still to be the best possible versions of ourselves.
because if ever a spirit managed to be bigger than a mere body, it was Ant’s
if ever a spirit could leap the physical boundaries
if ever a spirit could break the rules and inhabit other people
swim up them like rivers
it was Ant’s
it IS Ant
who touches us, squeezes us, bruises us
marks us indelibly, crosses our borders
so that we are his country
we are the real countries
and he’s waving, like one of his own characters, like Jamie, on the other side of the glass, watching us, knowing we have to grieve, but willing us to move on.
Forgive me for one last list, the list of ways in which Anthony Minghella is still with us:
really
truly
madly
deeply
passionately
remarkably
to name
but a few.
Dominic Minghella
Saturday 5 April 2008