Add this to the ‘dearly departed way too soon’ column. The man who gave us film treasures as The English Patient, The Talented Mr Ripley and Truly Madly Deeply has died suddenly at the age of 54. Variety reports that the director died because he “suffered a brain hemorrhage” after “routine operation on
his neck”.
In recent years, the British filmmaker gave us a pair of underwhelming directorial efforts in Cold Mountain (2003) Breaking and
Entering (2006), but picked up the producer’s hat back in 2001 with Tom Tykwer’s Heaven and Catch A
Fire. He was currently producing The Reader and had optioned properties (with Sydney Pollack at Mirage) I Don’t
Know How She Does It, The Silver
Linings Playbook, The Amulet of Samarkand, The Ninth Life of Louis
Drax (a film which he was looking to direct as well) and finally a possible remake for The Lives of Others.
He had just completed shooting the BBC/HBO telepic No 1 Ladies Detective
Agency based on Alexander McCall Smith’s novel, which is going to premiere sometime this year with much fanfare and he was on board as director and producer for New York, je
t’aime but at this point I’m not sure if he even had time to start his short film contribution to the short film collection.
