R.I.P.

Anthony Minghella (z''l), visionary director, has died of cancer at the tragically young age of 54 and Arthur C. Clarke (z''l), visionary author, has died at the ripe old age of 90. Both made sublime contributions to our arts and culture and both will be remembered as a blessing (zikhrono livrakha).

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/19/movies/19minghella.html

Anthony Minghella, the British filmmaker who won an Academy Award for his direction of “The English Patient,” died Tuesday morning in London from complications of surgery he had a week ago to treat tonsil cancer, said Leslee Dart, his publicist.

The son of parents who made ice cream on the Isle of Wight, off the coast of England, Mr. Minghella used expansive tastes in literature and a deep visual vocabulary to make lush films with complicated themes that found both audiences and accolades. Mr. Minghella’s films, which also included “Breaking and Entering” (2006), “The Talented Mr. Ripley” (1999) and “Cold Mountain” (2003), used a careful eye for cultural and historical detail to explore ways in which the dynamics of class often pushed people into corners that they had to fight or scheme their way out of.

Mr. Minghella recently completed work on “The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency,” an adaptation of an Alexander McCall Smith novel, which was filmed in Botswana, in southern Africa, for HBO, and the BBC as the pilot of a series. He recently stepped down from his position as chairman of the British Film Institute, an organization that promotes making films in Britain.

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/03/arthur_c_clarke.html

As a writer, Arthur C Clarke stood alongside Robert A Heinlein and Issac Asimov as one of the fathers of the science fiction genre. Although best known for 2001: A Space Odyssey, famously adpated for film by Stanley Kubrick, Clarke had the prolific output common to many science fiction writers of the era, authoring over thirty novels and thirteen collections of short fiction in a career of over five decades.

But Clarke was also the author of at least forty non-fiction publications, covering deep space exploration, the communications revolution, fractal mathematics and a host of other subjects across the sciences, demonstrating a mind that was as flexible and imaginative as it was intellectually rigorous. He is often credited as having propagated the concept of geostationary satellites, without which modern global communications would be impossible. He also became a noted deep sea researcher, widely acclaimed for his work on the Great Barrier Reef. And while he never have realised his dream to journey into space himself, he was present alongside Walter Cronkite as a commentator on the Apollo moonlanding.