The English Patient (1996)


Ralph Fiennes           Almasy
Juliette Binoche        Hana
Willem Dafoe            Caravaggio
Kristin Scott Thomas    Katharine Clifton
Naveen Andrews          Kip
Colin Firth             Geoffrey Clifton
Julian Wadham           Madox
Kevin Whately           Hardy
Clive Merrison          Fenelon-Barnes
Nino Castelnuovo        D'Agostino
Hichem Rostom           Fouad
Geordie Johnson         Oliver
Torri Higginson         Mary
Lisa Repo-Martell       Jan
Raymond Coulthard       Rupert Douglas
Philip Whitchurch       Corporal Dade
Lee Ross                Spalding

Directed by:    Anthony Minghella, Peter Markham
Produced by:    Matthew Plummer, Bob Weinstein, Harvey Weinstein


Set in North Africa and Italy during the late 1930's and early '40's, "The English Patient" is an epic drama 
of two haunting love stories that unfolds against a background of international upheaval. Through the prism 
of war, and of love and friendship, various themes -- of fidelity, adultery, nationality and betrayals -- are 
dramatized and explored. The story, based on Michael Ondaatje's Booker Prize-winning novel, is told elliptically, 
through the histories of four characters who find themselves in a ruined monastery in Italy at the end of 
World War II. Slowly they reveal themselves and, in the process, the true identity of the English patient -- 
the unknown survivor of a plane shot down over the Sahara who lies dying in the monastery -- is made clear. 
Passion fires these stories, whether it is the raw passion between lovers, or the compulsive passion which 
drives men to explore remote and inhospitable regions, or to pursue across time and countries those they think 
have wronged them. 

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Beginning in the 1930's, "The English Patient" tells the story of Count Almasy who is a Hungarian map maker 
employed by the Royal Geographical Society to chart the vast expanses of the Sahara Desert along with several 
other prominent explorers. As World War II unfolds, Almasy enters into a world of love, betrayal, and politics 
that is later revealed in a series of flashbacks while Almasy is on his death bed after being horribly burned 
in a plane crash.

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A burn victim, a nurse, a thief, and a sapper find themselves in each others company in an old Italian villa 
close to the end of World War II. Through flashbacks, we see the life of the burn victim, whose passionate love 
of a woman and choices he made for her ultimately change the lives of one other person in the villa. Not only 
is this film a search for the identity of the English patient, but a search for the identities of all the people 
in the quiet old villa.

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In a crumbling villa in WWII Italy, during the final days of the European campaign, a young, shell-shocked war 
nurse (Hana) remains behind to tend her doomed patient - a horribly burned pilot. Through the gradual unraveling 
of his life and the appearance of an old family friend (Caravaggio) and a young Sikh sapper (Kip), the question 
of identity is explored.

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The moving story of a Hungarian mapmaker and his dying memories of the romance that tragically alters his life. 
Burned horribly in a fiery plane crash while crossing the Sahara Desert during WWII, he is tended to by a Canadian 
nurse with ghosts of her own and haunted by a thief seeking answers for a crime from his past.