The English Patient | Plot, Cast, Awards, & Facts (2024)

The English Patient, British-American film, released in 1996, that won glowing reviews and nine Academy Awards, including that for best picture. It also won four BAFTA Awards, including best picture, as well as the Golden Globe Award for best drama.

(Read Martin Scorsese’s Britannica essay on film preservation.)

The movie is set in the years before and during World War II. In the opening scene, a small propeller airplane carrying a man and a woman is shot down over the desert. The man, badly burned, is rescued by Bedouins. Meanwhile, Hana (played by Juliette Binoche), a French Canadian nurse for the Allied forces in North Africa, loses her boyfriend and another friend to the war. The burn victim from the plane, who speaks English but remembers nothing of his past, is placed in Hana’s care in the ruins of a villa in Italy. Hana reads to him from his volume of Herodotus, which jogs his memory. His story is revealed in a series of flashbacks.

The patient is Count László de Almásy (Ralph Fiennes), a Hungarian cartographer who in the late 1930s is leading a Royal Geographical Society mapping and surveying expedition in Libya and Egypt with his English partner Madox (Julian Wadham). They are joined by a British couple, Geoffrey Clifton (Colin Firth) and his wife, Katharine (Kristin Scott Thomas). Almásy and Katharine fall in love, though at first they try to resist their feelings for each other. After they are trapped together in a car by a sandstorm, they begin an affair. Eventually, Geoffrey discovers the affair. Almásy makes an important archaeological find, a cave containing Neolithic lithographs called the Cave of Swimmers. When the war begins in 1939, the expedition is halted. Almásy packs up his camp at the Cave of Swimmers, expecting to be picked up by Geoffrey. When Geoffrey arrives in his airplane with Katharine, however, he tries to crash the plane into Almásy. Almásy is unhurt, but Geoffrey is killed and Katharine is badly injured. Almásy brings Katharine into the cave and then sets out on foot to seek help. When he reaches a British-held village, though, he is taken for a German spy and put on a train transporting German prisoners of war. He escapes from the train and trades the survey maps to German soldiers in return for help getting back to the cave. When he gets there in an airplane, he finds that Katharine has died. As he tries to fly out with Katharine’s body, his plane is shot down (the film’s first scene).

The flashback sequences are interspersed with events that take place in the villa. A Canadian intelligence agent, David Caravaggio (Willem Dafoe), arrives at the villa, seeking morphine as well as revenge; he believes that Almásy betrayed the Allies and led the Germans to Cairo. Caravaggio was taken prisoner by the Germans and tortured by having his thumbs cut off, and his questioning of Almásy elicits much of the story. Once he learns what happened, he is sympathetic. In addition, two soldiers, the British Sgt. Hardy (Kevin Whately) and a Sikh man called Kip (Naveen Andrews), arrive to clear the area of land mines, and Hana and Kip have a romance. In the end, Almásy dies, and the others depart.

The English Patient was adapted by Anthony Minghella from Michael Ondaatje’s 1992 novel of the same name; the novel was a winner of the 1992 Booker Prize. Minghella brought the book to the attention of producer Saul Zaentz and directed the film, which was noted for its beautiful photography as well as for its evocation of the themes of the novel on which it was based.

Production notes and credits

• Studios: Miramax Films and Tiger Moth Productions

• Director: Anthony Minghella

• Writer: Anthony Minghella (screenplay)

• Music: Gabriel Yared

• Cinematographer: John Seale

Cast

• Ralph Fiennes (Count László de Almásy)

• Juliette Binoche (Hana)

• Kristin Scott Thomas (Katharine Clifton)

• Colin Firth (Geoffrey Clifton)

• Julian Wadham (Madox)

• Willem Dafoe (David Caravaggio)

• Naveen Andrews (Kip)

Academy Award nominations (* denotes win)

• Picture*

• Lead actor (Ralph Fiennes)

• Lead actress (Kristin Scott Thomas)

• Supporting actress* (Juliette Binoche)

• Art direction*

• Cinematography*

• Costume design*

• Direction*

• Editing*

• Music*

• Sound*

• Writing