49 Fun Facts About The English Patient

Who directed The English Patient?

Anthony Minghella wrote the screenplay as well. On Oscar night he won Best Director, but his script was nominated and lost.

Who wrote the 1992 novel The English Patient, on which the film is based?

Michael Ondaatje stayed close to the production, and grew so absorbed in how the film was cut that he later published a book of his conversations with its editor.

Who plays the burned title character in The English Patient?

Ralph Fiennes was nominated for an Oscar as the patient, yet on a night when the film swept the board he was one of its few nominees to go home empty-handed.

Which actress plays the nurse Hana in The English Patient?

Juliette Binoche won an Oscar as Hana. In a famous scene she is hoisted on a rope through a torch-lit church, swinging up to the frescoes on its walls.

Who plays Katharine Clifton in The English Patient?

Kristin Scott Thomas was the director's choice. His refusal to swap her for a bigger star was reportedly the flash point that made the film's first studio walk away.

In the film The English Patient, how does the title character get so badly burned?

His plane is shot down over the desert by German gunners, and the fire leaves him burned beyond recognition, which is why nobody at the hospital can say who he is.

In The English Patient, the patient's only possession is a copy of which ancient work?

Herodotus's Histories: he has packed the old book with his own notes and keepsakes, and when Hana reads to him from it, his lost memories begin to come back.

What is Hana's nationality in the film The English Patient?

French-Canadian: Hana nurses with the Canadian army. After the war kills her boyfriend and a close friend, she settles in a bombed-out monastery to care for her dying patient alone.

In The English Patient, what is Kip's job in the British Army?

Sapper clearing mines: Kip, a Sikh lieutenant, turns up with Sergeant Hardy to clear the mines and booby traps the Germans left around the monastery, and he and Hana fall in love.

In The English Patient, which body parts did Caravaggio lose under German interrogation?

His thumbs were cut off while he was a prisoner of the Germans. He reaches the monastery hunting the man he blames, then gives up on revenge once he has heard the patient's story.

Who plays Caravaggio in The English Patient?

Willem Dafoe plays the intelligence agent who turns up at the monastery bent on revenge, and whose questions slowly draw the patient's hidden past out of him.

In The English Patient, what nationality is Count Almásy?

Hungarian: he is taken for an Englishman only because of the way he speaks. He is really Count László Almásy, a character based on a real desert explorer.

In The English Patient, which ancient site does Almásy discover in the desert?

The Cave of Swimmers is a real rock shelter in the Egyptian Sahara, named for painted figures that seem to be swimming. In the film it is also where Almásy carries the injured Katharine.

In The English Patient, what gift does Almásy buy Katharine in Cairo?

A silver thimble: long after she has ended the affair he finds her gravely injured and sees it still hanging at her neck, and she tells him she has always loved him.

In The English Patient, how does Geoffrey Clifton try to kill Almásy?

By flying his plane at him: Geoffrey has found out about the affair and means to kill all three of them. Almásy jumps clear, Geoffrey dies in the crash and Katharine is badly hurt.

In The English Patient, the British at El Tag arrest Almásy as a suspected what?

Spy: he has walked three days across the desert to reach them, but instead of sending help they put him on a train with German prisoners, and Katharine is left waiting alone.

In The English Patient, what does Almásy trade to the Germans in exchange for fuel?

Maps from his desert surveys buy the fuel he needs to fly back to Katharine, but they also show the Germans a way to Cairo, which is why Caravaggio comes looking for revenge.

Which part does Colin Firth play in The English Patient?

Katharine's husband, Geoffrey Clifton: he brings her along on the desert expedition to fly its aerial surveys, and later discovers her affair with Almásy.

How does the patient die at the end of The English Patient?

Hana gives him a morphine overdose at his own wish: he pushes extra ampoules across to her to say he has had enough, and she reads him Katharine's last letter as he slips away.

In The English Patient, what traps Almásy and Katharine together in a car overnight?

A sandstorm pins them in the car through the night. Shut in together, the two grow close, and their affair begins once they are back in Cairo.

In which two countries was The English Patient shot on location?

Tunisia and Italy: the Sahara scenes were shot in the Tunisian desert in November, where the cast froze through the night shoots, and a real former monastery in the Italian countryside became Hana's refuge.

Which studio dropped The English Patient three weeks before filming was due to begin?

20th Century Fox wanted the insurance of bigger stars and, by the director's account, got cold feet over an ambitious period film with a mostly European cast. He thought the film was finished.

Which star did the first studio behind The English Patient reportedly want as Katharine?

Demi Moore was one of the most marketable stars of the day, and the studio wanted that insurance. The director held out for his own choice, and in the end it was the studio that left.

Years after The English Patient swept the Oscars, why did its producer sue the distributor?

Over unpaid profits from the film: his company claimed $20 million, saying that for all the film's success he had never even been paid enough to cover what it cost him to make.

Who edited The English Patient, winning Oscars for both its editing and its sound?

Walter Murch pulled off a landmark double, winning for the film's editing and its sound mix. He cut it with no borrowed temp music, trading scenes and newly written themes with the composer for six months.

The English Patient's editing Oscar was a landmark because the film was cut how?

On a digital Avid system: it was the first digitally edited film to win the editing Oscar, a sign that a century of cutting and splicing celluloid by hand was coming to an end.

Which company stepped in to finance The English Patient after its first studio walked away?

Miramax Films, the company that had gambled on The Crying Game and Pulp Fiction, put up the money to restart the stalled production, and the director got to keep the cast he had fought for.

Which vintage biplane, seen in The English Patient, shares its name with the film's production company?

Tiger Moth: when war breaks up the expedition, Madox leaves his at a desert oasis, and it is the plane Almásy later uses to fly back for Katharine.

Naveen Andrews, who plays Kip in The English Patient, later starred as Sayid in which TV series?

Lost made him a household name: for six seasons he played Sayid Jarrah, a former Iraqi soldier and interrogator stranded on the island with the other crash survivors.

Who composed the Oscar-winning score of The English Patient?

Gabriel Yared, known in France for Betty Blue, was asked to start composing from the screenplay before a frame was shot, and he went on to score the director's later films as well.

Which producer won his third Best Picture Oscar with The English Patient?

Saul Zaentz paid for his films with the profits of his record label, the home of Creedence Clearwater Revival, and spent the money on adapting novels he loved.

The English Patient was the first film to win nine Oscars since which 1987 epic?

The Last Emperor, Bertolucci's story of China's last boy ruler, had won all nine Oscars it was nominated for. The English Patient needed twelve nominations to match its haul.

Who hosted the 1997 Oscar ceremony at which The English Patient swept the board?

Billy Crystal, back as host after a break, asked the public to send him jokes through a website called whyistheshowsolong.com, and more than 35,000 arrived.

Which film tied with Shine as runner-up to The English Patient in nominations at the 1997 Oscars?

Fargo turned its seven nominations into two wins, and one of them stung: Frances McDormand took Best Actress ahead of The English Patient's own leading lady.

In The English Patient, which London institution sends Almásy's expedition into the Sahara?

The Royal Geographical Society backs the survey, a party of friends charting and digging in the desert in the late 1930s. When war breaks out the work is halted and the group scatters.

The novel The English Patient won which major literary award in 1992?

The Booker Prize was split that year, because the judges could not choose between it and a Barry Unsworth novel. In 2018 a public vote named it the best winner of the prize's first fifty years.

The English Patient's producer had already won Best Picture for Amadeus and which Jack Nicholson film?

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest won him his first. A record executive who came to films only in his fifties, he became just the third producer to win Best Picture three times.

In 1942 the real Almásy smuggled two agents across the Sahara for which commander's army?

Erwin Rommel's army was the client. Almásy drove the two German agents far behind British lines to the Nile and was given the Iron Cross, though both men were caught in Cairo within weeks.

Accepting her Oscar for playing Hana in The English Patient, the winner said she had expected which rival to win?

Lauren Bacall had already won the Golden Globe that season for The Mirror Has Two Faces. The winner told the audience she was so sure Bacall would get it that she had not prepared a speech.

In Seinfeld, which character is shunned for hating The English Patient?

Elaine finds it so dull that her date dumps her and her boss, J. Peterman, fires her, relenting only when she agrees to go and live in the desert.

In Seinfeld's English Patient episode, which made-up film would the hater rather see?

Sack Lunch, whose poster shows a family inside a brown paper bag, has sold out, so it is The English Patient instead, and loathing it costs the character a date and, briefly, a job.

In The English Patient, Hana learns that the retreating Germans liked to hide mines in which objects?

Pianos: she is playing one in the wrecked library when a soldier hurries in to stop her and check it for explosives. He then camps in the garden to clear the rest of the place.

Stuart Craig, who won an Oscar for The English Patient's sets, went on to design which film series?

Harry Potter: he designed all eight films, and Hogwarts was so much his creation that he was then asked to design the Wizarding World theme parks as well.

Which earlier film by The English Patient's director persuaded its producer to work with him?

Truly, Madly, Deeply, a small ghost romance, was his first film. The producer admired it, and it was then the director who brought him the novel he wanted to adapt.

In The English Patient, who finds the badly burned Almásy and carries him out of the desert?

Bedouin tribesmen find him, tend his burns and carry him across the sands, so he reaches Allied hands with no papers and, he says, no memory of his own name.

The ruined monastery where Hana nurses her patient in The English Patient stands in which Italian region?

Tuscany: the novel sets the story in a battered villa in the hills outside Florence, and the film-makers used a real former monastery among the hills of the Val d'Orcia.

In the novel The English Patient, which event does Kip learn of through his headset near the end?

The bombing of Hiroshima turns Kip against the West he has served. Sure that such a bomb would never have been dropped on a white nation, he levels a rifle at the patient, then abandons his friends and goes home to India.

In the novel The English Patient, how does Kip leave the villa for the last time?

On a motorcycle: he takes the old Triumph and rides away. Years later the novel finds him a doctor in India, married with two children and still thinking of Hana.

Jürgen Prochnow, who plays a German major in The English Patient, made his name as the captain in which war film?

Das Boot cast him as the U-boat commander his crew call 'the Old Man', and its success made him the German face of Hollywood films for decades afterwards.