The English Patient

The English Patient (REX)

Year of release: 1996

Screenwriter: Anthony Minghella

Key awards: BAFTA for Best Film and Best Adapted Screenplay; Oscar win for Best Picture, Oscar-nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay

The English Patient is Anthony Minghella’s adaptation of Michael Ondaatje’s Booker Prize-winning novel of the same name.

The film is a multi-award winning tale of tragic love set against a North African landscape during the outbreak of the Second World War. As a badly burned and bed-ridden mapmaker is tended to by a compassionate nurse, we discover, through a series of flashbacks, how an affair between the geographer and a wealthy married woman results in drama and tragedy for several connected characters.

Through this story, the film is able to explore themes of lust, jealousy, identity and guilt.

Watch Anthony Minghella at BAFTA in 2006

BAFTA / Marc HobermanOther notable screenplays by Anthony Minghella:

Truly Madly Deeply (1991)
The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999)
Cold Mountain (2003)