Film facts		Plot summary
	General comments		Comments by Colin
	Comments about Colin		Trivia
	Reviews of  The English Patient		Favorite Quotes
	Web links		Back to Main Roles page
	Credits		Awards

• Title: The English Patient
• Year: 1996
• Company: Miramax Films
• Running time:
• Rated: R (sex, violence, nudity, mature themes, language)
• Colin's character: Geoffrey Clifton
• Other cast: (in credits order)Ralph Fiennes .... Count László Almásy, Juliette Binoche .... Hana, Willem Dafoe .... Caravaggio , Kristin Scott Thomas .... Katharine Clifton, Naveen Andrews .... Kip, Julian Wadham .... Madox, Jürgen Prochnow .... Major Muller, German Officer, Kevin Whately .... Sergeant Hardy, Clive Merrison .... Fenelon-Barnes, Nino Castelnuovo .... D'Agostino, Hichem Rostom .... Fouad, Peter Rühring .... Bermann

Producers: Saul Zaentz
• Director: Anthony Minghella
• Writer: Michael Ondaatje (novel)/Anthony Minghella
• Cinematography: John Seale
• Original music:Gabriel Yared

PLOT SUMMARY

This complex film, adapted from Michael Ondaatje's evocative haunting novel, weaves plot and time and place in an intricate, ever more revealing dance. Set in Italy at the at the end of World War II, and in flashbacks to North Africa in the 1930's, the main thread concerns Count Laslo Almasy (Fiennes), a desert explorer, who had been horribly burned in a mysterious airplane crash, and his relationship with - in the present - his nurse Hana (Juliet Binoche), and in the past - his lover, Katharine Clifton (Kristin Scott Thomas). Katharine's husband of two years, Geoffrey Clifton (Colin Firth), who has known her from childhood, is a seemingly hearty Englishman whose jovial manner hides a life full of secrets and passions.

Hana, a French Canadian nurse, meets Kip (Naveen Andrews), a demolitions expert with the American army who is by nationality an Indian, and a Sikh. Their romance is carried out against the background of the remote Italian convent where Hana has taken the English Patient to die.
 
 

This outstanding film gave Colin Firth a chance to play the pivotal character in the Katharine/Almasy portion of the movie. His portrayal of a "typical English gentleman" of the time, but one who held secrets behind his amiable facade, was understated and delicate. Though limited in screen time, he left a lasting impression, especially in the scene where he watched his unfaithful wife return from an assignation. He also had a key part in the tragic scene that ends the relationship of Katharine and Almasy.

"You can't come on stage and act grief-stricken. That's histrionic. I think when you come on stage trying to be happy and then fight against grief, that's moving." [The Guardian, Feb. 10, 1996]

It "centers on five people, of whom I'm not one. I'm a rich champagne-toting English buffoon. My wife has an affair with Ralph's Fiennes's character. I discover the affair and turn out not to be a buffoon. . . "  11/10/96--Bart Mills's interview

On his role: "It was the English thing: violent emotion and pain well-disguised by jauntiness."
 

Coming soon: URL link to Jane's Firth articles page, for the full-length versions of articles from which quotes are taken.

COMMENTS ABOUT COLIN . . .

TRIVIA

Colin gets to perform a delightful sequence around a desert campfire in a game of "Forfeits." He must sing and dance to
"Yes, We Have No Bananas," and sing and dance he does in the most charming manner.

To see a small animation of Colin in this scene, click HERE.

Factual errors
The German paratroopers are wearing English uniforms and using English parachutes.

Anachronisms
A British sergeant wears a Sunderland Football Club scarf with a logo not designed until the 1970s.

"Ralph seems to get all the women in this movie. It's never going to happen again."

Click on the above words for Colin's voice at the Hollywood premiere. He was interviwed briefly on E! in their coverage of the premiere. He attended with Alan Cumming and some friends. Some of the FOF were there to see him and get autographs.

As Clifton listens to a drunken Almasy tell the whole dinner party more than he should about Katharine, he begins to plot his revenge.

Click HERE to read an imagined last letter to Katharine from Geoffrey

REVIEWS of The English Patient

Lisa Warrington (The Friends of Firth):

I was particularly taken by the visual imagery Anthony Minghella created, and that's what I'm going to talk about here.

I thought much of the film was exquisite, in its own terms. I also was delighted by the novel, and I see the changes and things omitted, though I like the film just for what it is - and I think it has its own poetry and imagery - which brings me to the opening image of the movie....

Click HERE to read the rest of Lisa's Review.

"The English Patient" begins with a great, spellbinding image - of a vintage prop plane's shadow passing over an undulating, seductively contoured orange desert. To see it is to be magically transported back in time and to be filled with both wonder and dread - wonder at the evocative visual poetry that is still the province of film, dread at the odds against the rest of the film living up to the power of that image....

Click HERE to read the rest of this review

Rapture In The Dunes by Richard Corliss

From their green, damp, congested homelands, Europeans come to the North African desert and fall in love--as if into quicksand--with the dry vastness. Like T.E. Lawrence, they are awed by the womanly contours of the great desert dunes. Soon their faces are bronzed, their limbs burnished, their hair bleached, until they are the color of sand. These nomads-by-choice have become the Sahara.

Click HERE to read the rest of this review

FAVORITE QUOTES . . .

"Uxuriousness..that's my favorite kind of love. Excessive love of one's wife."

Click HERE to hear Colin say these words.

THE ENGLISH PATIENT RATINGS

LW "rating system":