Free Republic

He won Oscars for producing three best picture winners -- "One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest," "Amadeus" and "The English Patient" -- after a great career with Fantasy Records and feuds with John Fogerty. Saul Zaentz, who parlayed a successful career in the music business into a Oscar-winning second act as an independent movie producer, died Friday at his home in the San Francisco area from complications of Alzheimer's. He was 92. His nephew Paul Zaentz, a fellow producer, confirmed the news. "He was an extraordinary man," Paul Zaentz, who worked with his uncle for 37 years, said. "He had...

The true story of Count Laszlo Almasy, the Hungarian explorer and hero of the film The English Patient, is told in MI5 files released to the National Archives today. In the film, Almasy, played by Ralph Fiennes, is a disfigured patient in an Italian hospital who had been the handsome young lover of an Englishwoman (Kristin Scott Thomas) in pre-war Cairo. The truth is more prosaic. Although Almasy was a Hungarian explorer and airman who mapped the Libyan and Egyptian deserts and was prominent in pre-war Cairo society, he was no hero. He was a bungling Nazi intelligence officer who,...