Free Republic

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,...

The True Story of Desert Explorer Laszlo Almasy During World War II, desert explorer Laszlo Almasy smuggled Nazi agents through the Sahara on an epic journey behind enemy lines. Now the true story of the man depicted in "The English Patient," is coming to light. As a boy, the son of a Hungarian nobleman would often stare off into the distance from his birthplace, a castle in the Burgenland region of present-day Austria. He always longed for the unattainable. At 14, the boy built himself a glider to fly up to the sky, but it crashed. Then, in the 1930s,...