The Real 'English Patient'

An article about Laszlo Almasy, the person around whom the movie "The English Patient" was based. Turns out he was a Brandenberg commando and a pole smoker.

So the Allies would have hanged him as a spy and the Nazis would have hanged him as a homosexual. No wonder Hollywood idolized him; he's their prototype.

Also, he did not die of a voluntary drug overdose triggered by a fit of love-lorn depression. He died of dysentery. I can think of a few people in Hollywood I'd like to see die shitting their guts out -- but I'm just mean like that.

I did enjoy this bit:

The undercover mission [which Almasy smuggled into Egypt] never did much damage. The German agents transmitted information from Cairo for several weeks, but then their transmitter broke down. It was none other than Egypt's future president, Anwar al-Sadat, part of the resistance movement against the British occupation at the time, who hurried over to repair the transmitter.

But Sadat quickly realized that there was something odd about the situation. In his memoirs, he wrote that the spies had deliberately dismantled their transmitter so that they could enjoy themselves, undisturbed, with "two Jewish prostitutes."

The irony is off the scale.

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Hat-tip to Vizigoth