English Patient Skirt-Chaser Was Actually Gay

Count Laszlo de Almásy, the Hungarian adventurer depicted as a carousing ladies' man in The English Patient, was gay, according to love letters recently discovered in Germany. The letters show that Almásy had relationships with everyone from a Wehrmacht officer to Egyptian princes, according to the Heinrich Barth Institute for African Studies in Cologne. The letters also reveal that he died of amoebic dysentery rather than a morphine overdose, as the film character does. (More gay stories.)