THE ENGLISH PATIENT Being Adapted for TV at BBC

The 1996 Academy Award-winning best picture, The English Patient, as well as the winner of eight other Oscars that year, is now being adapted for TV. Miramax Television and Paramount Television Studios are producing the series for BBC, and Deadline reports that the drama series will represent a new interpretation of Michael Ondaatje’s book, which follows four dissimilar people brought together at an Italian villa during World War II, and not a remake of the 1996 Miramax feature film adaptation directed by Anthony Minghella.

The series comes from Run and Taboo writer Emily Ballou, and will follow the story in the book, which was published in 1992, about “a unrecognizably burned man — the eponymous patient, presumed to be English — his Canadian Army nurse, a Sikh British Army sapper and a Canadian thief. Set behind the North African and Italian campaigns of the Second World War, the book is told out of sequence and moves back and forth between the patient’s memories before his accident and the current evens at the bomb-damaged Italian monastery.”

Were you a fan of this book and/or film? Will you be tuning in to watch the series?