8 Days Article

Singaporean TV magazine, March 1997

Oscar Wild! All the buzz about the English Patient & its 12 oscar nominations!

Being bandaged and disfigured for the most part in The English Patient hasn't diminished his magnetism and appeal.

"Fiennes is blessed by looks and brains and talent, which is a very unusual cocktail of skills," notes Anthony Minghella, director of the The English Patient, in which the actor impressively restates and expands his credentials. "You're very lucky to have those three things in your suitcase."

The English Patient, based on the award-winning book by Michael Ondaatje, is the kind of soaring drama in which tragedy and romance wreak havoc with the audience's emotions. It is also the kind of movie that should bring statues of acclaim to its participants. A badly-burned man (Fiennes) lies in an abandoned Italian monastery towards the end of the Second World War, and we slowly learn who he is and how he got there. For half the film Fiennes is on his back, burned and disfigured; for the rest of the film, he appears in flashbacks before his injuries, handsome and tomented.

"He does have that amazing face," says KST, who plays the object of Fiennes' love in the film. "[But] there's a kind of sobriety and dignity to him that other actors of his generation do not have. " She laughs. "Ralph's a man. He appeals to women in a sort of manly way rather than an 'Isn't he cute, I want to take him home and give him soup' way. He does make you want to go weak in the knees so you can go, 'Ooh, catch me!"

Minghella describes Fiennes' screen presence like this : "Whatever he's saying or doing, you suspect there is a counterpoint to it, a second agenda. That's very exciting because you feel like there's a mystery. There's a darkness in him."

Ralph Nathaniel Fiennes entered the world on Dec 22, 1962, in Suffolk, the first of six children born over seven years. From a tiny child, he already had an incredible sense of self containment, a sense of his own purpose. True to form, even when faced with having to make new friends every time the family moved, constantlytransferring from Episcopalian to Roman Catholic to Quaker to state schools, Ralph never had the slightest interest to put on masks or behave in a certain way to make himself attractive to people.

Acting, however, was the one mask he was willing to wear. When he was just a toddler, his mother dressed him up in a frilly white shirt and trotted him off to a birthday party. There, amid screaming children sitting around a table, Ralph jumped out of his chair, ran to the front of the room, and started singing the theme song to Rawhide over and over again. It was perhaps the first of many times that the actor would command an audience's attention.

Fiennes also had a talent for painting, spending a year at the Chelsea College of Art and Design before being accepted into the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. But any question on what motivated him to leave one artform for another earns the enquirer an evil-eye. (Suffer one of Ralph's withering looks and you can be turned to dust)

"I don't know," he says, clearly irritated, carving away at his chicken with a fork in one hand and a knife in the other. "I guess being in art school, where all the kinds of linear thinking are knocked out of you, gave me the confidence to say, 'Actually, if I can think about being an actor." He pauses, looks up: "I bored you with that answer."

Fiennes says that Schindler's List was the last movie his mother saw. She died at the end of 1993 at 54, from complications of breast cancer. He's not uncomfortable speaking of her, but he is palpably sad. "I just feel lucky that all of us were there," he says. He pauses. "You grieve. A person you love dies and in the way they die, they're a giving you a gift." He stares at the table, a long, elegant finger absently tracing the tablecloth. "It's hard to explain, really. It's the experience of being a witness to death, that in a way, is so revealing. It is the way that you are a witness, in that it is full of love. That is its own gift."

Jini lived to see Fiennes marry his RADA classmate and longtime companion Alex Kingston in 1993. But they have split after just two years of marriage.

"She's been very supportive," he says, minding his words. "She's been tolerant. I'm not very easy to live with. I'm not a pile of fun. She has to put up with a lot." Here it comes : "I don't want to talk about this. I think she'd rather be left out."

These days, when men like Jerry Seinfeld and Woody Allen are dating ladies several decades their junior, it's refreshing to hear about hunky 34-year-old Fiennes currently dating 51-year-old actress Francesca Annis. But according to the London Express, not everyone is thrilled with the union, especially Annis' parents.

"Ralph's a young man who may want children," Annis' mother told the tabloid. "How can it work?" Fiennes and Annis met while starring in a production of Hamlet on Broadway. She played Gertrude, the mother of Fiennes' Hamlet. The performance was so intense, one critic wrote that Gertrude 'seems unnaturally fond of her son, caressing and kissing him with a warmth that would make Freud straighten up and polish his glasses.' Fiennes reportedly moved in with Annis, much to the chagrin of Annis' former lover Patrick Wiseman. Wiseman and annis were a couple for 22 years, and have two children together. But since she started dating Fiennes, Wiseman has been doing the majority of the child-rearing.

"Ralph's a deceptively sly lady-killer," says his director in Schindler's List, Steven Spielberg. "He doesn't purposely put out indications. But in that sense you're attracted to the gentleman in Ralph, and as you get closer to him, you realise he has a very keen sense of his own sexuality. I think that women are very attracted to him."

Christopher McDonald, who has become a friend since their Quiz Show days, thinks it's more playful than that : "He's a chick magnet. I've never seen anything like it. That thing. That aura. Women and men are drawn to him."

Can a 'Sexiest Man Alive' cover be far off ? "What ?" Fiennes isn't eager to pick up this line of questioning. "I don't know how I'm going to react to that." Picking up the tape recorder he presses it to his lips, lowering a velvety voice. "I think I'll giggle when I see that." He giggles. " IF I see that."

The film roles are being lobbed at Fiennes left, right and centre : he is currently starring in a film version of the cult TV classic, The Avengers, and has been mentioned for roles in Anna Karenina, Byron (as Lord Byron - can't you just picture it?), Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, The Elixir, The Moon and Sixpence, and the Rationalist, having turned down the lead in producer Robert Evans' project The Saint.

"We've all seen the sort of sophisticated, smooth, tuxedoed gent working his way from gambling tables to sports cars to helicopters to beautiful women and bank vaults, and villains with funny voices and moustaches, and mountain tops in Greece or whatever," says Fiennes." I just think it's been done. It's boring."

To be or not to be a movie actor, that is the next question. "I hope he doesn't become a movie star," says Spielberg. "Because Ralph is one of those rare talents who is, in fact, a greater character actor. Some of the best movie roles today aren't the leads. It's Tommy Lee Jones in The Fugitive. The leading figure is Harrison. I hope he will take the Tommy Lee Jones over the Harrison Ford parts. I think he will now. If Hollywood spoils him, he might not in a couple of years."