Harpers & Queen Article

December 1999

The Byronic Man
Ralph Fiennes is known for playing lethally attractive tortured heroes - a trend he continues in his latest film Onegin. And yet he says he longs to appear in uncomplicated, Cary Grant-type roles. Lydia Slater goes weak at the knees.

In the green parlour at Home House, London's most fashionable members' club, a tall, ascetic-looking fellow is arguing with a waiter. "*Why* can't I have a cream tea?" he is asking in querulous, academic tones, waving his menu threateningly. The window of opportunity for scones and jam has closed, apparently. With a rather sulky air, the man accepts an alternative offer of smoked salmon sandwiches and plonks himself down into an armchair.

Meeting Ralph Fiennes in the flesh is, it must be said, a rather different experience from viewing him on screen. As an actor, his physical allure is legendary. When he was playing The English Patient, his co-star Juliette Binoche reportedly had to telephone her boyfriend every day to reassure him that she had not succumbed.

Fiennes specialises in the sort of soft-centred, outwardly vulnerable, misunderstood hero beloved of women with a drop of romance in their veins. Which of us, watching The English Patient, did not want to stroke his tortured brow, as he staggered across the desert in a vain attempt to rescue his beloved? Who could remain immune to his neurotic Hamlet, his flawed, yet irresistible Ivanov? Somehow, even when playing a psychopathic Nazi in Schindler's List, he managed to hint at vulnerability. And here he is, fussing about cream teas. What is romantic about that?

Fiennes, quite naturally, recognises no moral imperative to remain heroic off-screen. "The whole point of cinema is that it can create emotions," he says, "but it takes all the ingredients of cinema to do that. It's dangerous to perceive yourself as the fount of that emotion, because so much depends on where the camera is put."

But it must be said that he smoulders when it suits. An hour earlier, arriving breathless and rather dishevelled at the photographer's studio, I am introduced to the great man before I have had a chance even to remove my coat. He takes my hand and holds it in a warm, strong clasp, smiling and looking deep into my eyes with his own chatoyant pair. Irresistably, a blush travels up my body all the way to my hairline, announcing its arrival there in an embarrassing prickle of sweat. "Lovely to meet you," he says smokily, a phrase that suddenly seems pregnant with possibility. Over the course of the next half-hour, however, three other women present at the shoot confide, individually, that they believe Fiennes has feelings for them. "You should have seen the way he looked into my eyes!"

Steven Spielberg has said that Fiennes has "a very keen sense of his own sexuality". And he seems to be able to turn it on and off like a tap. "Faking it brilliantly is what acting is all about. It's the mastery of a craft," he tells me. So his refusal to practise his craft on me for longer than five minutes is a great disappointment. Instead, he stares out of the window abstractedly while speaking, and frequently becomes tetchy, waving away irrelevancies and intrusions with his long, elegant hands as if swatting flies.

"I don't think it's at all odd that he's so restrained," says his director sister Martha, a forthcoming and friendly woman. "I understand his need to protect himself. The star is possessed by the individuals who see him on the big screen. Those of us slogging away behind the scenes aren't interesting; people don't want to know about our marriages, thank God! Of course he withdraws; there's a sense of imposition on one's personal life outside one's work which must be intolerable."

Now Fiennes is comfortably installed with smoked salmon and tea, and the waiters have stopped coming in and out of the room, provoking huffs and accusing looks, we can start talking about his new film, Onegin. The stakes are high, following the multi-million-dollar flop that was The Avengers, in which Fiennes took the role of John Steed. They are made higher by the fact that Onegin has been his and Martha's project for the past seven years and is something of a family affair. She directed it, he executive-produced and starred in it, and their younger brother, Magnus, a composer, wrote the score. Even Fiennes's squeeze, Francesca Annis, has a naughty and unaccredited cameo role.

"Do I have more to prove with my family involved?" Fiennes wonders. "There's always something to prove when people are paying to see your film." But he has invested more than he cares to admit, for when I ask him whether he enjoyed the experience, he is positively offended. "I wouldn't describe it as fun" he exclaims. "It's about finding fellow spirits to work on something you believe in. Plenty of people told me that it wouldn't work, but, if something gnaws at you enough, you will make it work."

And, of course, he has. Onegin is a little gem, with Fiennes putting in a moving performance as the eponymous hero, a St Petersburg sophisticate suffering from a terminal case of mal a siecle. On a trip to the country, he meets the wholesome Tatyana (Liv Tyler). She, inevitably, falls for the disaffected aesthete; he rejects her, then realises, too late, what he has lost.

It is, on paper, a bleak fable of missed opportunities, and it is not surprising that financing was hard to come by. "It would be odd to pretend that The English Patient didn't give backers a degree of confidence," agrees Fiennes. "Still, it has been a real struggle. In fact, it's still a struggle, because, let's face it, Onegin is not an upbeat story, and it's not action-packed. Most of the time, the characters are writing letters and waiting for answers."

This makes the film sound immensely dull, but it fact it isn't at all. It is visually luscious and unexpectedly moving (as the final credits rolled, the preview theatre shook with the sobs of hard-bitten critics). The direction is particularly impressive, as it is Martha Fiennes' first feature film. She has made her name directing commercials, but seems to have brought the same attention to detail to a full-length feature - a feat that necessitated many seven-day weeks and eighteen-hour days.

"The challenge for me was to see whether I could make sure that my decisions were just as rigorous on a larger scale. I'd be looking at scenes over and over, reshooting them because the earrings were too big," she says.

Brother and sister claim not to have had any on-set fights, except for one "lively" disagreement over whether Onegin should pause before turning a pistol on his best friend. Nevertheless, while his picture is being taken, Fiennes confides, jocularly, that he would not work en famille again.

Later, he is more circumspect. "I am sure, if the right project moved us both, we would consider it," he says, primly. "I expect Martha would want to do a film again, though whether with me or not, I can't say. "But," he adds, more warmly, "I think she possibly got out of me more than another director might, because she was willing to make me try a scene over and over in different ways, to get it absolutely right."

This is quite some tribute. I know few siblings whose relationship could cope with such a situation, particularly as Martha is the younger of the two.

"There was very little hierarchy between us as children," insists Fiennes. "In some families, there seems to be a legacy of the elder child ordering the younger ones about, but it wasn't like that at all with us. We were a tight-knit group, more like friends."

As a child, Fiennes was even less outgoing than he is today. His sister remembers him at children's parties, asking the hostess whether she had a jigsaw he could do. "I was not particularly outgoing at parties," he agrees," and I'm still not." Paradoxically, though, he shone on stage. "I suppose acting was a liberation. It gave me a chance to be someone other than myself."

His mother, Jini, who died of breast cancer in 1993, seems to have been the principal inspiration for his career. "She gave me recordings of songs and poetry read by actors, and I remember being hugely impressed with how words could conjure up images and emotions," he says. "She opened me up to the fact that words could exist dramatically."

Jini Fiennes distrusted television ("though we complained about not having it,") and encouraged her six children to amuse themselves with writing, drawing or photography. As a result, they have developed into a mini-dynasty of the performing arts. Besides Ralph, Martha and Magnus, there is Joseph - brooding star of Shakespeare in Love - and Sophie, a theatrical designer. Only Jacob, a gamekeeper, has rejected the artistic life.

At first, Fiennes decided to make a career as a painter, but found that he did not enjoy art school. "The truth is, you can be quite accomplished and there is no point in carrying on if there is nothing in you to make you want to do it. I didn't have a hunger to be a painter."

So he auditioned for RADA instead, which was where he first read Eugene Onegin, at the suggestion of the Academy's librarian. "I was immediately intrigued by the characters. I didn't really know anything about Pushkin, but the story was very sophisticated even though it was so spare. I knew immediately that if there was a way I could play this character, then I wanted to play it, but only when I'd done a bit of work professionally." And so, there followed Wuthering Heights, Schindler's List, The English Patient, Quiz Show, Oscar & Lucinda, Hamlet, Ivanov...all good practice for Onegin's cynical outsider. "I enjoy playing people who are flawed and full of antagonism," says Fiennes. "People are fallible, they make mistakes, they can be destructive. That's what humans do." His next roles are in the same mould: he plays Maurice Bendrix, an obsessive lover, in Graham Greene's The End of the Affair, and three generations of the same family in Sunshine, directed by the Hungarian Ishtvan Szabo.

Fiennes detests discussing his private life, which may be a mistake. Deprived of information, one feels one gets a glimpse into his soul only from the dark parts he chooses to play, especially as, in person, he seems just as lonely, cerebral, and intense.

Perhaps this blurring of boundaries is responsible for the tide of criticism that broke over his head when he ended his eighteen-month marriage to Alex Kingston in 1996, after falling for Francesca Annis. Kingston, filming Moll Flanders at the time, came across as jolly and down-to-earth, in sharp contrast to Fiennes, who was seen as uncomplicated and unsympathetic. He still bears the taint of the "love rat", which is unfair. They had been together for eight years before they married in 1993, under pressure from Jini's terminal illness. It is hardly surprising that the marriage, begun under such circumstances, was not a success.

Anyway, Fiennes claims he would love to play an uncomplicatedly appealing hero. It is just that he is not very good at it. "I tried with John Steed in The Avengers," he says humbly, a smile quivering at the corners of his mouth, "and it was a, um, disaster. I think I would find it hard to play an effortlessly relaxed Cary Grant type." I am afraid he is right. Can you imagine Ralph Fiennes in Bringing Up Baby? He would certainly have ended up in hospital, dying of the wounds inflicted by Katharine Hepburn's leopard. But how delicious he would have looked doing it.