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Armstrong, the director of "Oscar and Lucinda," which opens Friday, had wanted to bring Peter Carey's 1988 Booker Prize-winning novel of the same name to the screen since reading the manuscript a year before the book was published. A screenplay was completed, and Armstrong, who was tipped off by her London-based producer, Robin Dalton, already had her eye on a young, unknown-beyond-the-English-stage actor, Ralph Fiennes. Fiennes read the screenplay and did a screen test.
This was in the early 1990's, before Armstrong made "Little Women" and before "Schindler's List" put Fiennes on the map. "I remember thinking at the time," Armsrong recalls, "that I'll probably have to try to get a star to play Lucinda because ther's no way I'll get this movie made without a recognizable name in one of the two leads."
The Australian director also remembers her reaction when she heard that Fiennes was cast as a Nazi in his firsst major feature film. "I thought to myself, 'Playing a Nazi doesn't usually do much for one's career.' Well," Armstrong now laughs, "famous last words, right?"
Armstrong finally met with Fiennes in New York, where he was just off the plane from Poland, having completed his role as Amon Goeth in Steve Spielberg's Holocaust epic, and before he was to begin work as the lead in Robert Redford's "Quiz Show" (1994). During their meeting Fiennes confirmed his commitment to make the movie for Armstrong.
"He was very excited about doing it," remebers Armstrong. "But he said to me, 'Do you mind if I do this small English film first?' Well, that turned out to 'The English Patient,' and then he was off doing 'Hamlet' in London and New York. We kept in touch, and he told me that he wouldn't be free for another year or 18 months and then maybe he'd be too old for the part, and he told me that he didn't expect me to wait for him.
"But," she continues, "the more it I looked at other actors for the part including several of the best English actors around - the more it confirmed for me that Ralph was exactly the right actor for the role. To play Oscar - and all the other actors I saw could do one, but not the other - one has to be utterly believable as an odd-bod, a nerd, *and* as a romantic hero. Plus Oscar has to be played a a simple but not a stupid man, and that's very hard to pull off."
"Oscar and Lucinda," set in Australia and England in the 1860s, represents another prestigious period role for Fiennes, who plays a repressed, awkward, and very nervous English minister who finds life is at its most vibrant only when he's gambling, even though he realizes that gambling is sinful. He meets Lucinda (Cate Blanchett) on a boat trip to Australia, where he plan to missionary work in the outback (Thus removing himself from the temptation of gambling). Also addicted to gambling, Lucinda breaks free from those around her and, with her considerable wealth and an obssession for glass, indulges herself by becoming a co-owner of the Prince Rupert Glass Works. The movie plays out as an odd meditation on glass, gambling, and religion, with Oscar at one point determined to build a glass church as a demonstration of his love for Lucinda.
Not being just another second-guesser in the audience, Armstrong views the casting of Fiennes with a specific difference. "I met the man, got to know the person, was sure he was right to play Oscar in my movie, and then watched 'Schindler's List,'" says Armstrong. "Here was this shy, warm, and lovable man playing this horrible human being. He was also very cold in 'Quiz Show.' I might have been the only person who thought the real Ralph was much more in line with the part he'd be playing in my movie."
'No extrovert' Fiennes agrees with the assessment. "Playing Oscar has been the least of a stretch for me in terms of the character's personality and my own." says the 35-year-old twice-Oscar-nominated actor. "I have a real empathy for Oscar. He's caught in a spiritual dilemma and he's on a tortured intellectual journey. There are these huge debates of conscience going on. I responded to all of that."
As Armstrong also points out, and Fiennes readily admits, the actor is no extrovert ("He's not really comfortable with small talk," says Armstrong). Soft-spoken to the point of near-inaudibility, Fiennes admits that he's handling the whole publicity process a lot better that he did a few years ago. "It's something I was quite uncomfortable with," says Fiennes. "I used to think that if you do your work well, you shouldn't have to explain what you do."
While he might be getting better at it, Fiennes is still easily flustered. Or maybe he just cares more about his interviewer's needs. He gets visibly bothered when a public relations person bursts in and asks him to sign several copies of Carey's book for promotinal purposes. When housekeeping knocks too many times on the door, and he realizes that the coffee in the pot is cold, he gets up from the sofa and orders cappuccino for both of us and says in all earnestness, "I feel terrible about this. If you need some more time, please let me know."
Fiennes is not an last actor (sp?) who thinks along Oscar lines. With "Schindler's List" and "The English Patient," he's the only actor since Jack Nicholoson ("One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" and "Terms of Endearment") and Dustin Hoffman ("Kramer vs. Kramer" and "Rain Man") to be nominated for an acting Oscar in two movies that have gone on to win the best-picture Academy Award. "No, I didn't know that," says Fiennes when the fact is mentioned along with Hoffman and Nicholoson. "I had never heard that."
Nor, predicitably, does Fiennes embrace the "thinking woman's sex symbol" label. "What's the unthinking woman's sex symbol like?" he jokes. "When I hear that, I guess my first reaction is that a part of me is a bit flattered, a part of me doesn't believe it, and another part thinks people just need a sound bite or label and it really means nothing at all."
Fiennes is more likely to ruminate on the fact that he came close to nipping his own movie career in the bud after playing Heathcliff in an English remake of "Wuthering Heights," his feature-film debut. "It was not a happy experience, and I almost swore off the movie business to go back to the stage full time," Fiennes recalls. I had just finished up two seasons of leading roles at the Royal Shakespeare Company, so future stage roles I was being offered weren't that appealing. I did that 'Lawrence of Arabia' thing for British television, and then 'Wuthering Heights,' and I thought, 'That's it for movies. There's my film career.' I was very lucky that Steven gave me a chance and 'Schindler's List' came along."
Fiennes, who was born in Suffolk, England, and now lives in London (he is recently divorced), was able to sneak in the "Oscar and Lucinda" shoot before going from "Hamlet" (he won the best actor Tony in 1995) to John Steed in "The Avengers," a feature-film version of the cult 1960s British television series that opens in June.
"Now, that movie is set I don't know where or when," says Fiennes with a smile. "It's in AvengersLand - a mixture of contemporary high-tech as imagined in the 1960s and pre-40s London style.
Since completing "The Avengers," Fiennes has also voiced the character of Pharaoh Ramses in DreamWorks' first animated feature, "Prince of Egypt," due out for the year-end holidays. He will start shooting a screen version of Pushkin's "Eugene Onegin," which his sister, Martha will direct.
Yup it's another period role, but he swears there's no agenda. "It's just
the way the cards have come up." Then he thinks for a moment and adds, "I
guess even Lenny Nero from 'Strange Days' wasn't of this time, it was the
future. Hmm, I suppose I have never played a contemporary character in a
film. Not that there aren't bad scripts set in a particular period, but I
can't remember the last contemporary script that's made an impression on me.
I am however, developing a script based on the Ian McEwan novel 'The Child
in Time,' and that's contemporary. So I guess that'll be a first for me."
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© EL STEPHO
Added to the RF Reading Room on January 19, 1998
EL STEPHO