British Vogue Article, February 1997

GRIEF ENCOUNTER

The first time you see the English patient his face is scabby and glistening like newly made toffee. He has just been pulled from a small plane shot down in the desert at the start of World War Two. A kindly Arab rubs soothing oil into the fiery crust before covering it with muslin. There are three holes: two for the eyes and one for the mouth. The mask looks like a child's drawing of a ghost. What makes it even worse is the knowledge that beneath the cloth and disfigurement lies one of the most beautiful faces in all cinema.

Ralph Fiennes would not thank you for composing a soliquy on his loveliness, although given the provocation I'm sure it cannot be helped. Shall I compare him to a winter's day? Dazzling, bright and thrillingly cold with the buried promise of a thaw to come. Like Rudolf Valentino and other silent-screen stars he has a famished look, but you suspect that it's not the kind of hunger that could be satisfied by chicken Kiev for two. That doesn't deter waitresses from scrawling their number on his bill and it won't stop movie fans forming feverish queues outside the Almeida, where Fiennes opens in Chekhov's Ivanov on February 6.

Their idol may not be entirely delighted to see them. "I have developed a fear of public attention and not knowing what to say," Fiennes admitted recently. It is a phobia that has naturally deepened since he left his wife, Alex "Moll Flanders" Kingston, to be linked with Francesca Annis, who played Gertrude to his hectic, harrowing Hamlet in 1995. "Does he have to kiss his mother quite so passionately?" grumbled one critic. Clearly he did. And there is no small irony in the fact that in the same year the actor lost his beloved mother Jini - the novelist Jennifer Lash - to cancer, he seems to have found love with a woman old enough to be his mother. But you won't catch Fiennes slipping into Freudian speculatin. At 34, he has a seriousness about his work and a reticence about his life that has left a string of interviewers desperate for some good old Hollywood insincerity. I mean, will you get a load of this guy? Listens to the questions, gives polite, thoughtful answers and is humble about his sucess-spooky!

Ralph - pronounced the patriocian way to rhyme with safe - seems to suit courtly words: ardour, nobility, courage. If you laid him on a marbe plinth, he would be a dead ringer for an Arthurian knight. Put it down to the brainy forehead that forms a pensive helmet over those gimlet eyes and the wolfish narrowing of the face. "There's a kind of sobriety and dignity to him that other actors of his generation don't have," says Kristin Scott Thomas, who plays the object of Fiennes desire in The English patient. "Ralph appeals to women in a manly sort of way rather than an 'isn't he cute' way. He does make you want to go weak at the knees so you can go, 'Ooh, catch me!'

Knees all over England will be buckling at The English Patient, which tells the story of the incandescent love between Count Almasy (Fiennes) and a married English Blonde, Katharine Clifton (Scott Thomas). It's the kind of film that comes along thrice in a lifetime, bowling over critics and public alike. In this sandblasted Grief Encounter, Fiennes does double duty as the deep-tanned lover in the desert and the human wreckage that survives the crash. Knowing Hollywood, with its annual burst of enthusiasm for the disabled, he will probably get an Oscar for the latter, although the former is equally deserving; after all, how can you deny an Academy Award to a man who manages to look irresistible in a pair of It Ain't Half Hot Mum Shorts?

Until now, there was a danger that Fiennes would become the high priest of solitude-whether it was the loneliness of extreme evil in Schindler's List or that of civilised deceit in Quiz Show where he played Charles Van Doren, golden boy and game-show cheat. "I hear myself being very boring when I talk about acting," he says with endearing candour, "but I think that I should not judge the character I play." It is a good instinct, and one that has led him to performances as mesmirising as that of Untersturmfuehrer Amon Goeth. Swaggering with fat, Fiennes's Nazi went about liquidating the Crakow ghetto as though the business of killing thousands of people were a bloody nuisance and frankly he hadn't got all day. At first glance, little seems to link Goeth with Fiennes's other roles as Heathcliff, Van Doren and Almasy, but second thoughs suggest that they are united by a quality uniquely his own; something private, strngulated and unknowable.

When Steven Speilberg picked Fiennes for Schindler's List, he said that the actor could be a Guiness or an Olivier. Watching him in The English Patient, I was reminded more of Bogart. Of course, Humph was a frog and Ralph is a prince, but both men make you crave their approval; you want to measure up tothem, to be worthy. The English Patient is what they call in Hollywood a "breakthrough picture"; it makes Fiennes a big enough star to open a film on his name alone. It is a breakthrough for the actor in another way too. He has shown us the quality of his hate and here he unleashes its opposite. Almasy, a man who has been carefully locked up in pride, leaves his fortress to win the fair lady and makes himself vunerable. In the dying moments of the movie, Fiennes comes towards the camera cradling Katharine in his arms, that fabulous face cracked in sorrow. It is a walk straight into cinema legend. Those of a stoic disposition should make it through with a handy pack of kleenex. Weepers may need a small life raft.