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And how about "The English Patient," in which he played a mysterious aristocrat, neither sympathetic nor villainous -- a man no one really knew. The real Fiennes, perhaps?
Even in the recent remake of "Wuthering Heights," Fiennes was an ambiguous Heathcliff, one of literature's most famous men without a past.
In interviews with Fiennes, forget about gaining an insight into one of the most fascinating actors to hit the big screen in years. He puts up the shutters, albeit politely.
What we do know about him is that he is one of six children, was born December 22, 1962, in Suffolk, England, and was raised in England and Ireland. His mother, Jini, who wrote under the name Jennifer Lash, died of cancer in 1993. His father, Mark, is a farmer who later became a photographer.
His marriage to Alex Kingston, a classmate at London's Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, broke up shortly after their wedding in 1993, after they were together for nearly a decade.
And -- one more personal item Fiennes will not talk about -- he is romantically involved with English actress Francesca Annis, who is 17 years his senior and played Gertrude to his Tony Award-winning Hamlet on Broadway.
"People say that I'm shy. I don't really think that I'm that shy. I think I give the impression I'm shy, because I'm naturally defensive," he told Reuters in an interview.
Actually, Fiennes is perfectly charming and happy to talk about his latest film -- "Oscar and Lucinda," which opens in North America December 31. The soft-spoken actor is attentive to personal questions and answers in a thoughtful way, but he has an off-putting tendency to trail off in mid-sentence.
The interviewer tries a different tack. Is he a gambler, like the character he plays in his latest film?
"I'm a gambler only in the sense that I hope I would not always go where the odds are not all that safe in my work," he replied. "But they never are. I love things that are challenging or unusual."
Unlike most actors, who love to talk about themselves, he seems to find the first person anathema. He warms to the subject, however, when asked about his reputation as intense.
"Acting is a big part of my life. Since I was a child, I've always been thrilled by escaping into the world of a film or a play," said the man who has managed so far to hide himself behind the mask of stage and screen.
"You say I'm obsessed with my work. Well, yes I am, but not in the sense that it's an insular ivory tower. If I walk out into the street here in L.A., everything is extraordinary, everything about why this place exists. I feel somehow it's all connected."
Gillian Armstrong, the Australian director of "Oscar and Lucinda," added to the mystery of Fiennes when she told Reuters: "He is more like Oscar than any other of the roles he's played."
In the movie, based on Peter Carey's Booker Prize-winning novel, Oscar is a nervous, insecure 19th-century English minister addicted to gambling who emigrates to Australia. There he falls in love with a strong-willed businesswoman, Lucinda, who also happens to be a chronic gambler.
Is her leading man really like that?
"He has an inner strength, pure heat and great integrity," said Armstrong, who, like Lucinda in her film -- played by Australian actress Cate Blanchett -- is a strong, dynamic woman.
"Being a Nazi (in 'Schindler's List') was not a good start to a (movie) career," she said with a grin, adding that Fiennes had been recommended to her for "Oscar and Lucinda" before he began shooting Steven Spielberg's 1993 Holocaust drama. But more than anything else, she said, Fiennes possesses that rare and most intangible screen quality -- vulnerability.
Fiennes himself does not indulge in self-analysis, but it does not require Freud to interpret his view of the director who burst onto the cinema scene with her 1979 debut feature "My Brilliant Career."
"She's very direct but very nurturing ... and she's quite authoritative," he said, offering no elaboration.
A stock question: Has his life changed since Academy Award nominations for "Schindler's List" and "The English Patient"?
"It doesn't seem to have changed much, no," he said, despite an increase in the number of scripts he is offered.
"The trouble is I've tied myself up with commitments so far ahead that I'm saying, 'don't send me any more.'"
One of those commitments is to star in "The Avengers," based on the 1960s television series, opposite Uma Thurman as the karate-chopping, leather-clad Emma Peel.
Fiennes, of course, plays the dapper, bowler-hatted John Steed, a
man with a secret life as a spy. A coincidence? Fiennes won't say.
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© EL STEPHO
Added to the RF Reading Room on January 5, 1998
EL STEPHO