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It's all happened quite quickly, Ralph. The films one mentions in conjunction with your name have all been made in the 1990s. Was Schindler's List the "big break" - the one that made you bankable, as they say?
Ralph Fiennes: Yes, I suppose it must have been. I had done one television film, playing T E Lawrence, and a version of Wuthering Heights, which didn't go down particularly well and I think at the time I - I felt I'd blown it - that's it - it's not - I'm going to go back to the theatre - it's not going to work for me on film - and then I was asked to meet Steven -
SL: Steven Spielberg?
RF: Steven Spielberg - and then at the end of the interview he said that "the part that I'm interest in you for is not Oscar Schindler, it's for the commandant of the labour camp, Amon Goethe".
SL: But why would he think of you for that? I mean, were you amazed? Why would he think of - dare we say - a neat, small-featured, very English Englishman for this gross, in both size and character, Nazi?
RF: I don't - when I knew that he - actually I suppose the connection I made was I knew he'd seen me play this Heathcliff, which wasn't great, but I think I played Heathcliff in a particularly violent and quite sadistic way - and that's what I believe - that's what I believe Heathcliff is, actually -
SL: It's that darkness -
RF: Very, very dark.
SL: Mmm
RF: And animal and primitive and, in the latter part of the book, sadistic actually.
SL: You did have to become very fat, you felt in the end. How did you put on all that weight, because you had a real gut.
RF: Lots of pasta, ice-cream and Guinness.
SL: And did it work?
RF: Ah, no, it didn't really work. I - I got some generous love handles but otherwise not much, and then in the end I went to my local chemist, bought some very dubious-looking weight gain powders - you mix it with milk and it's like liquid cement.
SL: But from dangerous, evil German, you went on to play this cheating, American, white Anglo-Saxon Protestant in Quiz Show and then the Hungarian Count in The English Patient and the neurotic gambler in Oscar and Lucinda - it's a huge range, and it does seem, watching you in all of those roles, that you do change your, your - that you change physically - physiognomy - every time - I suppose, I suppose that's the job, is it, that's the talent, is it?
RF: I don't know - it's funny, because I think that when I wanted to be an actor it was because of language.
SL: How?
RF: We as children were always surrounded by books and recordings of poetry or, ah, plays, etcetera, and my mother was an articulate woman who'd encourage us to talk, and she'd read to us, and we'd be encouraged to read poems, and, um, I was always - from an early age I was excited by, by language. And I suppose that was what turned me on, actually, as an actor. But then when I started being offered work in films, it wasn't language, it was something more physical. I worked with a brilliant costume designer, Jim Atcheson, on Wuthering Heights, actually, but the process of finding this wardrobe - battered old rags for Heathcliff that then turned into finer garmets as he comes back to Wuthering Heights - was wonderful, 'cause he, he sort of worked the clothes around your body, and when we were sitting and we were talking about it and analyzing it that, I think, sometimes, someone would say "Wear this coat" or "Put on this uniform, Put on this SS uniform" -
SL: Yeah
RF: It was a very peculiar, unsettling feeling, that the costume made you feel powerful, and strong, and that was very disturbing.
SL: Tell me about your first record.
RF: Well when we were young, my father had been in Australia, and he had a whole string of ballads that he sang. Obviously he did things like Waltzing Matilda - although I haven't got a recording of him singing any of those, he always used to speak about Kathleen Ferrier, and how - how moved he was by her singing, and how tragic it was that she died of throat cancer, and so my first record is Kathleen Ferrier singing "Blow The Wind Southerly".
[Record plays]
SL: Kathleen Ferrier singing "Blow The Wind Southerly", and that was recorded in 1949. I wonder why it makes you cry?
RF: I suppose, something about, maybe it's inevitable nostalgia about - about hearing it when I was young, and also something about a voice of that purity being cut off so - so tragically.
SL: Your mother, erm, who died of cancer six years ago was obviously a formidable influence in your life. What was she like?
RF: Well as a mother primarily, extraordinarily loving and giving and able to encourage her children all as individuals -
SL: Because there were six of you
RF: Well, there were seven in fact, because when I was about one and a half or two she adopted - ah - I consider him my elder brother, Mick, who was eleven, actually, when he came to our house.
SL: You didn't resent him, you didn't mind?
RF: No, because there was such a - quite a big - a ten year age gap. I think that my first competitor was my sister Martha, and the story - apparently, I don't remember this - I stole her teddy bear.
SL: So it's a huge house full of children - I mean, there were, there were six of you were under seven at one point, and then there was Mick as you say, older. Life must have been pretty crowded, lots of queuing for the bathroom.
RF: There was - yes, when - yes, there was, and some of the houses we lived in - we moved - my parents moved around quite a bit in the early 70s - and some of the houses were quite small. Often they were intermediary houses while my father would work on doing up the house that we were going to live in.
SL: That's how he made his money, is it?
RF: I think so, yes. My father is a photographer, and he started being a photographer quite late, and so that early years of establishing himself were quite difficult.
SL: Well, your mother taught you herself at one point, all of you, didn't she?
RF: It was only for a short time - maybe just under a year, but she did it. It was all very arts biased. Arithmetic and maths, somehow, even though she tried not to, they definitely became second-string, and she got in a local retired army intelligence officer to come and teach us Latin, but my brother Magnus and I were more interested in asking him about his experiences during World War Two.
SL: It all obviously worked. She obviously stimulated you because, well, we know that your brother Joseph is an actor, memorably Shakespeare in Love, and then your sister Martha's a director, so you all ended up really being rather artistic and very successful, so the whole thing worked.
RF: It worked, but it often - there were moments - she was often exhausted. She wanted to find time to write, and always the concerns about schooling and money were quite difficult, so I have - I have memories of great freedom and being inspired and encouraged, but there were times when it was - it was very - and then I also remember times of great stress and anxiety.
SL: Record number two.
RF: Record number two is "Ziggy Stardust" by David Bowie, and I remember buying it in WH Smith in Salisbury after school. I felt like I had bought something slightly illicit
[Record plays]
SL: Ziggy Stardust. What were the theatrical influences in your childhood, Ralph? Did you listen to radio drama or television drama?
RF: No, I think, I think - my mother put on a record of Laurence Olivier speaking soliloquies and speeches from Hamlet and Henry V with - intermixed in with the, um, William Walton score from both the films, and I didn't - I can't - I didn't understand everything that was being said, but there was something about the effect of that voice and that music.
SL: It hit a spot, obviously.
RF: Yeah, it did.
SL: What about going to the theatre itself? Did you do that?
RF: Yes, but my first memory of going to the theatre is actually being taken to see Hamlet at the Salisbury Playhouse.
SL: And? I mean, having done him yourself since, I mean, again -
RF: Well, I was just - I remember this production. I remember a very simple, spare, minimal grey set. My parents were quite sniffy about it, but I - I wasn't, I was just intrigued.
SL: Mmm.
RF: What I've - always interests me is the spirit of that person coming through, whatever they're doing, if they're playing, um, Portia or a Pinter character it doesn't matter, there's still something that - I remember that first theatre performance and being interested, and I - that's why I suppose I understand why people are interested in actors outside being actors, because the actor thinks they're projecting something - they think "I want to project this character" or "This is what I'm sending out" but they're actually - there's stuff they're sending out which they don't know about and I think that -
SL: Which is themselves.
RF: Yeah.
SL: But you don't like it when people want to know -
RF: No, I don't
SL: More about you, do you?
RF: I don't.
SL: You prefer to be, as I said at the beginning, hiding away behind a character.
RF: I don't, but speaking as a punter [they both laugh] one is fascinated by the different qualities of different actors, or even if they're singers, or even musicians.
SL: Record number three.
RF: Well this is ah - from the Mozart Requiem. I think I must have bought it once in a record shop, but I played it a lot in - in my first and only motor car, which is, I still have - just. I bought it when I was - went to start my first season with the RSC at Stratford.
[Record plays]
SL: Part of the Benedictus from Mozart's Requiem, sung by Ilyana Koflabash [phonetic spelling], Helen Watts, Robert Tier and John Shirley Quirke. Um, Ralph Fiennes, you auditioned for the Royal Shakespeare Company, as you say, ah, I think, in the mid Eighties and Adrian Noble, the artistic director, said you gave one of the three best auditions he'd ever seen. Can you remember what you did for him?
RF: I actually did a speech by the character Barone from Love's Labours Lost. I remember it being a relaxed audition, but I - I didn't realise I had apparently scored so high!
SL: But you did go on, as we've indicated, to have a very successful time there. Um, but it has to be said, you had had a few failures before - you'd played Romeo, I think, in Regent's Park -
RF: Yeah.
SL: In the open-air theatre. It didn't go down well, did it?
RF: Um, I think Romeo is an infamously difficult part, and I remember an actor came to me afterwardsand said "I don't think the balcony scene was successful" because such tender, delicate language of first love, that mixture of speaking your mind but also worrying about what the other person thinks of you, lurching into - how much you love someone and then worrying that they - they've misread it and, and I think that I - in that big arena, I think I probably shouted it, or - I remember running around feeling great doing it, but I think that the intensity of that interaction, I think I missed it.
SL: It is interesting that one would think of you as playing romantic leads, but what you've made your name doing is very much character parts. We haven't talked about Oscar Hopkins in Oscar and Lucinda because he's very sweet, very vulnerable, very excitable, and he is a bit neurotic and a gambler. You have said, let me quote you to yourself again, that he is the nearest you've come to playing yourself.
RF: I know. I regret that quote. I think I said it off the top of my head. I read the screenplay of Oscar and Lucinda before I read Peter Carey's book, and there's something about the idealism of Oscar Hopkins in love, when he - he offers this mad scheme to the character Lucinda - there's something about his faith, actually, it's his faith. For all his awkwardness and his eccentricity, he's actually a very strong character, so although he's thin, and his clothes don't fit and he's - he's quite idosyncratic, there's something at the heart of him to do with his faith that is very strong - I don't know that I have that strength, but I was inspired by the strength of Oscar Hopkins and thought what a wonderful set of things to play.
SL: Which one of all the characters you've played do you like best? Do you have a favourite?
RF: I don't have a favourite, no - I've, I've - they've been the only thing in my life at the time that I've done them and then I suppose you bid them farewell and they go out - they get sent out into the - into the world, and people, you know, people either accept them or they don't.
SL: Next record.
RF: Well, on my travels I've taken - I've always carried the complete Beethoven piano sonatas played, all of them by Alfred Brendel so they've become, if you like, a talisman, a safety net, when one is feeling a bit bruised, battered or just needs to put one's mind into another place.
[Record plays]
SL: Alfred Brendel playing part of Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 32 in C minor. Tell me about Quiz Show, in which you were directed by Robert Redford. You played Charles van Doren, the good-looking clean-cut American son of an academic who colluded with the producers of a 1950s television show to win. It's a true story - he was told the answers beforehand. Did you research it heavily?
RF: Quite. There's lots of material about it and certainly I watched the old footage of the shows - you can see Charlie van Doren giving these answers and - that he actually has known beforehand.
SL: Could you tell he was acting?
RF: Robert Redford said "Oh, he's a terrible actor, you can see it." I have to say I thought he was quite good.
SL: Mmm.
RF: I met Robert Redford - I was asked to meet him in the middle of shooting Schindler's List. I had to fly - I had some days off and I had to fly to meet him in New York, first time ever in America, to play - up for playing a very WASPy American part. I'd never played American before.
SL: But why would he have thought you could do it?
RF: I don't know. I know that he had seen - I attempted to play T E Lawrence, for television, and I suppose Lawrence's hating publicity and yet being drawn to it - it seems that Lawrence, you know, posed for portraits and photographers and wrote huge books telling us about his experiences and at the same time retreated completely from the limelight, and I suppose maybe Redford saw in Lawrence that sort of confusion at the heart of someone, maybe, but I don't know, but I think that Charlie van Doren's someone who comes from a background of principle - his father's a very famous lecturer of English at Columbia University - and, and then drawn to this tacky world of television and getting audience figures up and manipulating the audience and, you know, winning a lot of money and getting a lot of recognition and being recognised in the street and I suppose there's a link between, in the kind of qualities an actor night have to play in both parts there's a link.
SL: Mmm. How did working for Redford, as a director, in the end, work out differently from working for Spielberg - how do they compare?
RF: Well, the obvious difference is that Redford is, Robert Redford's an actor. I loved working with both of them, but they - I mean, Steven Spielberg comes with an extraordinary, at-his-fingertips knowledge of the technical aspects of film-making -
SL: Mmm.
RF: "If you put that lens on it'll have this effect, if you move the dolly this way it'll - " whereas I felt with Robert Redford, that was less in the forefront of his mind - he really wanted to find ways of teasing out of the actors some different nuances of performance. Not to say that Steven didn't also, but, um, just the vocabulary is different, that's all.
SL: Next record.
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© EL STEPHO
Added to the RF Reading Room on October 31, 1999
EL STEPHO