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His smile is warm yet world-weary. His answers to questions are careful and intellectual. He is, quite simply, hot and cold at the same time.
It's a dual personality that's particularly suited to Mr. Fiennes' latest role, the emotionally tortured novelist Maurice Bendrix in The End of the Affair, which opens Friday. As Bendrix, Mr. Fiennes is torn between love and hate, between vulnerability and heartlessness, between faith and disbelief. And Mr. Fiennes is well aware of the parallels between the movie persona and real life.
"I identify very much with Bendrix," Mr. Fiennes says of the character, who falls in love with the wife of an upper-class British bureaucrat during World War II. "Bendrix is afraid. He's afraid of losing Sarah [his lover]. And he comes at it with anger. He's actually sort of a vulnerable man, with paranoid anger and cruelty attached to it. And people like that I understand. I understand the fear, the uncertainty."
Director Neil Jordan, who adapted the screenplay from the famous Graham Greene novel, has a slightly different take, and it sounds rather cutting at first but isn't meant to be: "Greene once said there's a splinter of ice in the heart of every novelist - an ability to feel an emotion and then examine the feelings about it."
In The End of the Affair, Mr. Fiennes manages to capture that paradoxical, emotional stance by remaining skeptical and distant, even in the most passionate situations, Mr. Jordan says. "Take the scene where Ralph is sitting on the bed with Julianne [Moore, who plays the lover Sarah]. They're having this terribly passionate, provocative conversation, but you can see Ralph, as Bendrix the novelist, mentally taking notes about the page he will write the next day. The observer has to be dispassionate, perhaps almost icy, yet still participate."
A special role
Passionate yet icy. Mr. Fiennes has made a career of playing such roles: the patrician cheater of 1994's Quiz Show, the ex-cop in 1995's Strange Days, the doomed romantic in 1996's The English Patient, and the gambling-obsessed Anglican in 1997's Oscar and Lucinda.
But Maurice Bendrix in The End of the Affair has a special place in Mr. Fiennes' heart. "I'd always wanted to play a Graham Greene character," he says. "I always wanted to be in that world, because there's a peculiar honor, something at the heart of Greene, that I'm really drawn to.
"It's clear that Greene himself feels flawed or failed, and that he has compassion for other people who are flawed and failing or perceived to be doing something unethical. He has a peculiar, paradoxical kind of morality, and I think it's really distilled in The End of the Affair, in the character of Bendrix."
Mr. Fiennes hesitates before proceeding, choosing his words carefully as he tries to explain Bendrix's emotional turmoil after the end of the affair with Sarah Miles, who, unbeknownst to Bendrix, has made a promise that she can't break.
"I think Bendrix is in a rage, he's locked against the memory of a very physical, earthly love affair. And suddenly it's been taken from him, and he finds that his competitor is actually God. He rages against God, and against her, in a sense. But I think that in the very act of his raging, he is acknowledging God," Mr. Fiennes says.
"I think what Greene is saying is that hating God is actually better than thinking that there is no God. I think there's actually something going on in opposing God. And the last line, 'Leave me alone forever,' to me implies that God won't leave him alone forever. Because I think there's a paradox, really. I think Greene raged against the very God that he espoused all his life."
Mr. Fiennes says he thinks Bendrix is the most autobiographical of Greene's fictional characters, especially since the author dedicated The End of the Affair to Catherine Walston, with whom he had a doomed romance. Greene was so infatuated with the religious-minded woman, Mr. Fiennes says, that he converted to Catholicism to help win her love, but then proceeded to betray her.
Private parallels
Although he is reluctant to talk about private matters, it's clear that complicated love affairs have been a big part of Mr. Fiennes' life, too.
From 1993 to 1997, Mr. Fiennes (whose name is pronounced Rafe Fines) was married to actress Alex Kingston, who's perhaps best known to American audiences as the British doctor Elizabeth Corday on television's ER. He and Ms. Kingston met while both were attending the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts.
But the marriage ended in divorce in October 1997, after Mr. Fiennes met an actress 18 years his senior, Francesca Annis. Much to the scandalous glee of the British tabloids, sparks began to fly between the two while both were performing in a stage version of Hamlet in 1994. British papers have delighted in pointing out that he was Hamlet, while she played the mother Gertrude.
Mr. Fiennes is now 37; Ms. Annis is 55.
While politely declining to comment directly on the relationship, Mr. Fiennes says, he agrees with Greene on matters of the heart.
"Greene doesn't want to give any of his characters any easy, fairy-tale, glib solutions," he says. "You know, there aren't any easy answers in life. And the sort of screwed-upness of people and situations doesn't stop."
'Lovely themes'
When Mr. Jordan began to adapt the novel for the screen, he says, he had a similar conception of Greene's interests. The director thought the main attraction was Greene's complicated portrayal of love and faith and hatred and disbelief. "These kinds of questions are lovely themes, they are the themes of art. They're the only big themes, really."
Mr. Jordan says he was also intrigued by "the possibility of showing a love story from all these different points of view, showing the tragic opposition to the way one man views a love affair and one woman views it.
"The man views it through jealousy, possessiveness, a kind of singularity of desire. And although the man doesn't know this, the woman views the affair through unconditional love. I thought it was fascinating."
As it turns out, the unconditional love of the woman evolves into a love of God, who turns out to be the ultimate opponent for Bendrix, who's a hardened atheist. "Through jealousy and hatred, Bendrix is led to acknowledge that which he knows does not exist," Mr. Jordan says. "But how you can hate that which does not exist? It's a very active hatred. There's a deep kind of irony there." The director's story
Mr. Jordan, who was born a Catholic, says he doesn't see himself as a religious man today. "I ceased to grapple with religion or worry about it after the age of 17," he says, "but I find the questions intriguing."
And, he says, he especially loves these questions in the context of the doomed romance in The End of the Affair. "I love the kind of immensity of the questions that it brings to mind, about the nature of fidelity, the nature of love, the nature of immortality, of what love between two people expresses."
Then, he adds, in a comment that reflects a skeptical Irish Catholic heritage, "I love it that people can go on loving God all their lives without seeing him."
In the end, Mr. Jordan says, there's something deeply autobiographical for everyone - not just Mr. Fiennes - in The End of the Affair.
"I have been in those situations that are in the Graham Greene novel," he says. "I think that very few people survive the death of love in their lives. And if they do survive, they survive in a diminished way.
"I think any adult who has been in love with someone has experienced this," he says. "You start with this infinite possibility, and you end up with nothing left."
But the bittersweet Mr. Jordan makes it clear that he's not all gloom and doom. After all, he says, we have the memories, the possibility of new love, and, thanks to Greene, stories such as The End of the Affair
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© EL STEPHO
Added to the RF Reading Room on January 7, 2000
EL STEPHO