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Ralph (pronounced "Rafe") is about to make the leap from RSC stage star to film lead, in the third film version of Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights. Sexual chemistry is what director Peter Kominsky hopes will inflame the screen whenever Ralph and Juliette Binoche, the French actress chosen to play both Cathy Earnshaw and Catherine Linton, appear together.
"Peter keeps bringing it up" says Ralph wearily, "but I'm very confused about what it means. When I first met Juliette, I was in awe of her and she was nervous because she had to read with me in English, which she wasn't so strong in at the time. I'd read with another actress and I thought we were really sparking each other off, but no, it seemed we weren't, whereas Juliette and I were."
Making the break from subsidised stage to commercial cinema has been puzzling and not altogether comfortable in more ways than one. Ralph became accustomed to having his artistic talents rewarded by ecstatic notices when he appeared in the title role in Henry VI, Parts 1 and 2, soon after he joined the RSC in 1988. Further acclaim followed when he played Troilus in Troilus and Cressida, Edmund in King Lear and Berowne in Loveís Labour's Lost in the 1990-91 season. But Heathcliff was a very different proposition.
"I needed to get out of the ivory tower of subsidised theatre," Ralph recalls, "but I wasn't sure I was right for Heathcliff. I had an idea that he was broader and bigger and darker and heavier than I am, perhaps because he is such a very damage human being."
Next thing he knew he was striding across the Yorkshire moors in the footsteps of Lord Lawrence Olivier, who played Heathcliff in the 1939 film of Wuthering Heights. Not literally in the footsteps, as it happens, for Lord Olivier's was the all-Californian moorland enhanced only by Hollywood heather, whereas Ralph got to trample the real thing in the worst October weather anyone cares to remember. "I don't feel threatened or daunted by Olivier because acting and cinema styles are so different nowadays. My anxieties lie in the emotional heights and depths in Heathcliff. I had to draw on the angry, difficult, violent parts of myself and I did find all those things inside. Of course I can be bad tempered and ugly when I am frustrated. It's quite easy for me to be intensely negative toward other people."
The attention and fuss that comes with the media circus also exasperates Ralph. Recently he played TE Lawrence in the television film A Dangerous Man. His performance prompted a Time Out journalist to write, "Ralph Fiennes smirks his way through it like Little Lord Fauntleroy", and an American journalist to ask if playing Lawrence had given him a sense of adventure to match Sir Ranulph Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes, the famed explorer. Sir Ranulph, says Ralph, is a very distant relative, a second cousin twice removed. He doesn't know him well. Indeed he's rarely met him, despite much reporting to the contrary. "I have absolutely no lust to go exploring" he adds firmly, "and in no way has Sir Ranulph's career, exciting and brilliant though it is, had any effect on my being an actor. The Time Out journalist related one to the other and came up with Little Lord Fauntleroy. The American wanted to know if Lawrence and I had anything in common. I said we both like books a lot, which was definitely not the answer he wanted."
On the subject of Wuthering Heights, he says: "My Heathcliff isn't just a very nasty man and I'm glad of that. There are times when you can see the pain underneath, all the losses that make him manipulate people and do horrendous things. Although it came up endlessly, I still don't know what 'sexual chemistry' means. I feel that Juliette and I have a professional relationship on screen which is fine because the film has no bonking in it, just as the book hasn't. It is about love and obsession that goes beyond sexual desire, but Basic Instinct it isn't."
The move to handsome young movie lead hasn't changed everything. Ralph is not, for example, immune to the insecurities of acting. After Wuthering Heights, he was out of work for six months for the first time since he left RADA in 1985. Now that he's fully employed again, initially in the new Peter Greenaway film, The Baby of Macon, followed by the lead in the BBCís The Savage Eye, he can afford to be more sanguine about this involuntary pause for thought. He admits he was running scared. "I was never confident and I'm not confident now. I'm always open to every offer that comes along, but I do have strict standards."
He was lucky enough to have the kind of itinerant upbringing that should have prepared him for an actor's existence. He is the oldest of six children of a photographer who supplemented a precarious income by developing houses in England and Ireland. At times, The Fiennes children were so far removed from civilisation that their mother took over their education herself. "The schools in the west of Ireland taught Gaelic, arithmetic and Catholicism, and that was it. Mum loved literature, and especially Shakespeare, so she concentrated on that and hired a retired banker and ex-intelligence officer to teach us maths and Latin."
The decision to act came late. In his teens Ralph was far more interested in more obviously macho pursuits. "I desperately wanted to be good at rugby, that adolescent thing of needing to be a man, I suppose, but I was useless. It was a charade really. Then I thought I'd go into the Royal Marines, but luckily I realised that I found more stimulation in the art world."
He decided to be a painter and enrolled in a foundation course at Chelsea College of Art, then opted for the stage. He applied for assorted drama schools and went along to the Lost Theatre Company, an amateur group in Fulham, while waiting to see if he'd been accepted. On his first visit he remembers "a lot of young people with incredible energy", so he went backstage and asked them if he could join their improvisation workshop. What they saw was the Romeo they'd been looking for. "I was thrilled", said Ralph. "To play the leading role as a newcomer was not what I expected." It seems inevitable that he should have been doing it ever since.
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© EL STEPHO
Added to the RF Reading Room on January 21, 1998
EL STEPHO