Globe & Mail TIFF Interview

September 16, 1999

Young blue eyes

His hand flying through his sandy hair as he answers questions, Ralph Fiennes's gaze contains a paradoxical mix of shyness and defiance.
By RICK GROEN
Film Critic

Toronto -- No, the question is not whether Ralph Fiennes is a superb actor. That's beyond dispute -- he's among the best of his generation and, at 36, already entrenched in the hallowed tradition of British titans who command the stage (Hamlet, Ivanov) and the screen (Schindler's List, Quiz Show, The English Patient) with equal ease. So his lineage -- Olivier, Burton, O'Toole, Bates, Branaugh, Fiennes -- is as clear as his talent. All this is obvious. What's not is the trickier question of whether Ralph Fiennes has the magical quality, much more a fluke of genetics than a function of talent, that transforms a merely gifted actor into a bona fide movie star.

To complicate matters further, that star quality isn't solely bestowed by matinee idol looks, which Fiennes owns in abundance and which have been on ample display this week in Toronto. He's at the festival pulling double promotional duty -- hyping (1) Istvan Szabo's Sunshine, a multigenerational saga where he delivers a tour de force turn as three separate characters; and (2) his sister Martha Fiennes's adaptation of Onegin, which sees him assume both the title role and an executive producer's credit.

As he makes the publicity rounds, his casual attire -- sandals, khakis, loose blue shirt over a tighter red one -- does nothing to disguise his drop-dead handsome appeal. It's that face, whose features somehow manage to appear simultaneously strong and delicate, dominated by those very celebrated eyes -- pale blue yet intensely riveting. Judged by the reaction the man is evoking, those eyes are to faces what Ferrari is to cars -- a highly efficient babe magnet.

Not that he's noticing. Indeed, under the glare of press scrutiny, Fiennes is behaving exactly as he does under the gaze of a movie camera.

In short, he's performing. So even the tritest question -- someone wonders whether acting is a road to self-knowledge -- meets with an oddly dramatic reply. His body bends in seeming misery, his hand flies nervously through a shock of sandy hair, and (here's the trademark gesture) from beneath a slightly tilted head he suddenly looks up through those oh-so-blue eyes, which are fixed on his questioner with a paradoxical mix of shyness and defiance. The answer ain't half as entertaining as the performance: "It's quite nice to escape into a part at times. Real life is much more confusing. But I don't think acting is therapy. It's just play, an extension of dressing up and playing cowboys and Indians. I think it's wrong, and probably self-defeating, to analyze it."

Later in a relatively private conversation (translation: 15 minutes, timed to the stopwatched second by a flack hovering outside the door), our actor has cranked down the artifice a little. He muses on the directors he's worked with -- Szabo, Anthony Minghella, Robert Redford, Steven Spielberg -- and the thread that connects them: "They all have respect for what an actor does and can explore. I've never been in a film where I've felt like a puppet. Even in The Avengers, which turned out to be a disaster, I liked working for Jeremiah [Chechik]. But Steven and Istvan have something special, the same kind of acute eye. They know what they're looking for and when they've got it -- there, that's the moment they want. And what I loved about Istvan is that he never watched the video monitor during a scene. So many directors insist on watching the damn monitor when you're acting. I hate it."

Perhaps that's why, in his film career at least, Fiennes is intent on exercising creative control over the entire project, as he and Martha did with Onegin: "That has really been a baptism of fire for me. . . . It was much more exhausting than acting and quite scary. But that's still the direction I would like to go. Also, with Onegin, I got to return to the Russian classics. I don't know what it is about Russia. I went there for the first time in '97, to perform Chekhov's Ivanov. It's an extraordinary place, and it's painful -- the history of Communist Russia has left scars, but the people are so warm and they almost celebrate the pain of their past. You know -- Mother Russia weeping over her children. There's just this strong heart that beats through all of it."

Fiennes's own family is quite the artistic clan. The offspring of a photographer father and novelist mother, he's the eldest of six children -- including Martha the director, Magnus the musician, Sophie the producer, and Joseph the fellow thespian (yes, of Shakespeare in Love fame). Among so many high-strung artistes, is the dominant mood co-operative or competitive? "Both," he says instantly. "Since we're all very close in age, as kids, we were always lumped together as 'those Fiennes children.' So we became eager to establish our individuality, and we still carry around that sense of defining our territory. If we're feeling confident about that territory, we can meet and collaborate. If not, we don't."

In comes the stopwatch. My 15 minutes of reflected glory are up, but that question lingers. Does this supremely adroit actor, whose portrayals glide so fluidly from vile Nazi to melancholy Dane to near-incinerated English patient, have what it takes to become an iconic movie star? Happily, there's an expert nearby, and his name is Istvan Szabo, a venerable auteur (Mephisto, Colonel Redl) who has seen much in his 61 years. Szabo has an intriguing theory: "The close-up is the only thing motion pictures can show us that other arts cannot. So the real power, the real heart of a motion picture lies in the living face of an actor."

He continues: "If this is so, then it follows that the notion of a star system is not just some clever creation of studio heads or agents. Instead, the star system is inherent to the medium itself, because the faces of the stars are the icons that the audience uses to represent them on the screen." But those icons, Szabo argues, change according to the cultural shifts in every era and the correspondingly different needs of the audience: "The tough-guy manliness of Robert Taylor and John Wayne during the Second World War, the sensitivity of James Dean in the war's aftermath, then the intellectual face of Tony Perkins during the era of Kennedy's Camelot, followed by the more ragged and antiheroic looks of Dustin Hoffman and Al Pacino and Gene Hackman in the postassassination period. And later, Sylvester Stallone in the wake of the defeat in Vietnam. In his movies, Stallone is always killing, killing, but if you cut to a close-up of him after 15 minutes of killing, what you see is a lonely child -- he was perfect for the time."

Okay, but how about now, as we sit on the precipice of the millennium? Szabo smiles: "Well, for example, society has no idea of the role of women, so the real stars are men. And Ralph Fiennes is one of them. He has something very potent, because he's exactly like us in the audience: fragile. His face suggests fragility -- the intelligent young man who's hesitating about what to do, a conflicted man fighting against himself."

It's a wonderful theory, but misses an ironic truth. Apparently, the owner of that conflicted mug would prefer to have it seen from a distance. If Fiennes could command the same salary in theatre as in film, the decision would be easy. "I would choose the play like that," he states with a snap of his fingers. Rather thin fingers, they are, and attached to a hand that looks delicate -- almost fragile.