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Thirty-two-year-old Ralph Fiennes, who stars in Robert Redford's Quiz Show, due next month, currently finds himself at that peculiar juncture between hard work and hoopla, between obscurity and fame. Improbably so, as Fiennes's tour in rarefied repertory with London's Royal Shakespeare Company hardly seemed a likely springboard to a high-profile Oscar magnet like Schindler's List. And his mastery of classical stage roles like Troilus and Lear's Edmund weren't obvious preparation for Amon Goeth, Schindler's depraved Nazi, in whose boots Fiennes goose-stepped to sudden renown - and an Oscar nomination (for best supporting actor). Pale and bloated, with glowing eyes and the pinched, pretty face of a castrato, Fiennes's Goeth - who got his jollies from picking off Jews with a rifle like tin ducks on the midway - was oddly seductive. Of course, evil often is; even more so when it bears Ralph Fiennes's features - the fine bones, delicate almond-shaped nostrils, long eyelashes and darkly rimmed green-gray irises that look as soft offscreen as rabbit's fur under glass.
He's been likened by Schindler director Steven Spielberg to Laurence Olivier, anointed one of the year's "fifty most beautiful people" by People and put on the fast track by the mighty Creative Artists Agency. Still, Fiennes can't comprehend the media's sudden interest in his opinions, nor can he stomach the fuss made over something as personal as his name - which is pronounced, all together now, "Rafe Fines." People are bemused by it; some writer somewhere once decided it was Welsh. "I don't know who the fuck started that. It's complete rubbish," Fiennes says, pointing out that his is a perfectly legitimate, Old English pronunciation. But "people think you're being willfully perverse or affected. As I'm learning, we are two countries divided by a common language, and here it makes sense: You call a spade a spade - 'Ralph is Ralph, and don't try to pull the wool over my eyes.' I'm so sick of the fucking pronunciation thing. I hate it being made an issue of."
Such problems. On the cusp of stardom, Fiennes is wary and slightly embarrassed by all the ghastly goodies life tends to foist on the chosen. But he's coping.
Fourish on a California Sunday. The retro odor of pot and patchouli floats on the warm breeze down at Venice Beach, where Ralph Fiennes moves discreetly through the human wreckage. Ghosty batik blouses flap on racks in an open-air shop where a headless, handless mannequin bids a macabre welcome. It's stranger-in-a-strange-land time for Fiennes, who can't help looking a little like Christ among lepers.
Distracted by a Rollerblading demonstration, he stops and watches, then smiles and shakes his head at the idea of ever strapping on such a set of wheels. Fiennes dislikes sports and competition; he well remembers the indignity of being made to play rugby in school, during his youth in England and Ireland - "having some instructor yell at you to get in line so you can kick a ball," he says, shuddering at the memory. A few paces down the beach, he gasps at the sight of a severely disfigured dwarf. And a step or two farther, he's stopped dead in his tracks by something even scarier: an out-of-work actor wearing a sandwich board advertising his services.
Does Fiennes imagine that that could be him someday?
He sighs and says "I suppose anything is possible."
Fiennes pauses long and hard between thoughts; he wouldn't know a sound bite if it bit him on the rump. His expressive eyebrows climb easily to an apex of worry if he thinks he's offended you in some way. (At lunch one day, as a busboy approaches, he starts frantically sweeping up the pile of breadcrumbs he's created, then says with a nervous laugh "I guess that's the nature of bread, isn't it?") He's frequently described as fragile and diffident. Still, a couple of afternoons spent with the actor afford numerous hints to the contrary: his impressive collection of randy Irish jokes; his eagerness to go out dancing - with a journalist, of all people - before opting instead for a trip to Venice Beach; his having gone to a "girl bar" with a woman friend the night before, out of curiosity. Fiennes has a taste for nightlife, which largely had to go unsatisfied while he was shooting Schindler's List in the gloomy city of Krakow, according to his costar Liam Neeson. "There was fucking nowhere to go," says Neeson, who's become a friend. "But if we were somewhere like Paris, I know Ralph and I would have hit the clubs and got into a lot of trouble."
Of course, in this country, such proclivities lend themselves to gossip. According to one New York tabloid, Barbra Streisand requested she be seated beside Fiennes at a pre-Oscar bash at the Hotel Bel-Air this past March. "I wasn't aware that she'd angled to sit next to me," he says, smiling gamely at the item that details the diva's alleged designs on him. Surprisingly, the idea of being column fodder seems to leave him less mortified than slightly amused.
But the first hint of the real Ralph had come earlier that afternoon, when he set out a tray of tea in the verdant backyard of his rented Los Angeles home (when not working on a film, Fiennes shares a permanent home in London with his wife of one year, actress Alex Kingston). An hour or so into the conversation, he'd admitted that he would much rather have a whiskey, whereupon he poured himself a shot and began to relax. And it was as if the whole genteel deal with the tea wasn't really him at all but, rather, what he thought was expected of him as someone who looks as if he were dreamed up by Merchant Ivory.
But don't call Fiennes a Merchant Ivory type to his face, no matter how tempting, given the wispy Edwardian coif, combed straight back on top and falling elegantly on either side, or the winsome tilt of the head that sparks the shy smile. With mock annoyance, he rears back, exclaiming "A Mechant Ivory type - that's a terrible thing to say. It's like telling a black person 'You're a Spike Lee type'!"
Indeed, Fiennes is no poncey Oxbridge aesthete, destined for precious parts in picturesque pictures. Instead, he favors characters whose amenable facades are belied by twisted, risky passions. Take, for instance, his T.E. Lawrence in A Dangerous Man: Lawrence After Arabia, a television movie he made for the BBC a few years ago. A far cry from Peter O'Toole's frolicsome nutball, Fiennes's Lawrence is a spooky, almost Kurtzian egotist. "Whereas David Lean's film was in a major key," says Fiennes, "this was in a minor key," which clearly is how he prefers it.
Others, however, don't always see it his way. Regarding 1991's disastrous British remake of Wuthering Heights, in which he played Heathcliff, Fiennes can't hide his disappointment with the producers and studio people who, he says, tried to reduce the gritty story to a breathy romance. Even worse, "they wanted - there was a talk of me... they want to see you with your shirt off or your bare bottom," he says with distaste. Pilloried by the press, the movie never made it to these shores. Still, Fiennes prefers this sort of noble failure to a surer, if shallower, bet like the movie version of The Saint, which he'd been approached about starring in. "It had an appeal to the little boy in me who wants to drive fast cars," he says on the ride home from the beach, sitting in the passenger seat of a lethargic American rental, searching the dial for "chat shows." "But I'm more interested in the Sam Spades and the Philip Marlowes, who have a kind of rough edge. The Saint is a charmer, and I think that's a bit dated."
Far more to his taste is the nuanced role of Charles Van Doren in Quiz Show. Based on the 1950s scandal surrounding the game show Twenty-One, in which it was discovered that some contestants had been fed the answers, the movie tells the story of how Van Doren, a lackluster academic and son of the esteemed poet and professor Mark Van Doren, became the show's star. At a certain point, Twenty-One's producers were tiring of the reigning champion, Herb Stempel (John Turturro), an uncomely Bronx-bred Jew. They felt the audience needed someone more appealing to rally around. Charming Charles Van Doren was just the guy, in no small measure because of his blue-blood background. Eventually, Stempel was pressured into answering an easy question wrong, leaving Van Doren - furnished with the right answers - to emerge the great WASP hope. It seems a funny coincidence that, on the heels of Goeth, Fiennes is playing yet another bad-for-the-Jews role. Perhaps he will make a career of portraying flawed Gentiles, thus providing humanitarian service - sort of like Robert Redford, who often explores the thornier side of upper-Anglo-Saxon life in the movies he directs.
The scenario amuses Fiennes. "The good goy," he says, laughing. Suddenly, worry clouds his face.
"You're not Jewish, are you?"
Quiz Show is among other things, wonderful-looking - shiny, well-built, audacious as a Vintage Cadillac. The movie is populated with heavy-smoking sharpies in dark suits, wearing their pocket squares like combat ribbons, shoulder pads flaring like fat fenders. In such a milieu, Fiennes's Van Doren is a puzzle: What compelled this tweedy intellectual to participate in such a scam? "I think if you come from that kind of a family, often the cheesy things are attractive," Fiennes says. "'Cause it's just different and new. The feeling I get is, Charlie appreciated his father's uniqueness but probably didn't actually inherit it in there," he says, pulling a loose fist into his gut. "I think often there's a point where, however much you value what your parents have given you, you just want to say 'Hang on, I'm somebody different. I want my own territory, thank you.'"
To some degree, Fiennes has experience with the sentiment. Born in Suffolk, England, the son of a writer mother, who died last year, and a photographer father, Fiennes was the oldest of four boys and two girls. Yet he shrank from the putative role of leader of the brood. "My sister Martha is a year younger, but there was never much differentiation," he says. "Equals, really." In fact, all six were so bunched up, agewise, says Fiennes, that "people used to refer to us as one: the Fiennes Children. And I think we all used to rebel against that. We all actually wanted to stake out our own territories."
The family moved around a lot. According to Ralph's sister Sophie, "We always were very broke - my parents never had any money a'tall." Ralph says "bohemian" is an apt description of their upbringing; as a result, he can't identify with the way Brits are typically depicted in the movies - "that ridiculous sort of retentive, class thing."
"I wouldn't care to relive my adolescence," Fiennes says. "It's that period of inadequacy and all the sexual-awakening stuff. And you know your parents know it's happening to you, and you bring girls home and they're kind of all talking about them and it's just horrible." Sophie describes her brother in those days as "a loner," "an independent soul," who dabbled in rebellion by becoming "a punk, momentarily. He used to listen to Patti Smith in his bedroom, and he drew this big black rat on his bedroom wall" - album art from the punk band the Stranglers. "I remember him wearing a lot of army surplus stuff and a big greatcoat, he cut his hair very short because I think he wanted to look mean. But it never really worked, because he's got a quite sensitive face." Soon thereafter, Fiennes attended Chelsea College of Art and Design, then switched to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and gave himself over to the rigors of repertory.
The natural impulse to get away and make a life was probably more conflicted in Charles Van Doren. However radical his foray into TV-land glitz, another side of him clearly lived by the creed "Honor thy father." The real beauty of Fiennes's take on Van Doren is that it allows for Charlie's contradictions: You can never be completely certain of his motivation. "I think I can understand the ease with which one can go down a path of behavior other people can see as sort of morally wrong," Fiennes says. "It's very easy to kid yourself into thinking, Well, this is okay." There was, after all, a tremendous amount of money and fame at stake for a guy who wasn't likely to outperform his dad in academe. On Twenty-One, Charlie Van Doren got closer than any college instructor ever could to what it feels like to be a rock star.
John Turturro thinks Fiennes's performance in Quiz Show will be "real confirmation of what he did in Schindler's List. People will see that it wasn't a fluke." Yet it amazes Fiennes that he won a role in the new movie at all. While filming Schindler in Poland, he received word that Redford wanted to fly him to New York for a test (Redford, like Spielberg before him, was initially intrigued by the T.E. Lawrence movie). But Fiennes, who'd never even been to America, thought it was a long shot. "I mean, I didn't feel remotely like a clean-cut American intellectual. I had twenty-odd pounds extra and a very aggressive, short haircut, and I just felt," he says, laughing, "more like a Nazi."
"Everything was against him," Redford admits, "except the thing that means the most, which is an interior quality I felt he had. I thought Ralph had a wonderfully interesting interior - this dark, haunted quality underneath the perfect shell. That is exactly what I wanted for Van Doren." (As probably the world's most reluctant sex symbol, Redford must know from the dubiousness of perfect shells.) Ultimately, he says, "Ralph's eyes were what interested me the most. I felt they would carry the message I was looking for, for the whole character."
Fiennes, however, had doubts. "It was hard for him," Turturro says. "He hadn't really had enough time to prepare with the accent - he was really quite nervous when he began. It got better as he went along, but he was in a very vulnerable situation," in part because of the newness of New York. "Yeah, he was in a daze, basically."
But Redford wasn't troubled by Fiennes's jitters. "I guess the reason I felt as confident as I did is that I thought we could use some of that for the character," he says. "Because Charles had a slight innocent ungainliness about him, which had to be mixed with a shrewd, wily, smart, slippery quality that I knew would come in time, because Ralph is a very, very hard worker. He is a very serious actor, and I knew that his seriousness would lead him to the right place."
Fiennes delivers on all counts - except, possibly, with the accent. But he'll take another whack at it in his next movie, Kathryn (Blue Steel) Bigelow's Strange Days, in which he will play a former L.A. cop. In preparation, he's working with a dialect coach, as well as reading Raymond Chandler out loud, to familiarize himself with Angeleno patois.
What might be harder to learn are the elements of the job that have nothing to do with acting - such as how to endure the hype that comes with being the Next Big Thing. When the glowing Schindler reviews, nominations and awards started rolling in, "people would say 'Oh, my God, are you okay? It must be weird for you at the moment,'" Fiennes says. "And that's what's weird. People assume certain things are happening to you. They're waiting for you to suddenly be different and starry and aloof. People are waiting to see you being corrupted or destroyed." Which doesn't seem to have happened, although Oscar-mania did have its impact. "I found myself getting kind of expectant and anxious because of the whirlwind of chatter that happens," says Fiennes. "All the papers run articles, and people are telling me they'd put money on me - and you catch yourself taking it quite seriously."
Fiennes supposes that "coming from England, you have a healthy, ironic attitude to prizes." There are moments, however, when the irony borders on cynicism. "Because it's kind of a silly exercise anyway, who's best. I mean, Harvey Keitel never got an Oscar, and that makes me think, What the fuck, you know? How can you take this seriously if one of the best actors, like Harvey Keitel, doesn't get one?"
After Fiennes lost out to Tommy Lee Jones, Liam Neeson pulled him aside and tried to lay a little perspective on him. "I told him 'I'm thrilled you got nominated, and I think it's wonderful you didn't win,'" says Neeson, who feels somewhat big-brotherly toward Ralph. " 'Because if you did, you'd end up wearing Goeth around your neck like an albatross. Tommy Lee Jones won and justly so, because it wasn't just for The Fugitive. It was for years of hacking away, doing this craft.' I said. 'You've arrived, you've been acknowledged, and you don't need a statuette for it.'"
As the expectations for his career multiply, Fiennes will likely draw on the training he received in repertory boot camp. "You get roughened up, you go through the mill. You can't be precious about it," he says, sipping white wine in his sandy-colored living room as Bach variations flutter around in the background. "What I'm trying to say is, your only target is that night's performance. It's a team thing, and any actor in a company who is striving to be the best, above other people, is kind of really abhorrent.... Talking about this really makes me want to do a play."
Next year, he'll get his wish, when he plays Hamlet in an English production. Yet Hollywood isn't likely to let Fiennes stray for long. Which will mean more extended separations from his wife, whose own London-based career is in a decidedly lower gear than his at the moment. Fiennes admits that's hard on them both, sometimes. But Neeson says the couple is "very close. They'll cope admirably" - never mind Fiennes's American female fans, who can be, Ralph has noticed, "quite forward." The other challenge will be in not letting stardom get in the way of the work. "Ralph knows what he wants to do," says Redford. "He knows what he has to do. The question is, Will he be able to do it against the forces that exist in Hollywood? So my advice to him would be to get out of town whenever possible."
Walking along the beach at twilight, his undone shirt cuffs flapping in the stiff wind, Fiennes is sharing his hopes and fears - about acting, about fame, about his wide-open future. Then he stops at the water's edge, his naughty smile saying he just might take a dip. A chill goes through him. Still, Fiennes looks ready to dive in.
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© EL STEPHO
Added to the RF Reading Room on May 5, 1998
EL STEPHO