 |
 |
 |
 |
 | |
 |
|
We've met at his private club, atop a narrow, dead-end alley in the West End, a hidden corner of London's winding theater district. At first glance, he's welcoming and polite, but discomfort shows on his brow and in his intense, skipping glance. The club is markedly casual and unpretentious, and he asks if a small table near the bar would be a good setting for our interview. But Anneliese Rothenberger is singing opera loudly over the stereo and might drown out his words, since interviewers have often described him as, well, for one thing, quite soft-spoken.
"'Quite soft-spoken,'" Ralph Fiennes muses as he leads me to a quieter upstairs parlor. Quickly, his discomfort changes to a playful smile. "Well, it depends on what kind of questions you ask."
That's a joke, but a warning as well. Not since Sean Penn has a film star been as averse to publicity as Fiennes, 37, a classically trained stage thespian bewildered, and sometimes embattled, by the conventions of the film business. Friends, family, and colleagues describe Ralph (pronounced "rafe," and Old English locution) as stern, but also warm, funny, and considerate. Interviewers have been less complimentary. "I'm shy, introverted, awkward, uncomfortable, and I hate to talk to the press," Fiennes says with a knowing smile, summarizing his public image.
After Fiennes played a Nazi commandant in Schindler's List, the remorseless villain in Steven Spielberg's 1993 redemption parable, a Vanity Fair profile presented him as a sour, smug, cold abrasive genius. Although he doesn't contest other aspects of his media portrait, Fiennes insists he's guarded and defensive rather than shy, because the latter word connotes apology or embarrassment. And Fiennes is resolute: He won't entertain questions about his personal life. If asked about his girlfriend, actress Francesca Annis, 55, or his ex-wife, ER cast member Alex Kingston, he's likely to mumble softly, in a "tight-lipped, polite way, because I'm not very good at saying 'Fuck off.'" He adds with a laugh, "I *should* say that more often."
Even more, he hates questions that are "based in total ignorance" about filmmaking. "When people ask, 'Why do you choose only period parts? Why do you always play these difficult, disturbed people?' it pushes me into being resistant," he explains.
The delicate intensity he showed as a haughty, love-ruined Hungarian explorer in 1996's The English Patent was widely described as "smoldering" -- an unfortunate way to describe a man playing a burn victim, perhaps. But the movie's massive romantic appeal came as much from Fiennes' dark-roofed gray-green eyes as from dialogue like "The heard is an organ of fire." At close range, those eyes can assume a severe, appraising stance, rich with dismissive power. A few years ago, even his own sisters characterized him as aloof, arrogant, and curt.
During this rainy early-fall afternoon, he regards some topics with caution and others with enthusiasm. But his convictions come into clearest focus when he discusses his role in The End of the Affair, Neil Jordan's handsome, compelling adaption of the Graham Greene novel about faith and unfaithfulness among London's well-mannered classes during World War II. Fiennes plays Maurice Bendrix, an undistinguished novelist in love with a married woman, Sarah Miles (Julianne Moore), who won't leave her drab husband. Jealous and petulant, Fiennes turns his mouth into a bunker of torment, makes electrical storms of his eyes. No one else broods so magnificently. A tragic wartime love story, The End of the Affair holds echoes of The English Patient: "I'm in the desert without him," Sarah even says when they're estranged. During the long, candid sex scenes between Maurice and Sarah, Hollywood's typical bedroom thrashing gives way to sincere, soulful eye gazing.
Although this is quite deliberately a romance, Maurice is not a conventional romantic hero. "I like his anger and his bitterness," says Fiennes. "I like his hatred. I think that's real. I'm sure people won't find him likeable. But to be honest, I don't really want to be likable, or play parts that are likeable."
Very quickly, Fiennes learned that Hollywood doesn't share his appreciation of anger, hatred and bitterness. He had trained at the prestigious Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, played the classics in national theater companies, and after his first starring film role, as Heathcliff in a 1992 version of Wuthering Heights, he "almost swore off the movie business" entirely. He and costar Juliette Binoche "were both unhappy," he says, because studio executives wanted to palliate the "violence and duplicity" of the story. He bristles at the studio's "language of commerce: 'We've got to have a sex moment, we've got to have a screen kiss, it's got to have chemistry.' That's a very limited vocabulary."
Playing Shakespeare in London hadn't been like this. "No one talked to me about being 'likable' when I played Troilus," Fiennes says with a dry laugh.
At times, he seems at odds not just with writers but with the casualness that comprises contemporary culture. "He's serious. He's not glib or frivolous," says one of his sisters, director Martha Fiennes. "He wants to do things in an intelligent, serious way, not with the chimera of passing fashion, immediacy, MTV culture -- all the stuff that's very pervasive." Seven years ago, Ralph gave her a copy of Aleksandr Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, a verse novel about the tragic, tardy transformation of a louche playboy in 19th-century Russia, and said, "I think this would make a great film." She developed Onegin as a vehicle for him, between directing music videos and commercials. But he refused to commit to star in it, she says, "until he was happy with the script." Ultimately, he also served as executive producer for the film, which will be released this winter and costars Liv Tyler. (The Fiennes' younger brother Magnus composed the soundtrack.)
If he's so averse to vulgarity and plastic cheer, why even work in Hollywood, which exports the stuff by the billions? He's been in hits since Wuthering Heights -- as well as one noisy dud, last year's The Avengers (his first nonbrooding role) -- but he says he's chosen films that had "strong people in control," directors who could block studio interference: Spielberg, Peter Greenaway in The Baby of Macon (1993), and Robert Redford during Quiz Show (1994).
Redford also gave him career advice and counseled the path of maximum invisibility. Unlike many stars, Fiennes doesn't dodge questions with artful half-answers and false sincerity. "Some of us are better than others at pretending that we're really showing you our selves," says Julianne Moore. "And I don't think Ralph pretends, which is one of the things I really love about him. Most actors beg for approval; Ralph doesn't do that."
When he's not defensive -- that is, when he's not around writers -- Fiennes even has a bawdy sense of humor; he "loves a good naughty limerick, and more else besides," says sister Martha. Moore raves about him with almost girlish ardor. "Ralph is my favorite costar of all time," she says. "People think he's difficult to know, but he's exactly the opposite." She met him in 1995, backstage on the last night of his run as Hamlet. Says Moore: "We were both going through incredibly difficult personal times" -- she was divorcing her husband, he was leaving Kingston for Annis, who played Gertrude, Hamlet's mother, in the production -- and over dinner at the cast party, the two actors discussed their troubles. When Moore went to London to begin The End of the Affair, Fiennes and Annis took her to dinner and to see Conor McPherson's play The Weir. Moore also raves about Annis -- "aside from being a marvellous actress, she's one of the sexiest women in England" -- and recalls that the couple were kind even when Moore's cell phone went off in the theatre.
In The English Patient, Fiennes quizzes Kristen Scott Thomas with a series of four questions in order to know her better. I present the same questions to Fiennes.
Q: "When were you most happy?"
"Oh, this is from The English Patient?" he asks. "I think I was very happy in the adventure of rehearsing Hamlet, or playing Hamlet. I was tired, I was exhausted, I was frustrated. Often, I would be bad some evenings. It was extraordinary to continually investigate that part -- every night you have to say extraordinary lines that are applicable to everyone, and it's a special challenge to make that connection every night."
Q: "When were you least happy?"
He pauses. Outside, a bus rolls by, a few cars honk. Fiennes lets out a heavy breath. A minute and four seconds pass, then he says, quite softly, "Not any one given moment, but times over a couple of years when two things combined to make me unhappy. One was that sense that my first marriage was not actually working, combined with the knowledge that my mother was terminally ill."
Q: "What do you love?"
A pause of 11 seconds. "I don't know why I give into these questions. I feel very uncomfortable being put on the spot," he says. "That's the mistake about your questions -- the scene is two people in complete privacy, and your interview is going to be printed everywhere. He sighs; 30 seconds pass.
"I want to say something that's true." Another 20 seconds of silence. "Every day, you enter a mess of uncertainty, you encounter tensions and anxieties. I like certainty -- not rituals. Things like a clean handkerchief, pressed and white, or a pressed shirt. It's like putting on the costume for tonight's performance. The shirt has been cleaned, you feel you've been given a fresh start. Then a few hours later, it's used. And that's *you*. And you've got to live with it. I love the first drink of the day, round about seven or eight, when you think, Okay, it's a mess again -- but it's alright." He laughs.
Q: "What do you hate most?"
"Mmm." A pause of more than 30 seconds. "I hate myself, if I've been duplicitous or fraudulent. Or if I was not particularly pleasant to someone -- you get so wrapped up in work, you can be very selfish and ignore people around you, and then you come out of that tunnel, and you think, Christ, what a shit I was. It's all tied in with the clean handkerchief, you see: a fresh start."
This summer, Fiennes actually sought out interviewers, or order to promote the posthumous publication of his mother's novel Blood Ties. He, sister Sophie, a documentary filmmaker and producer, and brother Joseph, an actor who shot to stardom last year in Shakespeare In Love, gave public reading of the book, published under their mother's maiden name, Jennifer Lash.
When Ralph was born, his father, Mark, famed wheat, barley, and peas in Suffolk, and his mother, known as Jini, had published two novels, to growing acclaim. But the Fienneses quickly had six children -- Ralph, Martha, Magnus, Sophie, and twins Joseph and Jacob, a gamekeeper -- and adopted another son, Michael, which left little time for their mother to write. They left the farm because of financial struggles, and Mark became a photographer, specializing in interior architecture. Money was scarce, so he also fixed up houses and resold them, which meant the family moved some 15 times.
Jini Fiennes had an unhappy relationship with her father, who had molested her, and her children vividly saw her troubles. "She was open with us about it all, how she'd never been happy when she was a young girl," says Ralph. "It was quite hard, because we were always treated as adults, so nothing was hidden from us." Although Jini was energetically loving and supportive, she also, Martha said in 1995, "would scream, break crockery, threaten to kill us all."
After Jini died of breast cancer in 1993, Ralph talked to English Patient author Michael Ondaatje about her last manuscript, and he referred it to his editor at Bloomsbury Publishing. Blood Ties, a vigorous account of parental neglect passed through generations, was likened to D.H. Lawrence's work by several reviewers for its richly told visions of family turmoil.
Fiennes says little about his mother's instability, and less about how it affected him. Martha observes that he escaped much of what she once called Jini's "derangement," by virtue of his independent resolve. "Because he always went off and did his own thing, I don't feel he did get burdened by it. He was always singular, he always did his own thing." As a child, he was solitary and unsociable, preferring jigsaw puzzles to the company of classmates. Even then, he wasn't a product of his own time. Years ago, he declared that he'd never taken drugs -- an exceptional claim, given his age and background.
When I ask why he never took drugs, his smile returns. "Well, I said it then, but time's gone by since," he answers.
In fact, he now informs me, he's made a few things up during our talk. "But I'm not going to tell you what."
I think about how he deftly turned the questions about happiness into a discourse on Hamlet. Has he lied, or has he simply left things out?
"Oh," he teases, "I *always* leave things out."
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
|
|
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
© EL STEPHO
Added to the RF Reading Room on November 26, 1999
EL STEPHO