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He has wooed cinema audiences with his impeccable accent and sculptured profile, in films from The English Patient to his most recent, BAFTA-nominated role in The End of the Affair. But behind his flawless English facade is a Celtic streak which has fuelled his career. Mesmeric actor though he is, his achievement is rooted in his remarkable family upbringing in Ireland.
Fiennes is the eldest of six children born within seven years of each other. That he had a uniquely creative childhood nurturing is evident from the fact that two brothers and two sisters are following him into international prominence in the arts. Joseph Fiennes was acclaimed as the love-stricken Shakespeare in Tom Stoppard's romp Shakespeare in Love and as the spineless Earl of Dudley in Elizabeth, both nominated for Oscars last year. He is now almost as well known as his brother.
After making music videos for Boy George, Al Green and Furniture, their sister Martha has made a dazzling feature debut, directing Ralph in Onegin. The film's emotive soundtrack was composed by brother Magnus, who has arranged songs for All Saints, The Spice Girls, Pulp and Boyzone. BBC2 recently screened a dance documentary, The Late Michael Clark, directed by another sister, Sophie. She made her debut in 1998 with Lars From 1-10, which deals with the Danish director Lars von Trier and the revolutionary Dogme collective. Joseph's twin brother Jacob, an archaeologist and gamekeeper, is the only sibling not directly involved in theatre, music or the movies.
Onegin producer Ileen Maisel was in no doubt that the Fiennes gene was creatively blessed when he first encountered the family. He says: "I knew when I first met Ralph on Wuthering Heights - he played Heathcliff opposite Juliette Binoche - that he was going to be a major star. When he introduced me to Martha, it was obvious that extraordinary talent runs in the Fiennes family."
Their father, Mark, a second cousin of the explorer Ranulph Fiennes, is a farmer who found he had a gift as a photographer. Their mother Jini Lash, who died of breast cancer in 1994, was a brigadier's daughter who became a painter and novelist. Her last book, Blood Ties, dealt with a prickly mother and son relationship on an Irish farm not unlike where Ralph grew up.
"We moved to Ireland in 1973, to West Cork, when I was ten," says Ralph. "My mother, particularly, and my father sensed a strong affinity with things Irish and the Irish approach to life - with an open-heartedness that people seem to have there."
Fiennes fixes me with grey eyes ringed in deep blue and adds: "Maybe it's a cliche. We talk about English uptightness. We talk about Irish warmth. But I think there's truth in it too. I think my parents responded to that. They came to Ireland and found a warmth and an ease in communicating day-to-day that is remarkably different to England. That's not to say it doesn't want to extend an open hand.
"I think it has something to do with education. In the Eighteenth century and earlier, people didn't have this sort of closed down quality in England. The Victorians put on the mantle of not showing emotions. My father went to public school. He said that if you were a feeling person, a sensitive person, it was difficult. Because you were immediately a target."
Fiennes escaped this conditioning - his mother taught him and his siblings at home for a while, before Ralph was singled out for education at a Quaker school. He says: "In the end my brothers and sister went to the local school and I was sent for a very short time to Newtown School in Waterford. It was a Quaker school and sort of progressive then. I was slightly embarrassed. I was the one sort of given the special treatment. Even now, my brothers and sisters tease me. 'Oh yes, you were the special one, you went to Newtown'."
His parents found that they couldn't keep up the fees and when the family moved to Kilkenny, the children were sent to local schools. Something of his Catholic education has stayed with him - a fact he must have been intensely aware of while filming The End Of The Affair, which deals with love, religion and guilt. "I'm not a practising Catholic now, at all," he says. "I sort of rebelled against it. I didn't like going to Mass. I was made to go and I didn't understand why I should have to go, so I didn't believe in it.
"It's strange, in a way. My mother was a Catholic. Her brother was a Catholic priest. She had an uncle who was a Benedictine monk. So on her side, for a lot of her family, God was very present. There were always intense discussions and theological debates, I remember, when I was young. I do think that even if I am not a believer, the sort of compassion that's encouraged in Catholic education - you don't forget it."
His mother put that compassion into practice when she adopted the son of an Irish Catholic single mother after reading an advertisement in a newspaper: "Michael, aged ten, urgently seeks a home where he is allowed to read a book."
Fiennes remembers: "Michael was 18 or 19 when we came to Ireland, so he wasn't really part of that move. He'd left home, but he came to see us. My mother was able to extend to lots of people, Michael being the obvious example. I think she had a great insight into people - sometimes a quite ruthless perception. She'd say, well your problem is X, Y and Z. You've got to really pull a finger out and do such and such, but always with great love. She could be quite honest, even to her own children. She would call a spade a spade when she thought you might be dillying yourself about something. She could never be cool about anything."
Bringing out traces of humanity in characters who are in some ways unpleasant, even evil, is a defining quality of the roles that established Fiennes in the Nineties as a major star. Even the sinister, sadistic Nazi officer in Schindler's List, which won him his first Oscar nomination, was eerily compelling. The horribly disfigured wartime pilot who crashes his plane in the opening sequence of The English Patient - another Oscar-nominated performance - and whose past is revealed in flashback as Juliette Binoche nurses him, may well be guilty of war crimes. In Robert Redford's Quiz Show, Fiennes is the son of uppercrust Americans who cheats in the $ 64,000 Question TV show in order to impress them. In Oscar and Lucinda, he is a flawed cleric and in Strange Days, he is a bought cop. Nearly always, he is a man trapped into being what he is not.
"I cannot struggle against my feelings any more," he says in Onegin, playing the privileged Russian intellectual whose failure to show love wrecks the lives of himself and those around him. Fiennes first read Pushkin's novel in the early Nineties and was so enthralled by the enigmatic character of Onegin that he wrote a rough film treatment and sketched out a storyboard, which he persuaded his sister Martha to film.
"I became quite infected by Ralph's passion for the character," says Martha. "He's not an easy character. He's dark and unpredictable, but also amusing and sardonic. In many ways, he's the classic Byronic figure but he also has the Chekhovian sense of unfulfilment and emotional immaturity. That's what makes him interesting and sympathetic today."
Fiennes relished his first step behind the camera. "I was never asked to make financial or budgetary decisions, but I was very involved in the development of the screenplay which I found extremely demanding and continually challenging."
The Fiennes family left Ireland when Ralph was in his late teens, but by then, they were so used to moving that it had almost become the norm. Joseph once calculated that he'd been to 14 different schools. "We all have that instinct to fit in," he said. ''In Dorset I adopted a Dorset accent. In Ireland, I had an Irish lilt."
The reason for their move back to Britain was purely economic. "My parents had a very uncertain income and I think my father thought that maybe work would be more consistent for him as a photographer in England," says Fiennes. "It was a struggle for my father, but now he's pretty established."
With his mother's encouragement, Fiennes got into the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. "She knew how to give you confidence because she knew what it was to fail," he says. "She wrote books that got mixed reviews and didn't stay in print very long. She had her admirers, too, people who believed in her. She had to sustain her belief in herself. Sometimes it was very hard. So she knew what it was like when you are lacking confidence in your ability and you feel the cold breath of failure or defeat. She'd say things like: 'Never be afraid of failure.'
"It's something Graham Greene used to say too. When he stood up to receive applause for his play, The Living Room, he said: 'Thank you very much. The applause is flattering but the thing that really teaches us anything is failure.' My mother understood that, but she was also very good at praising. She never talked down to us as children. She always talked to us as equals and would share with us the ups and downs of life. When something was achieved, she would celebrate and when she saw that you were at a loss, she would draw you in, because she had been there too."
Working his way up through reps at Oldham and Clwyd, Fiennes became an actor to watch at the Royal Shakespeare Company in the late Eighties, playing Henry VI in Adrian Noble's production of the early history plays and the title role in Sam Mendes' production of Troilus and Cressida. In 1993, the year that Schindler's List swept the Oscars, he married his RADA sweetheart Alex Kingston, who later starred in Moll Flanders and now ER. Three months after, his mother died. Rather than put her in the hands of a funeral parlour, the children and their father buried her themselves in an electric blue coffin.
Fiennes's marriage to Kingston broke up soon after. He had met Francesca Annis, who is 18 years his senior, while playing the mother-obsessed son, Prince of Denmark, to her Queen Gertrude in a production of Hamlet at the Almeida in North London. "It wasn't his stardom that took Ralph away from me," Kingston told theatre critic Michael Coveney at the time. "He has such a dark side, I am surprised our relationship lasted as long as it did. I think he feels he is only half a person, that he is only real when he is acting."
Fiennes returns to the stage next month to star in a double bill of Richard II and Coriolanus at the Almeida, where the fixed salary is £200 a week. "It's a big risk," he says. "But it's selling well at the moment."
He is passionate about theatre, but bemoans the pressures which it is put under in Britain, thanks to underfunding. Fiennes is in no doubt who he blames for a situation which he believes has stifled adventurism in theatre - Blair's government.
"There's too little risk in theatre today," he says. "Everything has become too orientated to good reviews and full houses. I think it's important to the achievements of our subsidised theatre that it shouldn't be dishonourable to fail. Too much subsidisation may soften the muscles, but at the moment theatre companies are being seriously eroded by lack of public funding. We're not even talking about experimentation.
''I'm very close to the Almeida, who have a brilliant track record, but the amount of subsidy they get is small. The pressure to succeed is very high. Even big, subsidised companies have been made to juggle sponsorships and have success. I think it's swaying too much the other way, away from being allowed to take risks. They look to actors who have a TV pedigree, maybe very good actors, but often there are great actors undiscovered who should be sustained.
"There has to be a balance. But since the Seventies, when there was a lot of generous subsidy for the arts, it has gone too far the other way. There isn't a strong enough commitment to letting people take risks with producers, directors and actors. It's a different climate now. I think the Blair government is in many ways carrying the mantle of Conservative policies."
Jonathan Kent, who directed Fiennes in Hamlet and will direct him again in Coriolanus, feels that his strength as an actor is his "strong inner life". What the actor doesn't show becomes his allure, which is what movies are all about. Toby Stephens, the friend he shoots in a duel in Onegin, says: ''There's a subtlety to his acting that is mesmerising to watch. Performing alongside an actor with such skill and focus is a terrific incentive to find that little bit extra in oneself."
In fact, Fiennes nearly didn't become an actor. After school, he went to the Chelsea School of Art. "I thought I wanted to be a painter," he says. "I realised that although I was becoming quite proficient in drawing and painting, I didn't have anything to paint. I'd sit in a life class and wonder, why am I doing this? I saw people around me who had a real urgency and real things that they needed to express and I didn't.
"I think art school helped me realise that all along there had been something else. I discovered the thing I had been ignoring, which is a voice that says I want to be an actor, I want to speak these words. So that's what happened."
By all accounts, Fiennes was a fine painter. "A couple of art teachers said: 'Oh, you'll never be as good an actor as you would have been a painter. I don't know if that's true. I made my decision."
Whatever the truth, Fiennes has used his own life as a canvas from which to
draw his on-screen characters. And blended with the quintessential
Englishness that makes him such a convincing romantic hero is an undeniable,
stubborn Celtic streak. Together, they have made one of Britain's most
talented film stars
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© EL STEPHO
Added to the RF Reading Room on April 15, 2000
EL STEPHO