Highlife Magazine Article

British Airways in-flight Magazine
July, 1997

Ralph Fiennes: the clinical romantic

Beneath that cool exterior lies - a cool interior. But hard acting and hard work have proved an emotional escape for Ralph Fiennes at a difficult time. Sheridan Morley meets the leading man of the moment.

Let's deal with the pronunciation first. It rhymes with Safe Lines, and we are talking to and about the man described by Barbra Streisand , no less, as "the best young actor of our times." If there's one person who doesn't quite agree, it's Oscar; this year, for the third year running, Fiennes starred in a multi-Academy Award winning movie (The English Patient; the other two were Schindler's List and Quiz Show) in which everybody seemed to get trophies except him. One theory this time was that he plays the Patient so well in very old age that many Academy voters failed to realise he was also the dashing airman in the flashbacks, and (thought) that two actors had to be involved in the transformation.

Fiennes himself remains commendably unperturbed: "I never really expected to win this year, and sure enough I didn't. But the part is just wonderful; risky, certainly, but then I've always taken risks in my work; that's what is most scary about acting, but it's also why I do it." Oscar's triple rejection of Fiennes may also have something to do with his uneasiness at playing the Hollywood game; if anyone has raised shyness to an art form, it is Ralph, who on a bad day will regard any enquiry as "intrusive," especially since his three-year marriage to the actress Alex Kingston was ended by his affair with Francesca Annis, Gertrude to his Almeida Hamlet last year and, as the papers endlessly remark, 18 years his senior.

He has also suffered for several years under banner headlines reading "the new Olivier" (I think I'd rather be the old Fiennes") which neatly sidesteps the real heritage, one that only became clear to me when I saw him in The English Patient, the best-film Oscar winner in more than a decade to deserve a permanent place in the Best Movies of All Time. Who else has a stardom closely linked to the desert? Who else played Lawrence of Arabia, has a strong romantic attachment to Britain's mythical past and that same dreamy-eyed romanticism, and who else came up through the ranks of the Royal Shakespeare Company to almost instant screen triumph?

Peter O'Toole, of course; that is where Fiennes essentially comes from, and you might even want to see Francesca Annis as the Sian Phillips in his life - a glamorous older woman with considerably more stage and screen experience, keeping a sometimes wayward star under control. Not that Fiennes has ever subscribed to the old O'Toole philosophy of actor as rogue and vagabond; on the contrary he adopts an almost monastic approach to his work, finding it, I suspect, a lot more fun.

Born 33 years ago into an artistic family who lived variously in Suffolk, Ireland, Dorset and Salisbury, Fiennes is the eldest of six children; his father is a farmer turned landscape photographer, a beloved mother Jini was a novelist and travel writer, and of his siblings, one is the actor Joseph (also hot with the RSC), and two others, his sisters, are both in the business too - one directs video while the other works for avant-garde director Peter Greenaway.

Like Sir Dirk Bogarde (there too is an alter-ego Fiennes, one who tried for many years to make the film of Lawrence which finally went to O'Toole) Fiennes started out at the Chelsea College of Art: "After about a term and a half I knew it was all wrong for me; I had this definite longing - a call, a push, what you will, to be an actor." In his past, only the occasional class play at schools in Salisbury and Ireland had suggested there might be a thespian talent there; but as soon as he got to RADA it became clear that here was a winner - he won the Kendal, Littler and Forbes-Robertson Awards, a rare triple crown, and became less happily known as "the voice beautiful" or "Olivier in waiting."

But theatrical history seldom moves in direct lines, and for a while it was his contemporaries Daniel Day-Lewis and Kenneth Branagh who made the movie running, while Fiennes worked his way slowly through the classics at the RSC and the National. It was at the National, in 1987, that the American director Michael Rudman first alerted me to Fiennes being (of all three of them) the one to watch; at first I thought the confidence might have been misplaced, but when a year or two later he went to the RSC in Stratford for an amazing range of work - Troilus, Henry VI, Berowne and Edmund in King Lear, all characters rethought and given a brooding intensity as well as a strong sense of danger - there could no longer be much doubt that Rudman was right.

All the same, a Hollywood career might well have eluded him; movies are currently littered with the bodies of notable London stage actors turning in cameos as gay villains or recalcitrant butlers, while the heroes still remain defiantly American (or American-Austrian), from Mel Gibson to Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis.

Fiennes is now in that rare and happy position of a player who can "open" a picture; in other words, get moviegoers to book even before they know anything about the film they are about to see beyond the fact that he is in it. More remarkably still, Fiennes has made a series of non-heroic roles; neither Schindler's tame Nazi commandant nor Charles Van Doren in Quiz Show nor indeed the English Patient himself could be called flawless, but in their weakness Fiennes has managed to find an honour and a nobility which might well have proved elusive for lesser actors.

The director Declan Donellan, who cast Fiennes as Romeo in the Open Air at Regent's Park, the actor's first professional job after leaving RADA a decade ago, noted at once "a fantastically charismatic player with an electric quality and an extremely big, almost nineteenth-century voice. He was always very direct, and had this faintly crazed element in his eyes which is very attractive, especially now to a movie camera. He also has a poetic quality you simply can't ignore."

Not that the career has been altogether charmed; his television Lawrence of Arabia received a low-key reception, and his first major film appearance as Heathcliff in a catastrophic remake of Wuthering Heights might have ditched a less assured talent. (His Cathy was the Juliette Binoche who walked off with one of the many English Patient Oscars that this year eluded him).

"When the stakes are at their highest" says Fiennes, "that's when you know really how you feel" and unlike many of that Hollywood Raj of British character actors who have settled for the California high life, Fiennes anchors himself very firmly in the British theatre, usually at the Almeida in Islington where he has recently been playing a radical rediscovery of Chekov's first great loser-philosopher, Ivanov, and before that (at the Hackney Empire and then later in an award-winning Broadway transfer) a Hamlet equally haunted by guilt and self-doubt, the two great keynotes to all of his best performances.

Colleagues talk of his dedication to rehearsal, and his determination to lead a company by example rather than charisma; somehow one doesn't see Fiennes forming his own acting company or inheriting one of our national theatres - he belongs rather to an Alec Guinness tradition, and yes there too, now (that) I come to think of it, is the third man to have starred in our lifetime in Lawrence of Arabia. Clearly, there is something in those desert sands, something which again runs all through Fiennes' work in The English Patient as though only the desert can bring out the true mysticism of his reclusive nature.

The death of his mother and the break-up of his marriage has added to this sense of Fiennes as a lonely, bereaved, self-obsessed introvert, but in fact that is a kind of performance by which he escapes the intrusion of journalists:

"I did not become an actor because I wanted to appear in magazines, nor do I want to be a professional Englishman abroad. If a script intrigues me, whether it's a massive undertaking like English Patient or a baroque adventure like Greenaway's Baby of Macon or a low-budget thriller like Strange Days (he was Lenny Nero in a futuristic fantasy that did less than wonderfully with critics and audiences last year) I go ahead and do it."

Next comes a wide-screen version of The Avengers, with Fiennes as a latter-day Patrick MacNee, a role that is unlikely to stretch him intellectually but will doubtless do wonders for his bank balance. After that, he will again be able to afford to return to the Almeida for #250 a week, and after Hamlet and Ivanov he will doubtless be able to name his role if not his price. There's a sanguine sense in Fiennes of being in there for the long haul:

"Research, discipline, focus; in the end all acting comes down to that, and although I'm not averse to a bit of dosh I've never been hungry for stardom, at least not the kind of stardom that pens you in to the expectations of an audience. You have to keep coming at them from different directions if you really intend to hold their interest across an entire career."

In a vast family of Fiennes, the other one to have hit headlines (we'll have to wait a year or two for Joseph) is their distant cousin the explorer Ranulph, and it is tempting to see parallels there too in Ralph's more adventurous or sand-seeking moments.

"People are always trying to fit me into a slot, create an image for me, but it never really works; sometimes I'm hyped as a sex symbol but I don't think I'm very sexy on the screen, nor is that necessarily always a good thing to be. It depends on the role; you start and end with what's in the script, and bring that to life as best you can."

"You have a duty to the writer, the director, and I guess ultimately to the producer who is paying for it all," says Fiennes. But in the end you can only be true to yourself and if you're ever not, believe me, it shows fast. An actor's power is always given to him by the people he shares the stage or screen with; there are too many bad actors around already for the world to need another who hasn't bothered to learn his craft. Mine is a clinical, methodical approach; I try always to be as prepared as anyone could possibly be for a role, because only then can you free yourself. Awards can't make you happy, nor can stardom; only the knowledge of a job well done can do that for you. By the end of my marriage (he and Alex Kingston had effectively been together since drama school) I felt very rootless, and it was only in acting that I could find a centre. But you have to go to work as your character, not just thinking you're the star. That way disaster lies."