Inside Entertainment Article

Overdue Fiennes
Oscar-nominated actor returns to film after three-year break
By Gord McLaughlin

With a talent hailed as among his generation's greatest, he has convinced us of his romantic intensity (The End of the Affair), his idiosyncrasy (Oscar and Lucinda) and his capacity for cold, brutal evil (Schindler's List). Now, with a pair of films that follow his three-year absence from the big screen, this constantly questing actor takes us inside insanity.

David Cronenberg's Spider makes its North American debut this month at the Toronto International Film Festival, with Fiennes as the title character. A man suffering from schizophrenia is released to a halfway house in his boyhood neighbourhood, where he begins a memory quest of Freudian dimension. Then he shows us another side of crazy. As the eponymous serial killer in Red Dragon, to be released October 4, Fiennes matches wits with the reigning champion of 'nutsy-coo-coo,' Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal "The Cannibal" Lecter. In both cases, be assured that Fiennes made Herculean efforts to plumb the depths of perception and psychosis.

Though intensely private, bristling at personal questions in interviews, Fiennes, who is 39, paradoxically bares all when he's in character, exploring corners of human motivation with naked honesty. The 5'11" actor gained 30 lbs to develop what he called a "phallic" paunch to more fully become Amon Goeth, his breakthrough role in Schindler's List. As the banal, too-human killer, playing out his perpetual immaturity in a concentration camp, Fiennes made it all look plausible. To achieve that, he used the gut not just as a prop but also to get the physical feeling of being unfit. The yoga and health food enthusiast says he "allowed" himself to smoke and drink.

"I think it's important to get a sense of how the character sees the world, how they think," he told USA Today in 1998. "That's what I love, getting inside their skin and their heads. It's also an adventure into your own head, I think."

To portray Charles Van Doren, the well-bred WASP contestant in Quiz Show who was disgraced by the game show scandal of the 1950s, Fiennes drove to the man's family estate in Connecticut to observe his surroundings. The actor spied him from a distance, reading alone in front of his house. "He's made it clear that he doesn't want to talk about it, so I respected that," Fiennes has said. Nevertheless, he hungrily absorbed what he could. "It made me sympathize with his need for privacy. In that one little image, though, there was something sad. It felt a little weird seeing his face. I felt sorry for him. I feel a little guilty talking about him. I feel he's rather a tragic figure, an OK guy who wasn't aware of the deep water he was getting himself into."

This consciousness of the humanity in each character, even the seemingly irredeemable, no doubt can be traced to the arts-oriented, semi-nomadic upbringing he enjoyed as his family moved between England and Ireland. The Fiennes home was like an academy of sensitivity training.

Father Mark Fiennes was a physically vital Suffolk farmer who taught himself landscape photography. His wife, Jini, painted and wrote books under the name of Jennifer Lash, having published her first novel at age 23. They raised their children on Shakespearean records, outings to the theatre and open discussion. Fiennes has commented on "the attention granted to my imagination" during his childhood.

It's no surprise that five of six siblings, not counting a foster child, are involved in the arts. Joseph, for example, starred in Shakespeare in Love, while Martha directed Ralph in Onegin, the 1999 adaptation of a classic Russian literary work. Only Joseph's twin brother Jacob deviated from the family business, becoming a gamekeeper on an English estate.

Ralph, the eldest, had planned to become a painter and studied a year at the Chelsea College of Art and Design before switching to acting. An amateur company gave him the experience he needed to audition successfully at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in 1983. By 1988 he was being acclaimed for his work in the prestigious Royal Shakespeare Company.

Film and TV came soon after. A small role in the first Prime Suspect miniseries quickly led to a high-profile TV project about T.E. Lawrence, a remake of Wuthering Heights with Juliette Binoche, a BBC TV-movie (The Cormorant) and a co-starring role in Peter Greenaway's The Baby of Mācon. Then, Steven Spielberg set him up for instant stardom in 1993's Schindler's List.

The release of the film coincided with the loss of his mother to cancer at age 55 (her coffin was painted electric blue), as well as his marriage to Alex Kingston (ER), whom he had met at RADA and been with for 10 years. But in 1995 Fiennes lost his heart to Francesca Annis, an actor 18 years his senior. In the Almeida Theatre Company's Broadway production of Hamlet, Annis played his mother Gertrude, the object of more-than-filial affection, and it's said that the passion of their performances led to their relationship. (Of the dozen or so actors who have played Hamlet on Broadway, only Fiennes has won a Tony for it.)

While it's tempting to sift for links between these onstage and offstage realities, such games require floppy logic. After all, Fiennes abandoned Catholicism at the age of 13, but that didn't keep him from providing the voice of Jesus in The Miracle Maker, a recent British animated TV special. Still, Fiennes could probably defuse such intrusive speculation by being more forthright. Asked a few years ago to discuss his relationship with Annis, he would only say, "We've been photographed together in public, and I think most of the world believes that we are what they call an item." It leaves the impression that Fiennes did not have to cast afar for his motivation when the Red Dragon script called for him to bite the lips off Philip Seymour Hoffman's character; Hoffman plays a nosy journalist.

Oedipal echoes are heard again in Spider, the Cronenberg film that has been praised for its stylistic restraint (no bugs or rebellious body tissue) and for relentlessly refracting the story through the tortured mind of Fiennes' title character. Miranda Richardson plays the mother in his childhood memories (coincidentally she was also Mary Magdalene in The Miracle Maker). Gabriel Byrne is the father, whom Spider suspects of trying to kill his mother in order to replace her with a prostitute. The heavy-hitting cast also includes Lynn Redgrave and British-Canadian John Neville, but it was Fiennes' complex, layered performance that dominated notices from the Cannes Film Festival.

Meanwhile, Fiennes dominated New York gossip columns in June while filming The Chambermaid, a romantic comedy with Jennifer Lopez. The co-stars were spotted in each other's arms after dining in SoHo, shortly after the failure of Lopez's 10-month marriage to Cris Judd. If nothing else, the episode forced Fiennes to publicly declare his love for Annis, although he was allegedly seen "canoodling" with another woman soon after. When British media asked Annis for her comment, the self-assured actor laughed heartily.

What else can you do when your handsome partner is across the ocean, attending such swank events as a party at the home of Tina Brown, the former New Yorker and Vanity Fair editor. Taking his leave, Fiennes suavely kissed the cheeks of Brown and Candace Bushnell, the Sex and the City author who is indeed sexy, and one of them swore she'd never wash that cheek again. Fiennes' talent made him a star, but the face still gets him places other men only dream of.

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