 |
 |
 |
 |
 | |
 |
|
Fiennes, of course, won't admit to that, but he begins to let on that, like Oscar, he does have a touch of quirkiness. "Did you feel bemused by the movie?" he wants to know. "It's a period piece, but it has a large comic element to it. Tragicomic, isn't it?" Fiennes is seated in a slightly posh restaurant in his hometown of Islington, a working- class neighborhood in north London. Not far away is the Almeida Theater, where he originated the role of Hamlet that traveled to New York and won him a Tony. The restaurant was closed, but it opens for Fiennes, a frequent diner and longtime friend, so he can have a quiet interlude of tea and biscuits.
Fiennes looks nothing like Oscar now, nothing like the character from Australian author Peter Carey's 1988 Booker Prize-winning novel. Nicknamed "Odd Bod" for his skinny, scarecrow physique and quirky moves, Oscar is a gambling priest crowned with a flame-red coif. Fiennes, on the other hand, is back to a slick dark brown hairstyle and, having just wrapped The Avengers with Uma Thurman, is looking a bit more like Jonathan Steed. He's in a dark blue chalk-stripe Savile Row suit and a white shirt with white suspenders. His eyes are piercing icy blue, but they're piercing only his teacup until he starts feeling more comfortable. "Please move you tape recorder over here," he says, pulling the microphone closer. "I tend to talk quietly."
At one point during Oscar & Lucinda's six-year gestation, Fiennes said he wanted to talk himself out of it because it would be yet another period drama added to so many others on his lineup. "But I loved the story," he said at the time. "So it wouldn't have been true to turn it down and take a higher-profile part. It would have been mercenary."
"I adore him for hanging in there," says Armstrong. "It's hard to believe now, but at the time he was unknown. We didn't know if we could raise the money on his name."
Fiennes read the script, before Schindler's List came out, when he was in New York working on Quiz Show. "I asked Gillian if she'd seriously consider me because I really wanted to do it," he says. "I was so moved by it. I felt Oscar was me in a way."
Hard to imagine any director in his or her right mind not considering Fiennes for any role, but Armstrong, who has seen him only in A Dangerous Man: Lawrence After Arabia, a television piece about the writer T.E. Lawrence, wasn't sure. "She just wasn't certain I was the right choice," Fiennes says.
"It's a complicated story." That it is: Oscar is a young boy who, brought up by a religious fanatic, decides to become a priest. While studying theology, the awkward loner discovers gambling, which he interprets as a passionate act of faith. After falling in love with Lucinda (Cate Blanchett), an Australian heiress who shares his secret addiction, he wages everything to win her.
"To me, Oscar is all about faith," says Fiennes. "His belief is so strong, he can see the worst parts of life, terrible violence, and he knows the power of God can be bigger and stronger than all the negativity. No one has that kind of faith anymore. Period films allow a work surface for the playing out of values we don't get to play out anymore. Would you see a contemporary film about integrity or faith?" So Fiennes waited faithfully for Oscar while it switched directors -- from Armstrong to John Schlesinger, then back to Armstrong, who was sidetracked by Little Women. By the time the production got rolling, Fiennes had an Oscar nomination for his portrayal of Amon Goeth, the Nazi who shot prisoners from his rooftop terrace as a recreational sport in Schindler's List. He would soon get another for The English Patient.
When Armstrong saw Fiennes as the smoldering Count Almasy, she was unsettled. "Cate Blanchett and I went to see it and we both thought, 'Oscar, what are you doing throwing all those women up against the wall?' Cate said, 'That's not my Oscar!'"
All in all, Armstrong waited two years for Fiennes to be free. It was worth it. "I expected all kinds of miracles," says author Carey, who now lives in New York, "but I never expected Ralph would be just my character as I wrote him. All those tiny physical mannerisms, everything. I had no idea Ralph had such an amazing sweetness."
In order to create so vivid a character, Fiennes decided to familiarize himself with the world of high-stakes betting. "Before this," he says, "the only gambling I'd done was betting one dollar in Las Vegas. I lost it." But on Oscar's behalf, Fiennes went to Derby Day just outside London. "It's once a year, a big event, where the royal family and the whole cross section of English society comes -- for the Queen to people in jeans and jumpers. It's fantastic -- like Dickens. I got the feel and the smell of racing, and I won £200 ($320) on one race. I guess it was beginners luck. I went to a racing meeting a week later and lost everything."
He also went to a London casino to hone his poker skills. "I didn't think I had to know every single game under the sun," he explains. "I wanted to know about that little thing inside a gambler that makes them have to play the game: not the skill but the bug that makes them keep going. In the casino, I played 21 and kept winning, and then I just kept wanting to do it again. Gambling is a pleasure for Oscar, yet he associates pleasure with guilt. I suppose that's a metaphor. Because that moment that you don't know is the moment he -- when all of us -- feels most alive. I experienced that -- that moment where you believe anything can happen.
One interesting parallel between Fiennes and Oscar is a kind of willful asceticism with intermittent moments of indulgence. Despite his enormous fame, two Oscar nominations and A-list star status -- he reportedly got a hefty chunk (and all the natty suits) for The Avengers -- he stays in London close to his five brothers and sisters and his father. (His mother died of breast cancer in 1993 soon after the release of Schindler's List). He continues to do theater with the Almeida and has managed to keep his romance with Francesca Annis, which came on the heels of his split from his wife, Alex Kingston, fairly low profile. "The best way to win," he once told a reporter, "is not to play at all."
Now that The Avengers is wrapped and he's got a light comedy under his belt Fiennes does a sort of Cary Grant take on Steed, the ultimate bowlered British rogue -- it's time for yet another obscure project: a film version of Eugene Onegin, costarring Liv Tyler and Jude Law. He will star in and executive- produce the tale of the jaded Russian aristocrat who kills his best friend, and his sister Martha, a commercial director, will direct. "I've been working on this for a very long time," he says. I used to think I had to swear off period pieces; I had a real bee in my bonnet about it. But I have to go with what feels right, with what interest me. Period pieces are about today -- we like to see ourselves through a prism, another way of life. It's almost easier to look at ourselves that way."
Mention the way the rest of the world seems to look at the British, risk the words reserved or stiff upper lip, and the normally reticent Fiennes, graduate of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and a former member of the National Theater, almost loses his cool. "It's crap that the British are all formal and unemotional," he starts, on a mini tirade. "It's crap." He continues nonstop, segueing to British history: "Sure, as imperialists, the British have done some abominable things. What country hasn't? Braveheart was a great film, and I think Mel Gibson was excellent in it. But there was a lot of 'Let's kick some British ass 'cause they're all a bunch of stuck-up imperialists' sentiment in it.
"Well, it's not just the people of Scotland and Wales who feel like that -- it's the ordinary people of England as well! The real revolution in England is against the governing class that doesn't represent the people it's governing."
Princes Diana is a poignant illustration, he argues. "What's so interesting about her tragic death is that it confirms our country wants the symbol of monarchy, but it won't tolerate the symbol of being cold, aloof, indifferent. I find this all incredibly moving! It's life-changing, what's just happened here. Because Diana was shy and sometimes awkward, something about her human qualities, her fallibility, combined with her aspirations to do the right thing, makes her loss mean something so much bigger to this nation. It's bigger than Labor and Conservative, it's a whole new political identity for Great Britain."
Take a look at Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy, says Fiennes, "If you want to see what this country is really like." He is immersed in James Joyce now, reading Ulysses for the first time and finding it "fantastic. It comes from a very real place, using language in a completely true way."
The actor's interests may be highbrow, literary. But his interest isn't in impressing, it's in absorbing information, nourishing an active brain. Tonight, he's taking Annis, who played Gertrude to his Hamlet at the Almeida, to dinner and the theater to see Heartbreak House. Fiennes sees a lot of plays and reads a lot. He spends whatever time is left over with his immediate family. He once said that his idea of success is "all about being able to extend love to people. Really. Not in a big capital- letter sense, but in the everyday. Little by little, task by task, gesture by gesture, word by word."
"I suppose my life is sort of quiet," he says now, even laughing a little for
the first time. "It doesn't seem quiet. Perhaps because, inside my brain
well, it doesn't seem quiet at all."
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
|
|
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
© EL STEPHO
Added to the RF Reading Room on October 20, 1997
EL STEPHO