London Times Article

June 23, 1991

Ralph Fiennes - portrayer of huge, tormented souls

Ralph Fiennes has been acting very dangerous recently. In 1991, at the age of 27, he landed two of the most meaty, challenging male leads imaginable: first as T.E. Lawrence in a film drama, A Dangerous Man: Lawrence After Arabia, then as Heathcliff in a new film version of Wuthering Heights. And you can't get more dangerous than that.

Both Lawrence and Heathcliff are larger than life. Only one of them actually lived, but fiction has somehow claimed the other for its own - it has made of Lawrence a Boy's Own hero - and film has made each man vivid in the public imagination. There, in a way, lay the danger for Fiennes. It was not so much that this young, handsome former star of the National Theatre and the RSC must make his screen debut portraying these huge, tormented souls, but that he must somehow supplant the celluloid images created by Peter O'Toole and Laurence Olivier.

What he has made of Heathcliff, we must wait to see (though we are promised that this film will be more authentic, more true to the letter and the spirit of Emily Bronte's bleak and violent novel than either of its predecessors). But with Lawrence he has done something interesting. The two-hour drama, made by Anglia Films by David Puttnam's Enigma Television, is set around the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, where French and British politicians sat down together and, in the spirit of imperialist self-interest, and through a haze of cigar smoke, proceeded to redraw the map of the Middle East. Here Lawrence, determined to secure Syria for his friend, the young Hashemite Prince Feisal (played with great dash by Siddig El Fadil), was a very sharp thorn in the government's side.

Ralph (pronounced Rafe) Fiennes's portrayal of Lawrence is subtle and enigmatic, hinting at arrogance, hubris, personal vanity, broad vision, deep insight and intellectual pride, poignantly mixed with intense neuroticism, masochism, raw sensibilities, and a shrinking lack of self-esteem. There is something almost teasing in it: one feels some of the annoyance and frustration with which this non-
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A cousin of the explorer Sir Ranulph, Fiennes is a far less ambiguous person than Lawrence, being pleasant, softly spoken and refreshingly free from pretension or danger. He lives modestly in Peckham, south London, shops locally, dresses casually, and hates to sit for his photograph. He would not, he confesses, be averse to "a bit of dosh", but it is not greed that drives him.

"It was a lovely part to do. I always had an interest in Lawrence," he says, in the pub where we met, as he takes a sip of mineral water and stabs a floret of raw cauliflower, "but it was in a sort of schoolboy way. Then , when I got the part, I did quite a lot of reading about him. He came across as a person of integrity. People say he was a show-off, that he liked the limelight, and I think he did - but only in a little-boy way. He had an extrovert manner which actually stemmed from shyness, and he was intrigued by the attention he drew, but I don't believe he thirsted after it."

Fiennes relished the change from stage acting, the opportunity to convey, in close-up, by nuance of facial expression, a high degree of sensibility. "It's quite often as much about what isn't said as about what is. Shakespeare is so language-based, you have to keep going, you cannot let pauses sink in, or it just falls apart. It was a relief in a way to say, I can just take my time here, and I don't have to make sure I'm heard right at the back. But I do think that the kind of concentration and focus which I found I needed for the camera could be very effective and helpful on stage, while the discipline needed on stage could feed my film acting. Each acting style has something to offer the other."

The ambition to take up drama came late to Fiennes. He had been at Chelsea Art College for a year when he suddenly changed tack and applied to RADA. "It was the right decision, but I'm sure acting is a very deeply neurotic thing to do. I veer away from trying to understand why I do it. I just seem to need to. It could be something as basic as liking good stories and exciting films, and identifying with the people up there."

But playing Lawrence also supplied Fiennes with relevance - when filming started, the Gulf War had just finished - and "resonance". The French (for those who need a history lesson) were not to be denied Syria. They drove Feisal out of Damascus. Then, on August 23, 1921, Britain crowned him king of a newborn country: Iraq.