Mirror (UK) RF Interview

RALPH FIENNES: FIENNES ROMANCE
By John Hiscock

She is the bubbly, buxom dancer-singer-actress from the Bronx who is famous for her shapely backside and romantic liaisons. ,p> But together Ralph Fiennes and Jennifer Lopez hit it off just fine and they caused a sensation on the streets of New York while filming the sexy romantic comedy Maid In Manhattan.

For the low-key, reserved Fiennes, who is more accustomed to Shakespeare than shaking his booty, working with someone as unrestrained as J-Lo took some getting used to. And while he usually can pass unnoticed on the streets, whenever he was with her he was astonished to find himself at the centre of crowds of clamouring fans.

"It was a new experience for me," confesses Fiennes, who still appears slightly shell-shocked from his encounter with the ebullient Lopez and her infamous entourage of hairdressers, make-up artists and personal assistants.

"We were shooting in Manhattan in public places like Central Park and Park Avenue and all these photographers and paparazzi kept popping up all the time.

He smiles wryly at the recollection.

"But I love acting with Jennifer," adds. "She loves to play around with the text and the lines and to improvise and I find her very freeing to work with."

Maid in Manhattan was originally to have been called The Chambermaid and to have starred Julia Roberts, but she dropped out and was replaced by Lopez.

Fiennes plays the politician son of a US senator who falls for the chambermaid in his New York hotel, thinking she is a wealthy socialite.

The emphasis is on romance, which is something Fiennes feels strongly about. After living for 12 years with actress Alex Kingston, one of the stars of the television hospital drama ER, and being married to her for four years, he left her in 1995 for actress Francesca Annis, who is nearly 20 years his senior.

She was his co-star in Hamlet, ironically playing his mother, Gertrude, and their affair caused a major scandal. Alex Kingston admitted Fiennes's infidelity had driven her to the brink of suicide. Since then, the age difference between Francesca and Ralph has been the subject of continued speculation and gossip, but he claims it has never concerned him.

"I think if two people have a strong connection and a strong bond, that's what's important," he says.

"Certainly in my life age difference has not been a problem. "People create stereotypes about relationships. For Maid In Manhattan, everyone said to me, 'I can't see you and J-Lo as a couple,' because they want to see similar types and similar age groups together."

As for romance, he says: "To me, there should be something spontaneous about romance. It should happen in the moment and be a gesture that's not thought of before.

"It's the sudden decision to take someone somewhere; to buy a ticket for them to go somewhere; give them a gift because you've seen it in the window that moment.

"I think that is the true romantic expression. When that's done to me I love it, when it's something that's just decided in the moment because of your feelings for someone. Spontaneity. Genuinely loving spontaneity."

He has a reputation for being remote and aloof but, whether it was Lopez's influence or the sunny New York weather, Ralph Fiennes appears more relaxed and at ease than he usually does in interviews.

Wearing a black, open-necked shirt and with his hair slightly tousled he is affable as he talks of his life, family and career.

Born in Suffolk, he grew up with three brothers and two sisters.

His brother Joseph is a noted actor and starred opposite Gwyneth Paltrow in the award-winning Shakespeare In Love.

His sister, Martha, is an accomplished pop video and commercial director and Ralph starred in her 1999 film, Onegin, for which his brother, Magnus, composed the music.

"When we were growing up there was some rivalry but my parents were both very loving, very tolerant and always very forgiving," he says.

"My mother was a writer and she encouraged us to talk, debate and use language. She was also a very passionate woman so anything we undertook she encouraged us to put ourselves into it 200 per cent."

He attended Chelsea College of Art and Design, where he studied painting, but then set his sights on acting and began his career with the Open Air Theatre.

He joined the Royal Shakespeare Company for two seasons and was then discovered by television.

Ten years after he made his television acting debut in the hit Helen Mirren drama Prime Suspect, he is now able to take his pick of roles in both Hollywood and on the stage.

Nominated for an Oscar for his first American film, 1993's Schindler's List - in which he played a vicious Nazi camp commandant, he has since been nominated again for The English Patient, won a Tony Award for his Hamlet on Broadway, starred in The End Of The Affair with Julianne Moore and two years ago appeared in stage productions of Shakespeare's Richard II and Coriolanus in London and New York.

His obscure choice of roles demonstrates his scorn for obviously commercial ventures.

"I feel there's less pressure on me (to do American films) than there was early on," he says. "I just want to do the parts, the films and the plays that I have an instinctive gut response to.

"I find it harder to make choices because of some supposed career map. That this would be a good thing to do because it's a big budget or it's this studio and it'll do this for my profile. I don't find that helpful.

"I think I've been quite lucky in that the films I've made with American money, including Schindler's List and Quiz Show, had very strong directorial control."

But despite specialising in dark and brooding characters there is a lighter side to Fiennes.

And the frothy Maid In Manhattan was just what he needed after two gruelling roles - playing a deeply disturbed mental patient in Spider, set in the East End of London, and the psychopathic serial killer Francis Dolarhyde opposite Anthony Hopkins in the new Hannibal Lecter horror- drama, Red Dragon.

In order to research the two roles he visited a psychiatric unit in Croydon, South London, and then a high-security prison for mentally ill criminals in Atascadero, California.

"I met people who have a pretty tough history of hurting and killing people," he says. "But when you meet them they seem quite normal and, to me, that's what's scary.

"These people are human. They make coffee, they read books, they write. Some are incredibly well read and articulate and that's what interests me. It's easy to make them bogeymen and monsters but when you have to portray them you have to think of all the other things.

"That's why in Red Dragon there are scenes where my character is struggling to have some kind of normality and he's drinking a beer and putting on a record.

"He was never written as a totally evil psychopath. He is deeply disturbed and what interests me is that there's that battle going on, sort of an internal, moral dilemma."

With four films due out shortly - he also has a role in the comedy crime caper The Good Thief, due out soon - Fiennes feels able to return to his roots in the theatre, this time to the National Theatre in London where he will be playing the Swiss psychoanalyst Karl Jung in a play about Jung's relationship with his mentor, Sigmund Freud.

He adds: "I have to make sure I set aside a chunk of time for the theatre because films come up and unless you've made the commitment to the theatre, it's easy to keep putting it aside."

"You can't move them on because it's a public place, but she has a very good policy of letting them take pictures and then asking them to print something nice.

"It doesn't always work but it's hard for her to take a bad picture, so she always looks pretty good."

Not so with the privacy-loving Fiennes. "The night of her birthday they put out a big cake on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum. We were all eating it and, of course, the New York Post published this picture of me putting a great big piece of cake in my mouth."

El Stepho Zone