Newsweek Magazine Article

December 6, 1999

A Fiennes Romance This Is
He's a leading man who defies expectations
By Cathleen McGuigan

Ralph Fiennes had already been nominated for one Oscar when he got a second nomination for "The English Patient." But he also got something else with the role: the kind of idolatry that women usually reserve for screen heroes with abashed grins, who save the leading lady, if not the entire planet. Instead, the count in "The English Patient" was a mysterious loner, kind of an oddball. But he was also a guy so madly in love with Kristin Scott Thomas that he ripped her dress off in a fit of passion, and later quietly sewed it up. Now he's once again playing a complex romantic lead in Neil Jordan's hauntingly beautiful adaptation of "The End of the Affair," Graham Greene's novel of passion and faith. "I've always sort of hankered to play a Greene character," said Fiennes recently. "They seem very real, not simplistically heroic. In fact, often they're antiheroic."

The film, which opens this week, is set in London during World War II. Fiennes plays a moody novelist, Maurice Bendrix, caught in a triangle with a beautiful woman (Julianne Moore) who's married to a boring civil servant (the outstanding Stephen Rea). When she breaks off their intensely hot affair, Bendrix grows even more obsessed with her. "He's got a cruel streak," said the actor. "But then you kind of warm to him, because—as Neil says—his hatred and anger is all because he's desperately in love." Fiennes has been called a "cold" actor, but that's not really fair: it's just that he's so good at expressing deeply buried emotions, eloquently telegraphing the subtlest of feelings across his face. In the film "Onegin," opening just before Christmas, Fiennes once more shows off this gift. Pushkin's world-weary Russian aristocrat is a vastly different character from Bendrix, but he's also a man surprised by the power of love, and ultimately broken by it.

"Onegin" was a family affair: Fiennes's sister Martha, in a remarkable debut, directed the lavishly beautiful film, and his brother Magnus composed the original music. (Three other siblings include the actor Joseph and his twin, Jacob, who's a gamekeeper in Norfolk.) Their parents were artistic, especially his mother, who was a novelist and painter. Ralph himself started at art school, before switching to acting.

Fiennes, 36, just back from a trip to Tokyo to promote "Onegin," sipped green tea during the interview and talked about performing "Richard II" and "Coriolanus" in repertory next year in London. He's polite and a bit reserved, choosing his words with care. On the ring finger of one elegant hand, he wore three slender gold rings. (He denied he'd married — as an English tab rumored — his companion, actress Francesca Annis.) The talk turned to a movie he'd seen that he especially liked. " 'The Blair Witch Project'!" he said, with a small, wry grin. "I really loved it."