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Ralph Fiennes (pronounced Rafe Fines) hit the headlines for living his 33-year old TV actor wife, Alex Kingston, for Francesca Annis - a woman old enough to be his mother, and who just happened to play his mum in a theatre production of Shakespeare's Hamlet. But the 34-year old actor confesses that he is still haunted by the memory of his real mother - Jini - who died of breast cancer in 1993. In fact, Ralph even attended a seance to try to contact her.
"Yes, I visited a spiritualist centre with my father and two sisters (Sophie and Martha). It was done with a natural sense of curiosity - whether or not it was my mother coming through the medium, I don't know," he says. "She did appear to come through and in a way that made me feel that wherever she was she was very happy. I don't think our lives end with death. In moments when I'm anxious or concerned, I feel that somehow there's a presence of my mother or an awareness of her, which has helped me through."
Ralph insisted on a "do-it-yourself" burial for his mother, personally ordering a wooden coffin and painting it in her favourite colour, a bright peacock blue. He even brushed his mother's hair after she had died and scattered flowers over her body.
His mother died just before Schlindler's List was released and therefore never witnessed her son's Hollywood success - he was nominated for the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his role as camp commandant.
"It's a hard period to talk about," he says. "You can never quite comprehend the loss of a parent. Apart from the initial grief you feel, there's a whole other area of coming to terms with the absence of that person."
As the eldest child of a family of six, Ralph was always closest to his mother, an artist and writer, who was more like a best friend than a parent.
"If you have a parent who is so incredibly alert to your development, as my mother was, you feel that nothing is private. My mother had frightening intuitive powers, and she could be quite mischievious with them, too."
For those who know Ralph well, it came as little surprise when he left his wife to be with Francesca Annis, 52. Having lived with drama school sweetheart Alex for eight years, he proposed to her just a month after his mother's death - exchanging, some would say, one mother figure for another. But it seems Alex refused to take on that role, and so he switched to Francesca.
While the ever-private actor refuses to discuss his relationship with Francesca, his friends have observed that he is calmer and more relaxed these days, a fact they attribute to yoga, to which Francesca introduced him.
He now shares a home in London with Francesca and was recently Down
Under filming Australian writer Peter Carey's book Oscar and Lucinda, in
which he co-stars with Cate Blanchett. He followed that with a run on
the London stage in a Chekov play, before going on to film The New
Avengers with Uma Thurman, where he'll play John Steed. And that's a
decided fatherly role.
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© EL STEPHO
Added to the RF Reading Room on June 8, 1997
EL STEPHO