 |
 |
 |
 |
 | |
 |
|
"What's really scary about being in demand is that, when the world decides you're a desirable commodity, you haven't really changed inside," said Ralph Fiennes, 34. "The material rewards are very, very tempting. People think that, to be successful, you've got to take the car, the house, the big fee. They haven't thought about happiness. but recent events in my life have made me ask the question, 'What is the cost?'"
Ralph Fiennes (pronounced Rafe Fines) won international attention in 1993 with Schindler's List, a monumental story of the Holocaust in which he played a brutal SS commandant -a performance that brought Fiennes critical acclaim and an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor. Two starring roles soon followed: Quiz Show, about the '50s TV game show scandals, and Strange Days, a science-fiction thriller. In 1995, he won a Tony for his portrayal of Hamlet on Broadway.
In his current film, The English Patient, a romantic drama that opens in the final days of World War II, he plays a grievously injured pilot who recalls, in flashbacks, the passion and treachery that brought all he loved to ruin. He has been nominated for an Oscar as Best Actor for his performance.
In visiting Fiennes in London over several days, I was interested in his journey from a hardscrabble, itinerant childhood in Ireland and England to become a man many consider one of the most talented actors of his generation.
"It was a very hand-to-mouth existence," Fiennes recalled, speaking of his boyhood. "There was very little money. My parents were broke. But we did have an environment at home whereby there was always encouragement to do whatever we wanted to do. The strength of my Catholic ethic underpinning everything, the fabric of the family life, was so strong."
Ralph Fiennes was born in 1962 in Suffolk, England, the first of the four sons and two daughters of Mark and Jini Fiennes. His father was a tenant farmer turned photographer and builder who moved the family from England to Ireland and back again as he restlessly chased dreams of success.
"My father is brilliant with his hands," Fiennes said, "making gardens or designing houses. He got a job photographing someone's house in Ireland in 1972, so we moved to the Irish coast. My father bought some plots of land on which to build a house by the sea with the idea that maybe he could design and build houses for people as second homes. But you needed capital, and they didn't have that at all.
"We moved around a great deal," Fiennes acknowledged, referring to 15 different homes during his childhood, "but my mother saw that the positive side was that we had to learn so much and be able to adapt so easily to new environments. And I think we were able to, because we were loved so much at home."
Fiennes' mother was a novelist, publishing books under the name Jennifer Lash, and a painter. She died of breast cancer in 1993. (His father is still living.) "Ideas, history, the stories of people's lives, creative writing, the arts -- those were my mother's passions," Fiennes said. "She would tell us the stories of Shakespeare's plays. She didn't say, 'Read it.' She told us the stories in her own words."
"All of us children liked stories told to us, any kind of conversation with our parents," he added. "We were never excluded from adult company or spoken down to. She told me the story of Hamlet, and it intrigued and fascinated me. I identified with Hamlet seeing his father's ghost. We had a recording of [Laurence] Olivier speaking Hamlet, speaking language at its best, full of expression and intonation, the very dramatic way Olivier spoke those soliloquies. I was compelled by his voice and words. I was seduced." Today, Olivier is the actor Fiennes is most often likened to by drama critics.
When, I asked, did he decide to become an actor? "Not at first, although I'd been in plays in school," he replied. "At one point when I was about 16, I decided I wanted to go into the army, being disciplined, straight and true. It was a way, I think, of pushing myself into being a grown-up male. I love military history -- I romanticized it. I now realize that is the actor -- being interested in how another human being functions, to play the mind of a great general or politician or king. I was interested in why people do what they do, what has inspired or motivated or corrupted them. My army ambitions ended with one visit to a barracks here. That was enough to change my mind. When I left school, I thought I wanted to be a painter."
Fiennes spent a year at London's College of Art and Design, majoring in drawing and painting. Although he was considered gifted as a painter, it was in art school that he decided to become an actor. "There were so many possibilities," he explained, "so many things I could do. But I thought: I love theater. I love that what we experience in theater is as much visual as it is emotional or vocal. Today I love it when, in a technical rehearsal, for the first time I see the scenery and my costume, and suddenly I see the world of the story come together, the world I'm going to be in."
In the early 1980s Fiennes began his studies at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA), England's premier school for acting. While a student there he met and fell in love with Alex Kingston, a classmate, who became his companion for 10 years. (They finally married in 1993 but split up after two years.) He graduated from RADA, joined the National Theatre, then in 1988 began four seasons with the Royal Shakespeare Company, Britain's most prestigious institutional theater, gaining praise for performances in Henry VI, Love's Labour's Lost and as Edmund in King Lear. In 1991 he made his TV debut in a small role in the British mini-series Prime Suspect. The following year, he starred in the film Wuthering Heights and in the TV movie A Dangerous Man - Lawrence After Arabia, which led to his being cast in Schindler's List, his breakthrough film.
"I've been lucky in that, since I left drama school, I've been in work," he remarked, smiling. "I couldn't believe I was being paid just to be in rehearsals. I was happy even with my first jobs, where I'd have a walk-on part and make coffee or sweep the stage and put out the props. As time has gone on, the money has gotten more. In a funny way, what's a little depressing is that with the money comes people's idea of your being, well, a film star. It's wonderful to be paid - I'm not begrudging it for a second - but more and more the very simplicity of being is taken over by career, by the decisions and responsibilities made by money. "
Fiennes latest film project, Oscar & Lucinda, a historical romance, is set for release later this year.
Shortly before his mother died in 1993, she saw him in Schindler's List, in which he brilliantly portrayed a truly vile character. I asked about his mother's last days.
"She'd had a cancer operation in 1987 and got better, and there were no signs of it returning," he said. "But then in 1992 it came back. You know of the likelihood of her dying, but at the same time you think she'll fight it again, and it will be all right. By the time I got offered Schindler's List, she was pretty ill and in pain a lot. I came back one weekend from filming in Poland to spend some time with her.
"She was staying in the country at a cottage some friends had lent her, and she had read the script and was struck by the character of Amon Goeth, my role. She could see the extreme evil, but she would not accept that anyone was completely evil. They may be evil all their lives, but she wouldn't accept that their whole being was evil, because she wouldn't deny the potential for good in anyone."
It was shortly thereafter that his mother died, and that was followed by the failure of his marriage. After these events, I inquired, where did he find home?
"My strongest points of reference to some kind of grounding are my close friends and my family," Fiennes answered. "That's my sense of home. My family, my brothers and sisters, are very important. We've all seen each other in the most basic, everyday circumstances. I know that if I'm in pain, those are the people I can be very open with, and they with me, the closeness I feel to those friends and family."
I asked, "Don't fame and success isolate you from what you were before and those you loved?"
"Success?" Fiennes gave me a withering look. "Well, I don't know quite what you mean by success. Material success? Worldly success? Personal, emotional success? The people I consider successful are so because of how they handle their responsibilities to other people, how they approach the future, people who have a full sense of the value of their life and what they want to do with it. I call people 'successful' not because they have money or their business is doing well but because, as human beings, they have a fully developed sense of being alive and engaged in a lifetime task of collaboration with other human beings -their mothers and fathers, their family, their friends, their loved ones, the friends who are dying, the friends who are being born.
"Success?" he repeated emphatically. Don't you know it 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."
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
|
|
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
© EL STEPHO
Added to the RF Reading Room on August 26, 1997
EL STEPHO