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Shine he does, whether on screen as the smoldering Almasy, hero and victim of The English Patient, on stage as a hunka, hunka burning Hamlet, or in luminous 3-D at a swanky hotel where the England born, Ireland bred actor is ensconced to talk about his latest role.
In Oscar and Lucinda, the gently eccentric romance that opens Friday, Fiennes plays a Victorian-era Anglican priest and compulsive gambler tenderly, tragically and truly in love with the proprietor of an Austrialian glass works. With a shock of carroty hair that makes him resemble raggedy andy, Fiennes's oscar fixes his translucent eyes on Lucinda and wordlessly dares her to gaze into his soul.
Fiennes 35, is unnervingly intense and intensely beautiful, the personification of tortured ectasy, much like the characters to which he's drawn. Characters such as sadistic, if seductive, SS officer Amon Goeth in Schindler's List, telegenic cheat Charles Van Doren in Quiz Show, or brooding boer Heathcliff in a 1992 adaptation of Wuthering Heights.
"I guess I've played people who are ethically conflicted," Fiennes reflects in a low, halting voice that draws the listener toward him. Now it's time to lighten up a bit, he says.
"I've just finished playing John Steed [in The Avengers] who's not conflicted one jot!" Fiennes half boasts of his part opposite Uma Thurman in the cheeky adaptation of the cheeky '60s british tv series.
Yet even with The Avengers, which is set in what he calls "the perennial '60s," he has yet to make a movie wearing contemporary clothes, and it's jarring to see this professional time-traveler in modern dress, in his chamois shirt of hunter green worn like a jacket over a creamy silk shirt.
"It wasn't the fact that Schindler's List and Oscar and Lucinda are set in the past that made me do them though. I think the characters you play all reside in you," Fiennes reflects.
While its hard to imagine that Amon Goeth's sadism or Almasy's rage lurk inside Fiennes, he is , like those dark, difficult characters, someone who wears his emotions on the surface of his skin.
What links Almasy, Goeth, Hamlet, Heathcliff and Oscar is their callowness, the troubled psyche of one making an unwilling passage from manchild to man.
"I feel nostalgic about being a child," Fiennes confides. His body is here, but his spirit is far, far away, at play in the fields of his youth. "Your experience and imagination are so unsullied."
The pictures he conjures of his childhood are of a bohemian rapsody. The eldest child in a household that, for financial and idealistic reasons, hopped from southern England to rural Ireland, Fiennes speaks about his family the way others speak about their faith.
"I had a mother who was passionate about literature and poetry," he recalls of his artist/author mum Jini. She was keen that we commmunicate creatively and imaginatively. There were always crayons and paint around."
"My mother took me to see Olivier in Henry V," he recalls. "and dad would talk to us about the historical background and geographical sites of the play." [his father is a farmer and professional photographer.] The Fiennes family played theatrical games and charades. Little wonder five of the six children grew up to be musicians, actors and directors. [the sixth is a gameskeeper].
At first Fiennes dreamed of becoming a painter, like his mother. Well, not exactly like his mother who painted "images of pain and fertilitity and maternity", but you know what he means. One of his favorite retreats is "the room at the Tate galleries with Mark Rothko canvases. Transcendent. I love going there. It has the atmosphre of a chapel."
With the goal of an art career, he enrolled in London's Chelsea College of Art and Design.
Of acting in front of his brothers and sisters, he remembers, "I felt inhibited in my own family. Getting up and performing is necessarily exposing because your family knows you. Maybe they can see through you."
But at Chelsea, it was the art teachers who inhibited him. While he loved the creative freedom of draming and painting, "Suddenly you're in school and the teachers tell you what to draw."
A course of theater design led to the theater, specifically the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, where Fiennes met fellow student Alex Kingston and was voted " the voice beautiful" by classmates. Classical theater roles led almost inevitably to the part of Heathcliff in a 1992 movie production of Wuthering Heights - the same role in which another British stage legend, Laurence Olivier, made a splash on the screen 53 years earlier.
Fiennes and Kingston (the Pre-Raphaelite beauty who plays surgeon Elizabeth Corday on television's ER) married in 1993, the actor's annus mirabilis and horribilis. Three months after the wedding, his mother died of breast cancer. And three months after the funeral, Schindler's List was released, earning and Oscar nod for best supporting actor.
"If you lose a parent, it's a big change in your life," he told an interviewer in 1995. "your sense of yourself is completely redefined, and you reevaluate your own mortality and the innate child in you."
He said this just around the time he took on another stage role associated with Olivier: Hamlet. While playing the Dane he fell in love, with Gertrude, Francesca Annis, 18 years his senior, earning the undying ardor of older women everywhere and the suspicion that he was in training to play Oedipus.
Fiennes' new romance couldn't have been easy for Kingston, whose divorce from him became final last year. To one interviewer she remarked that she was suprised her 10-year affair and 18-month marriage "lasted as long as it did."
"He has such a dark side," Kingston said. "I think he feels he's only half a person, that he's only real when he's acting."
If that's true, and Fiennes politely evades the subject, it might explain why he's always working, why he bounds from Oscar and Lucinda to the stage role in Chekhov's Ivanov in the time it took Tom Cruise to make Eyes Wide Shut.
How important is a home base to the man who so lyrically describes his childhood on an Irish farm?
"Well, I just recently divorced, you know, and the house has gone to Alex," he replies, not exactly answering the question.
The subject of home reminds him of the most poetic sequence in Oscar and Lucinda. Oscar, who is terrified of water, transports a glass church -a spiritual home - hundreds of miles through the Australian outback to a remote settlement.
"I love the fragility and transparency of that church," he says. "I love it that Oscar calls it a kennel for God's angels." Does the actor who speaks with fervor of "these layers of childhood going on in us in adulthood" himself want children? It's an awkward question as his partner is beyond child-bearing years.
"I was called to duty in the rearing of my own brothers and sisters," he says by way of an apology. "I don't feel broody- in the procreative sense."
Broody, no. brooding, yes.
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© EL STEPHO
Added to the RF Reading Room on February 10, 1998
EL STEPHO