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In Onegin, directed by his sister Martha Fiennes, he played the melancholy hero of Pushkin's poem - a man whose aristocratic hauteur severs him from the one affection that might have thawed the shard of ice in his heart. And in The End of the Affair, Neil Jordan's account of Graham Greene's novel, he takes the role of Maurice Bendrix, a novelist whose adulterous wartime affair ends in deep unhappiness. Both parts did little to disturb what has become his established branding as a film actor - a cool reserve that hints at profound feeling but in which hurt is mostly turned inwards - as if a hedgehog were to curl up the wrong way round.
The release of Jordan's film has been somewhat blurred by what you might call the affair of the end - a noisy public spat about the censor's reluctance to let minors catch a glimpse of Fiennes's naked rear in action during one of the film's love scenes - but the sniggering bathos of the press coverage is unlikely to leave any permanent mark on its star's image. The film confirms him as a marquee star of an antique kind, one of those actors who live to be gazed at as much as listened to. And the interesting question - the intensely alluring question for many of his female fans - is still the same. What precisely is he brooding about and could it be cured by love?
His childhood might have been crafted by an assiduous PR, so neatly does it presage a career as a romantic star. He was born in 1962, the oldest of six, his brothers and sisters providing a handy, if occasionally reluctant audience for his early performances. Martha recently recalled one of those premonitory scenes of childhood beloved of cheap biographers, in which the boy who would later be nominated for an Oscar for his performance as the monstrous Amon Goeth in Schindler's List did jokey imitations of a cruel Nazi guard while his siblings washed up.
Both of Fiennes's parents were creative - his father, Mark, a photographer and his mother, Jini, a painter, novelist and travel writer. If they were not quite bohemian, then at least they were unusually open to change. The family moved 15 times during his childhood and Fiennes has talked of the difficulty of changing schools so frequently - an adolescent ordeal that may account for some of the reserve that even close friends identify in his character. What this upbringing lacked in stability, though, it made up for in creative nourishment.
For his eighth birthday he was given a recording of Olivier in Hamlet, and another gift - a toy theatre - provided him with his first stage, even if it could only accommodate his voice. His first full-sized role was that of Romeo with an amateur youth theatre company.
After A-levels he did a foundation course at Chelsea School of Art in 1981 but almost immediately decided that this was a wrong turning. He auditioned for Rada and was accepted, filling in the time before his course by skivvying at Brown's Hotel.
What followed was a swift ascent through the standard apprenticeship of an English stage actor - a season at the Open Air Theatre in Regent's Park, and time on the drill-squares of provincial rep, at Theatre Clwyd and the Oldham Coliseum.
In 1988, three years after he graduated from Rada, he passed out in style, convincing Adrian Noble to put him straight into leading parts in two seasons at Stratford. He first attracted critical attention in Henry VI, in which he played the title role, and as Troilus in an acclaimed production by Sam Mendes. Simon Russell-Beale, who acted with him at the time, recalls an actor still finding his feet but also beginning to play away from his strengths. "A really strong suit of his was his spirituality," Russell- Beale recalls. "The role of Henry VI fitted him like a glove. There was a certain physical gaucheness to it, but also this inner spirituality." He is not an instinctive actor, rather one who worries at the knot of a role until it loosens enough to be readily untangled.
Ruth Letts, a film producer who worked with him on The Cormorant, a Screen Two film he made in 1992, remembers the intensity of his conversations in rehearsal - two weeks of detailed analysis that translated into a shoot untroubled by thespian hesitation. "I think he's a grafter," says Russell- Beale. "He has a great sense of the importance of what we do."
Fiennes's loyalty to the classical stage has survived his Hollywood success. (His next project is to take the roles of Coriolanus and Richard II for Almeida productions of the two plays at the former Gainsborough film studios in London's Shoreditch - a project that neatly combines his classical pedigree and the peculiarly English character of his film style.) After those two seasons at Stratford, it didn't take long for British directors to see that his looks and ability to suggest that something troubled and enigmatic lay behind them offered a potent combination for the screen.
Peter Kosminsky cast him as Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, a role he characteristically preferred over Earnshaw, for which he had initially been approached. It was his performance in that film that persuaded Spielberg to consider him for the role of Amon Goeth, the brutal camp commandant in Schindler's List. "I saw sexual evil," Spielberg said later. "It is all about subtlety: there were moments of kindness that would move across his eyes and then instantly run cold."
Goeth was the role that transformed Fiennes into an international star and it changed him physically, too, since he put on weight to give the character an edge of corpulent indulgence. What was most powerful about the performance and allowed it to rise above the clipped Germish accent he was obliged to adopt - a jackboot clamped on to the "voice beautiful" - was the intensity of self-loathing and grief he brought to the part.
His characterisation never amounts to a crude verdict of guilt, allowing you instead to see why it is that despair can be a sin - because the conviction that all is irretrievably lost creates that most dangerous creature: a man who has nothing to lose. In one of Fiennes's best scenes he stares into the mirror, as if baffled by what lies behind the familiar features.
In the same year, in Quiz Show, he delivered what is possibly his finest screen performance to date - playing Charles van Doren, a patrician college boy who, in a real-life scandal in the Fifties, connived in the rigging of a top-rating quiz show. It was a clever piece of typecasting - the scion of an Anglophile New England dynasty played by someone who appeared to be the natural heir of Olivier, at least in his diction and bearing. But Fiennes added need and poignancy to the historical reconstruction, mapping the exact contours of Van Doren's weakness - the way in which TV celebrity offered a kind of substitute for the parental pride he really craved. It was not just a triumph of feeling either; watch the historical recordings of the real Van Doren answering questions and you can see that Fiennes's recreations had the precision of a recording, the perfect simulation of a fake.
For those who enjoy interpreting an actor's work as a reflection of inner turmoil, Fiennes's performance in Quiz Show offers as good an opportunity as any. On screen he played a serious and slightly unworldly young man who found himself plunged into fame and dubious about his entitlement to its rewards; in life a steadily earned reputation in the theatre had suddenly transmuted into a far more dizzying celebrity. Fiennes had begun to learn to soar at the RSC, but on gently sloping ground; now it was as if, without warning, he had gone over the lip of the Grand Canyon. The death of his mother in the preceding year can only have added to the turbulence of this period in his life.
If he felt any vertigo, he soon mastered it. When he next appeared on the English stage - as Hamlet in an Almeida production at the Hackney Empire - it was not just as a leading actor but as a full-blown star, the sort of attraction that warranted AA road signs to guide the fans home.
Those who knew and worked with him before his ascension are fairly unanimous about the grace with which he handled it. But it was clear that he'd crossed a line into a different kind of celebrity; that permanently besieged state in which no one can survive without defensive systems. With a different kind of actor the essential charm might have buckled - but since one of the chief ingredients of Fiennes's appeal is a sense of isolation, the wariness of the famous only reinforced his screen presence.
It's easy to think of Fiennes's career as pretty uniform in its challenges - but largely because stardom creates a kind of amnesia in audiences, so that only those films that confirm the received opinion are remembered. Like someone who finds himself buried in an avalanche he has made attempts to clear a little breathing space around him - in Kathryn Bigelow's science- fiction thriller Strange Days (in which he played a seedy dealer in virtual reality), and with the retread of The Avengers, where he tried to give his English reserve a twist of camp irony. But, though friends say that he can be drily funny in private, Ralph Fiennes and light comedy are hardly natural associations. Insouciance is never going to figure very large on his palette. And it was hardly surprising that he should cut an awkward figure in the future, since he'd always seemed far more at home in the recent past. Though he's cited Brando and DeNiro as professional role models (to an American journalist, as ! it happens) the glow he gives off is that of gaslight - the illumination of an older era.
Anthony Minghella was right to see that that was precisely the kind of period lustre he needed in The English Patient, the film that came between those failed escape attempts and in which Fiennes delivered perhaps the most economical distillation of heart-throb allure ever written. "Swoon," he murmured urgently to Kristin Scott Thomas, "and I'll catch you." The invitation, with its exciting combination of risk and reassurance, interfered with the cardiac rhythms of millions of viewers and cemented Fiennes's standing as a bankable romantic lead.
The revelation that he was leaving his wife, Alex Kingston, for an older woman - Francesca Annis, who had played his mother in Hamlet - didn't diminish his emotional sway over females of a certain age.
It's clear that Fiennes understands the exact nature of his romantic appeal because he is susceptible to it himself - talking of Onegin, he remarked on the allure of "disaffected men who have some heart of darkness, which actually isn't always there. It is quintessentially romantic, the heart of darkness that could possibly change, like Heathcliff". On another occasion - squashing the rumour that he had auditioned for the Bond movies - he couldn't help himself sketching out a Fiennes makeover of a character that had softened into an unthreatening cartoon. "He's a loner really. Nowadays he'd be hard to like if one were to realise him as Fleming wrote him. I'm intrigued by that."
In Onegin and The End of the Affair you can see that this seductive enigma could easily harden into an affectation. The hazard of a manner so contained and melancholy is that it can easily look like a mope - Eeyore with airs and graces rather than existential depth. But if Fiennes stays this side of self-parody - and his career so far suggests that he will - it remains a prodigiously seductive silhouette. No one can quite match him in depicting men who need the love of a good woman, which is why so many woman dream that they might be good enough to try.
Life Story
Born: Ralph Nathaniel Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes, on 22 December 1962, in Suffolk.
Pronounced: "Raif Fynes".
Family: Father, Mark, and Jennifer (Jini) (nee Lash), who died in 1993. Siblings; Magnus, a composer; Twins Jake, a gamekeeper, and Joseph, an actor; Martha, film director; Sophia, a photographer.
Marriage: In 1993 to Alex Kingston (of ER fame). Divorced 1997.
Famous second cousin: Sir Ranulph Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes, the well- known explorer. Also said to be descended from the Emperor Charlemagne.
Education: St Kieran's College, Kilkenny; Bishop Wordsworth's School, Salisbury; Chelsea School of Art and Rada.
Theatrical career: Includes title role in Romeo and Juliet and and Lysander in Midsummer Night's Dream (Open Air Theatre, Regents Park, 1986; title role in Henry VI and Troilus and Cressida (Royal Shakespeare Company, 1988-91); Six Characters In Search of an Author, Ting Tang Mine Royal National, 1987; Almeida, Hamlet, 1995; Ivanov, 1997.
Film career: Wuthering Heights, 1992; Baby of Macon, 1993; Schindler's List, 1993; Quiz Show 1994; Strange Days, 1995; The English Patient, 1997; Onegin, 1999.
He says: "It's that period of inadequacy and sexual awakening. It's horrible" (on his adolescence).
They say: "Ralph's bottom was pumping too many times" (Robin Duval, film censor, on The End of the Affair).
"He used to practise doing karate chops on classroom desks until his hands were blue" (Schoolmate Andrew Galt).
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© EL STEPHO
Added to the RF Reading Room on February 16, 2000
EL STEPHO