 |
 |
 |
 |
 | |
 |
|
In 1992, the actor made his starring film debut as Heathcliff, the granddaddy of all tortured lovers, in a little-seen remake of "Wuthering Heights."In"The English Patient," he was a Hungarian explorer who brought all he loved to ruin. Now in"The End of the Affair," director Neil Jordan's faithful adaptation of the Graham Greene novel, Fiennes plays a writer nearly driven mad by his married lover's betrayal.
"I can't think of a better representative of the very appropriate yet obsessed, tortured, and totally doomed Englishman than Ralph Fiennes,"says Jordan. "He was my absolute only choice for 'End of the Affair." In less than seven years, Fiennes has managed to corner the market on, for lack of a kinder description, losers in love. When he does manage to get the girl, in movies like"The Avengers,"the results are unconvincing. But allow him to play a dreamy, haunted figure, as he does in both"End of the Affair"and December's"Onegin," directed by his sister Martha, and Fiennes gives off the gleam of a bona fide matinee idol.
"I don't see the characters as losers,"says the actor, uneasily.
"I've chosen parts where people go through a life passage or a rough time and they either survive it or they don't. They have more dimensions and they're more human. Human fallibility interests me."
"The End of the Affair,"which opens Friday in New York City, is so filled with human fallibility it makes"The English Patient"seem like a tea party. Fiennes plays a writer named Maurice Bendrix who, during the London Blitz, begins an ill-fated romance with Sarah Miles (Julianne Moore), the wife of a dull civil servant (Stephen Rea).
Fiennes seems to have been fated to play the complicated role of Bendrix. A couple of years ago, two of the actor's friends gave him Greene's autobiographical novel as possible source material for a film.
"It was very odd," recalls Fiennes, 37."Completely separately from these two friends of mine, I got sent the script. I had the book waiting on my night stand so I read it first and thought it was extraordinary.
Then, I nervously picked up the screenplay because I thought, 'Oh God, will it match or in any way come close to Greene's novel? And I thought it really did. I thought Neil did a superb adaptation." Through the years, Greene's stories have been filmed often, from "The Third Man"(1949) with Orson Welles and"Our Man in Havana"(1960) with Alec Guinness to such relatively obscure (and unavailable on video) gems like"The Power and the Glory"(1933) with Spencer Tracy and "The Heart of the Matter"(1954) with Trevor Howard. Even"The End of the Affair"was filmed once before, in 1955, with Van Johnson and Deborah Kerr in the Fiennes and Moore roles. In the 1955 version, the central relationship between Bendrix and Sarah is handled so discreetly that the only hint of passion comes when Kerr takes off her earrings. In the new adaptation, Moore takes off a lot more than her jewelry. In fact, the film is marked by a raw, fumbling sexuality that is a lot more erotic than the bumps and grinds which pass for intimacy in most films.
Even though it was the respected Jordan of "The Crying Game"and "Interview With the Vampire"fame behind the cameras, Fiennes admits he thought twice before deciding to bare his bottom onscreen.
"You really have to have these very specific discussions about what part of your anatomy is going to be shown, and for how long,"says Fiennes, who prepared for the role of Bendrix by poring over love letters Greene wrote to the married American woman who inspired the novel.
"I mean, you're going to be up there forever on the screen, and you're going to be written about. So, on the day the scene is shot, you do get quite nervous." Months later, as he sits in a Manhattan hotel suite dressed in burgundy corduroy slacks and a billowy white shirt, Fiennes still looks quite nervous. His exchanges seem friendly enough but his body language speaks louder than his words. If he doesn't like a question, which is often, Fiennes has a habit of rocking back and forth in his chair, his arms folded tightly across his chest and his gaze fixed straight ahead.
The gestures are a strange combination of defiance and bashfulness.
"I was bruised badly by the press,"he says, alluding to the battering he took several years ago when he left his actress wife Alex Kingston ("E.R.") for his much older"Hamlet"co-star Francesca Annis.
"The media sort of swiveled onto me at that point."
Since he and Annis have settled down together, the paparazzi have eased up."I think if I work hard at being boring then I'm safe,"he says."Also, the 'Avengers was such a disaster that I think the media swiveled away from me after that. They did get enough mileage out of the movie being a disaster, though."
By his own admission, Fiennes has become a movie star in spite of himself. He tries his best to do the anti-star thing and change drastically from film to film. He gained nearly 30 pounds for his Oscar-nominated turn as a concentration camp commandant in"Schindler's List."He followed it up by playing an egghead game-show cheat on"Quiz Show,"a grungy virtual-reality peddler in"Strange Days,"and the great Dane in a Tony-winning production of"Hamlet."
Istvan Szabo, who directed Fiennes in the upcoming"Sunshine," believes the actor is an everyman for the new millennium."He is exactly like us in the audience: fragile,"says the filmmaker."His face suggests fragility. He's the intelligent young man who's hesitating about what to do, a conflicted man fighting against himself."
The oldest offspring of a tenant farmer-turned-photographer father and a novelist mother, Fiennes comes by his artistic ambitions naturally. It was primarily his mother, who died in 1993 after a long battle with cancer, who urged the young Fiennes to follow through on his creative impulses. "As a child, I wanted to be a painter," he recalls."I always wanted to draw scenes from 'The Battle of the Sun. I'd draw one soldier and then another one, then a bit of barbed wire. Then, I'd got bored.
But my mother would say, 'Come on, come on. You've got to finish it. She wouldn't just say, 'Oh, well done, darling. That's great. Let's have a cup of tea. My mother told me to put my guts into what I was doing."
It wasn't only Ralph whom his mother encouraged. All but one of Ralph's six siblings are involved in the arts. There's Martha the director, Magnus the composer, Sophie the producer, and Joseph the actor-star of"Shakespeare in Love."
Only Jacob, a gamekeeper, managed to resist of the lure of the spotlight.
"Jacob is really great,"says Ralph, a rare smile breaking across
his face."He's like, 'I don't know about these arty-farty people. He
makes a big posture of it, you know? He loves to say stuff like, 'I
don't know what you guys do while I'm off shooting foxes. He's very
good at playing up how regular he is."
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
|
|
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
© EL STEPHO
Added to the RF Reading Room on December 4, 1999
EL STEPHO