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We have always taken Fiennes seriously; he is the master of the complicated persona, the king of intense, whose moody yet charismatic screen roles stirred from a theatrical background seemingly overnight. In fact, Fiennes's debut was a wretched effort at Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights (1992), but Steven Spielberg saw it and detected the strains of darkness beneath the piercing good looks. He cast him as the Nazi Amon Goeth in Schindler's List (1993), requiring the actor to gain three stone (care of a Guinness diet) and go to a place most of us have trouble even contemplating. The result was a staggering performance, an Oscar nomination and a rapid step up the leading-man ladder.
Since then there have been crosscurrents of the mainstream (Quiz Show, 1994, Strange Days, 1995) with the arty (Sunshine, Onegin, both 1999) and, memorably, an art film that became mainstream (The English Patient, 1996), but he always plays complex, cerebral individuals.
So, if Fiennes is going to dabble in a blockbuster, he could do worse than star alongside Anthony Hopkins in Red Dragon. He plays the alternative psycho on the block, Francis Dolarhyde, who is obsessed with sticking mirror shards into his victims’ eyes.
"It is a great part," he claims. "It has some wonderful, high-octane scenes that are quite scary. He is a psychopathic paranoid schizophrenic, that's the label I worked out with the consultant psychiatrist."
If you want to understand the workings of Fiennes's thought process, try his earliest childhood memory, growing up in a farmhouse in East Anglia. "I always thought there was some monster on the landing or outside on the roof," he recalls. "There was a dreaded, terrible presence outside the door."
Ralph is one of six siblings, including an actor brother (Joseph) and director sister (Martha, who directed him in Onegin). He got his first taste of theatre when his mother took him to see Laurence Olivier in Henry V, yet he was committed to becoming a painter, going to art school in Chelsea. It was there that he turned his attention to the stage, transferring to RADA and eventually joining the RSC.
Face to face, Fiennes defies expectations. He is more fragile and far less scary. Most of his co-stars are surprised by his shyness and he eschews stardom like a disease.
"He's not as suave as you might expect," noted Emily Watson, whom he terrorises in Red Dragon. "He gets embarrassed. He's very charming, but in a really awkward way. He seems a little bit like a man who's uncomfortable in his own skin, who really comes alive when he is acting."
He has been referred to paradoxically as Bambi because of his childlike innocence, honesty and lack of cynicism. He just acts the other stuff. "He only knows about his power and charisma in a theoretical way," claimed David Cronenberg, who directs him in the forthcoming Spider - playing a schizoid agonising over childhood trauma, convinced that he is transforming into an arachnid. Certainly, he likes to keep his inner self private. He had a run-in with the tabloid sharks in 1994, when his marriage to the actress Alex Kingston (now in ER) crumbled and he started seeing Francesca Annis, an older woman who played his mother on stage in Hamlet.
"They pretty much treat us (actors) as fair game to write anything insinuating, embarrassing, lurid. You know what my relationship with the press is in Red Dragon," he smirks, enjoying the parallels. "I get the chance to bite the face off a tabloid journalist."
Recently, though, he has decided to come over to the light side: "I've been trying to do something lighter, more contemporary, for so long," he explains. "I get really sick of people assuming I only want to play angst-ridden, screwed-up, repressed people."
So, he made a romantic comedy called Maid in Manhattan with Jennifer Lopez, and had a great time.
When his Red Dragon co-star Ed Norton heard that he had been working with J-Lo, he rechristened Fiennes as "Ra.Fi." We'll see how long the new American version holds.
------------------------- CV Ralph Fiennes
Born Ralph Nathaniel Fiennes on December 22, 1962, in Suffolk
Family His father, Martin, is a photographer, his mother, Jini, writes novels under the name Jennifer Lash. He is the eldest of six siblings: Martha (director), Magnus (musician), Sophie (producer), Joseph (actor) and Jacob (gamekeeper). He is a cousin of the explorer Sir Ranulph Fiennes
But, seriously Fiennes is currently teaching himself Russian to appreciate better Dostoevsky and Tolstoy in their original text
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© EL STEPHO
Added to the RF Reading Room on October 17, 2002
EL STEPHO