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"Spirit is not a word I ever want to feel embarrassed to use, to talk about someone's soul," Ralph Fiennes says with an ingratiating earnestness.
It is several weeks before the release of "Oscar and Lucinda" (opening Friday in the Bay area), a period drama about love, chance and faith in which Fiennes plays a flame-haired, gambling-obsessed priest.
"I do believe in the soul, the spirit, the essence of someone. And I mean that apart from how they choose to project themselves -- their true essence," he says.
Fiennes stops, expressing concerns that he will hate seeing his musings in print. Expressing his spirituality is "terribly personal, and I don't feel equipped to put it into words very easily," he says.
The open, reflective Ralph Fiennes (pronounced "Rafe Fines") recedes for the moment, and the famously reticent persona surfaces. He soon makes eye contact again and smiles freely, assuming the confidence of an A-list movie star.
It's a warm winter afternoon in Los Angeles. Fiennes has traveled from London to fulfill promotion duties for "Oscar and Lucinda," He's caught a nasty cold on the flight over and admits that the illness is taxing him.
"It does dampen one's enthusiasm," he says, but summons the energy for a spirited discussion of the film.
"Oscar and Lucinda," based on the Booker Prize-winning novel by Peter Carey, is the story of two 19th century misfits -- Anglican priest Oscar (Fiennes) and Australian heiress Lucinda (Cate Blanchett), a bloomers-wearing noncomformist who has just bought a glass factory. They meet on a ship, discover they're both furtive gamblers and eventually find in each other the soul mate they could scarcely have hoped for.
Oscar is alternately ashamed and apologetic of his compulsion. In one riveting scene, he passionately defends gambling, justifying it as a logical extension of the ultimate wager he and most of humanity make -- that God is real. "We stake everything on the fact of God's existence," Oscar says, his whole body moving in animated appeal.
"A lot of the spiritual qualities of it attracted me," Fiennes says of his reasons for signing on the project. "The part of Oscar -- a man on a religious quest, struggling with his flesh and primitive urges."
Fiennes convinced director Gillian Armstrong ("My Brilliant Career," "Little Women") that he was right for the part of Oscar long before the critical and box-office successes of "Schindler's List" (1993), "Quiz Show" (1994) and "The English Patient" (1996) increased his bankability in Hollywood. A sense of honor and an affinity for the character kept him onboard with he quirky, financially risky script.
His determination to persist with "Oscar and Lucinda" through six years of delays was not because of any particular career trajectory or image concerns. He is, in fact, disgusted at the headline of a cover story about him in November's Los Angeles Magazine that read "Ralph's Big Gamble" and said he is betting on the film to heighten his image.
"I didn't even think of my image. I don't care a damn what my image is," he says, his voice rising. "I cannot tell you the bemusement of (reporters) who I've met today, as if they think actors sit down and make studied career choices. And maybe they do, but I just did this movie because I wanted to do it. I loved the part."
Dressed casually in burgundy corduroy pants, a dark green sweater and bright red socks, Fiennes appears younger than his 35 years. His somewhat fidgety, slightly awkward demeanor is difficult to reconcile with the sadistic Nazi commander he played in "Schindler's List," the smoldering lover he portrayed in "The English Patient" and the presumably suave performance he will deliver in the upcoming "Avengers" with Uma Thurman.
On the other hand, a healthy gap between onscreen persona and real-life personality should be expected of an actor who is being compared in some quarters to Laurence Olivier. He is, after all, a two-time best actor Academy Award nominee and winner of the best actor Tony Award -- all within five years of high-profile roles. Years of less visible roles preceded his relatively recent fame, including many as a member of both Britain's National Theatre and Royal Shakespeare Company.
Fiennes makes his home in London, where he spends his free time with his father, six siblings and his actress girlfriend Francesca Annis, who is 18 years his senior. His mother, English novelist Jennifer Lash, died in 1993. (Fiennes was divorced in October from Alex Kingston, who joined the cast of television's "ER" last fall as Dr. Elizabeth Corday.)
He counts on family and friends to help him keep perspective and has avoided cultivating an entourage of sycophants. His agent is "very direct," he says, and he has close friends in the theater who will "tell me truth." He particularly relies on his two sisters, one a producer and the other a director.
The Hollywood milieu is another world to him. He enjoys visiting Los Angeles but finds it a "perplexing, fascinating" place.
"It seems always a little unreal to me here. I love the climate and the sun, the sense of these broad roads, the cars. And things function so smoothly. Everything is so well-oiled -- you know, valet parking." he says.
Living in Los Angeles for any length of time, however, is not an option.
"I'm English. I come from England and I live in London, and I love it there."
Fiennes says he is learning to enjoy his success, including the large sums he earns for a few months' work, which appears to embarrass him.
"I push myself into these anxieties about it all the time. I think I'm just now starting to realize that I can enjoy it," he says.
Freed from Money worries, Fiennes has resolved that he will not become complacent about his work. He is executive producing his next project, and adaption of Alexander Pushkin's " Eugene Onegin," co-starring Live Tyler and directed by Fiennes' sister Martha.
"I'm not the key producer, but I'm party to all the choices that are made. That's been very exciting but also -- wow -- I've learned so much about the responsibility of what happens. I wouldn't call that always enjoyable because there's tress."
The experience is giving him important insights into human behavior and life in general, he says.
"I understand so much more about people, about communicating, choices you make, things that happen and how you have to readjust to them not happening. You really grow up -- fast."
When the conversation returns to "Oscar and Lucinda" and the questions of faith it provokes, Fiennes says he believes in "a kind of God." Again straining to express his thoughts, he says his God has to do with an eternal energy that governs all living things. The problem of evil -- that a loving God would allow unspeakable horrors such as the Holocaust -- does not diminish his faith.
"The question 'If there's a God why did the Holocaust happen?'
is limiting of God. God has given us these choices. That's
what's so remarkable," Fiennes says. "He said, 'You have the
choice to either help that person or beat them up, but you
have to be responsible for that choice.' That's the energy
I'm talking about. We have this life that's inside us, our
energy, our spirit, and we can make it do things that are
life-giving and life-affirming or we can do things that
are not. That energy that we have, that life force, is God.
It's in us all the time."
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© EL STEPHO
Added to the RF Reading Room on March 7, 1998
EL STEPHO