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Ralph Fiennes takes his bowler hat off to the unflappable persona of the character he plays in his latest movie
RALPH FIENNES does not look like John Steed. He looks more fox than gentleman-stud. The legacy of his most recent role is that his hair is still a shade of yesterday's ginger.
With his hair slicked back, his cheekbones seem more streamlined so his face and nose become longer, more angular. He is dressed more English Patient than Avengers in a pair of beige moleskin trousers and a casual shirt.
He sits diffidently in his chair, appearing at first to be shy. But he is just being polite. He comes across as a perfectly ordinary guy. But of course, it is not just the lens and lighting that have made Fiennes, 35, a major star.
Check out his CV. A reluctant romantic hero in the English Patient, a gambling-crazy priest in Oscar & Lucinda, a pot-bellied Nazi thug in Schindler's List, an ice-cold and brainy American in Quiz Show and now, Steed in the big-budget remake of The Avengers.
He says he was possessed to take the part as he was a fan of the TV series.
"I think this film is trying to be as true as possible to the style and feel of the original series but I don't know whether it is successful," he adds with candour.
"Because it was 30 years ago, I felt the persona Patrick Macnee created was one I could reinhabit. He wasn't an ultra-macho, big-biceped, Kalashnikov-toting he-man.
"Steed is slightly theatrical and camp with not a hair out of place. But he can handle any situation, adjust his hat and tie, and walk off.
"It makes me laugh because it is ridiculous and funny and I liked the idea that you can play it completely straight. I think I am different from Patrick Macnee but I was very happy that he gave me his blessing."
Macnee has a small part in The Avengers movie and the two Steeds reportedly got along very well.
Fiennes says he would like to play Steed again to get it better. Both he and Uma Thurman enjoyed doing it but were under pressure to get a big box-office hit.
"A film is controlled by the director. A film actor has to sublimate his ego much more than a theatre actor which may account for why he asks for so much more money."
So does he get paid too much? "Yes, but a bit of your soul is taken up and used. It is a Faustian pact.
"Big movie stars are a product. The studio buys an actor who has a special quality people pay money to see, but the actor needs the film studio to make people come and see the film.
"It is a piece of commerce. The more you are paid, the more what you do is totally to do with money. I feel the less you are paid, the more control you should have.
"Onegin, for instance, has a budget of US$14 million, which is almost too much if we are to have the creative freedom," he says of the film he had just finished shooting. It was a labour of love for Fiennes, who executive-produced and took the lead part.
SEXY? : DEPENDS ON MIRROR
THE ENGLISH PATIENT made Fiennes a sex symbol. And try as he might to vary his parts, to many, he is stuck as Count Lazlo de Almasy.
"I don't feel remotely that I am a sex symbol," he grins. "Whenever I look in the mirror, all I see are the growing crow's feet, the receding hair, the unshaven chin and little fleshy eyes."
Fiennes obviously looks in a different mirror from the rest of the world. He definitely lacks the relentless bonhomie of a modern Hollywood star, used to chat shows and endless mutual backslapping.
Where the others are happy at the centre of the crowd, he is happiest in more solitary pursuits. Reading, travelling or simply walking across the countryside.
He hates not exercising every day and has given up on weight-training and swimming for yoga.
"It makes me feel better than weights. I am not a member of a football team or a gym. I am not a team player."
LET ME BE STUCK WITH A BOOK ON AN ISLAND
Ralph Fiennes may be a movie star but he prefers books. To him, they are the very stuff of life ; he reads voraciously as if he were absorbing the words through his fingertips.
In fact, his best films have been based on literary novels not on Grisham's - Schindler's List, TEP, Oscar and Lucinda, though perhaps one should not mention Wuthering Heights and it is too early to judge Onegin which is based on Pushkin's verse novel and comes out early next year.
"I love reading," he says, "It takes me out of worrying about work or a job I am doing. I love having a page rustling through my hands.
"At the moment, I am reading Dostoevsky's The Idiot and because it ties into my next film with Hungarian director Istvan Szabo, I've started Hitler's Willing Executioners, a book about the Holocaust and why the Germans pursued that genocide."
His Desert Island Book list would be filled with books he had never read. "I've only read one Dickens novel so I'd like to read all of his. I'd like to read Gibbon's Decline and Fall because I think his prose is just fantastic and I'd like to read the Roman authors. I'd have to take a whole library."
Perhaps his passion is inherited. His mother Jini wrote seven books as Jennifer Lash and raised six children. He was the oldest though he does have an adopted brother, Mick, 11 years his senior.
The grandeur of the family tripled-barrelled name (Twistleton Wykeman Fiennes) was not translated into cash.
His father Mark was a farmer-turned-photographer who moved his family to Ireland six days after Ralph was born on 22 Dec, 1962. They moved 15 times in his childhood in houses Mark was doing up.
Money was tight and though the children went to local state schools,
their home life was rich in its culture and diversity.
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© EL STEPHO
Added to the RF Reading Room on September 13, 1998
EL STEPHO