Telegraph (UK) Interview

November 14, 1999

Mr Fiennes changes hats Although there's a lot riding on Ralph Fiennes' new film, Eugene Onegin, Sheila Johnston finds him to be a far cry from the tortured soul he's so often portrayed as
By Sheila Johnston

In his time Ralph Fiennes has been a man of many hats. The soft broad-brimmed trilbies of the Forties, the bowler, the military cap: these and more have perched at some point atop the aquiline visage, for he has majored in costume roles as epic, romantic, tragic types who call for the gravitas of a crowning accessory. Now, however, Fiennes is wearing a different hat: an executive producer's one.

The occasion is Onegin, based on Alexander Pushkin's verse novel about a world-weary libertine who spurns love when it is offered, then finds love spurning him. Fiennes also plays the title role, brooding and smouldering magnificently, and even carrying off an unflattering stovepipe number. He has a fair bit riding on the film, and has consequently been on the festival trail, taking Onegin to Russia, to North America, and to San Sebastian in Spain, where I met him.

Despite all this, an audience with him is shrouded in a veil of faint anxiety. His publicist sits on the phone to London, conducting brisk damage-limitation on the latest rumour about Fiennes's relationship with the actress Francesca Annis, a constant inspiration for gossip columnists. Meanwhile we have all been quizzed on Onegin (only enthusiasts need apply for an interview), though, since everyone was genuinely impressed, for once this did not require us to compromise our high professional ethics.

"I'm intrigued by a whole mix of things in Russia," says Fiennes, who went there to film parts of Onegin as well as taking the Almeida Theatre production of Chekhov's Ivanov to Moscow two years ago.

"There's an incredible warmth and a sense of celebration, a love of you because you love coming to them, a fascination with the West and a rejection of it. They will talk about big issues very quickly; they don't hang around to have polite, delicate conversations. They will say, 'Oh, Ralph, you understand the Russian soul.' "

Fiennes loves the big issues. Complex, intelligent, serious, secretive, prickly: these are the adjectives that inhabit his cuttings file. But could they be only half the story? "He has this reputation of being very gloomy, but he's not nearly as melancholy as people think," says Jonathan Kent, who directed his Ivanov and his Hamlet and counts him as a personal friend.

In person Fiennes is elegantly formal - a little tense, perhaps - but with a hint of mischievous humour. He speaks thoughtfully and courteously, even when thrown touchy questions like why, despite his affinity for the Russian soul, reports had sped back from the film's premiere in St Petersburg last May that Pushkin scholars were pouring scorn on its deviations from the text.

"In a way our ignorance was bliss. We didn't speak Russian and, although you can read on the page that Onegin is a great Russian classic, you don't fully appreciate that until you encounter a press conference of people who are almost saying, 'Who do you think you are?' I was told no Russian would dare make a film of it - it's so woven into their mentality as only a poem. And I can sort of see that."

Fiennes made Onegin a family affair, bringing in two of his six siblings: his brother, Magnus, to write the score and his sister, Martha, to direct. Since the latter had made many commercials and music videos but had no feature-film experience, she was a provocative choice.

"I'd been developing film projects as well as making chocolate commercials: I don't want people to think I'm obsessed with slick and snazzy looks," points out Martha, whose ad portfolio includes Strepsils and Archers Peach Schnapps. "But I'm completely aware of what a break it was for me. And I remember the producers saying, 'We've got to handle this really carefully - it looks like he's bringing his kid sister in.' "

"Oh yeah, oh yeah, absolutely," says her big brother. "That was an ongoing underground current: could she deliver? It was another reason for my title of executive producer. I was saying, 'Well yes, actually, she can.' I was able to stand by her when things got difficult, which they always do. It wasn't easy to raise the money but I had a sort of profile because of The English Patient."

Fiennes's presence in award-friendly, commercially profitable movies such as The English Patient and Schindler's List has earned him two Oscar nominations and made him moderately bankable.

But there have also been roles - his morally suspect academic in Quiz Show, his seedy hustler in Strange Days, his gangly, carrot-haired gambler in Oscar and Lucinda - which reminded the money men that his name alone can't carry a movie.

And, while each of those three films was an interesting succes d'estime if not a box-office hit, Fiennes was last seen on screen in The Avengers, with which he attracted the worst reviews of his career.

One critic rather rudely said he looked like Stan Laurel. Indeed the bowler was possibly a hat too far. Nobody wears them these days except for nerds like Bristow, the City drone in the Evening Standard cartoon strip, the Spillers flour-graders and the little mustachioed taxman on the Inland Revenue's ad campaign.

Fiennes has the grace not to display a flicker of irritation when the film is mentioned. "I thought it would be wonderful to play someone as confident and as uncomplicated as John Steed," he explains evenly.

"As Jeremiah Chechnik [the director] said, this was my chance to play someone who, when he walks into the room, likes who he is. At the time I was one of a number of people who wanted to replicate the original series, but with the benefit of hindsight our mistake was to be too faithful." The quality of Fiennes's performance in the movie is hard to assess amid the overall chaos, but he's clearly a good deal more comfortable gazing longingly at Mrs Peel than doing the debonair, umbrella-twirling stuff. His forte is tortured souls - men who don't much like who they are.

Asked "Why Onegin?", he answers, "Pushkin says in one of the stanzas, 'Who is he? Is he an angel? Is he a devil? Or is he just a charlatan?' He's almost unknowable. He's someone who's a bit lost and cut off, and he has removed himself from engaging with society and people. There's a line in the film that I really like, when he says, 'I'm not at home anywhere.' "

A deathly calm followed The Avengers (apart from a voiceover for the animated film Prince of Egypt), but Fiennes is about to become ubiquitous. Two more films are imminent: Sunshine, by Istvan Szabo, the director of Mephisto, in which he plays three men from different generations of a Hungarian Jewish family, and Neil Jordan's version of Graham Greene's The End of the Affair, in which Fiennes's novelist has a fling with a married woman during the Blitz.

Next spring he will wear the hollow crown as Richard II at the historic (though soon-to-be redeveloped) Gainsborough film studios in London, a role he takes in repertory with Coriolanus. The two plays are being paired, says Kent, who is directing them, because, albeit written at opposite ends of Shakespeare's life, both are "about men of power who are incapable of exercising those powers properly".

"Coriolanus," he adds, "is a man who has a single-minded sense of duty and responsibility, and finds an almost samurai release in war but finds the small change of peacetime politicking distasteful. It's a good role for Ralph because he has a fastidiousness and fineness of spirit, a very pure sense of what he's about."

Will Fiennes ever make a full-blown comedy? Kent reckons he'd be "wonderful in a David Hare play" (which doesn't wholly answer the question), and cites a fundraiser in New York at which Fiennes read excerpts from P. G. Wodehouse. His silly-ass act apparently slayed the Americans. "The audience had to be helped from the auditorium," recalls Kent.

But he adds that their universal collapse might have been from amazement as much as amusement.

Onegin opens on Friday. The End of the Affair opens next February. Richard II opens next April and Coriolanus next June at Gainsborough Studios, London (booking: 0171 359 4404).