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For male viewers, though, there is only so much pain one can take. At some point, decisive action is required. Fiennes's characters are often so introspective, so conflicted, that the comforting masculine finale of direct action rarely materialises. He endures all the pain of the antihero without the firey rebellion. Even as the serial killer in Red Dragon, he is torn apart in a self-destructive rage of conflicting impulses.
Like most English leading men, Fiennes has yet to find the self-acceptance to play out-and-out winners and trust to his charm. He needs angst. He needs the challenge of three-hour sagas about the Hungarian Experience (Sunshine) or the Russian Experience (Onegin).
During the filming of Wuthering Heights for TV, Fiennes requested a scene be filmed from the book which had Heathcliff banging his head against a tree, pining for Cathy. He did it so sedulously, that he drew blood.
Most stars have one question that interviewers are obliged to tiptoe up to. With Hugh Grant it's the Divine Brown question. With Russell Crowe it’s the Meg Ryan question. With Ralph Fiennes it's the (polite cough) tortured-soul question.
"You have something of a reputation for playing . . .", "Why is that all your characters seem to be . .?", "You do seem to play an awful lot of . . ." The result is much fidgeting (stacking coins, folding paper, shuffling his feet in and out of his clogs). The only time Fiennes writhes in more pain than his characters is when he’s having to play the publicity game. "I hate the fact that I analyse and rationalise when I want to be instinctive and open," he admits.
But of late he has made a concerted effort to lighten his image. He cracked a joke about his unsmiling reputation when he presented an award at last year's Golden Globes. He's been out and about on the chat-show circuit. And he's finally made a comedy, a romantic one, which he recently wrapped alongside Jennifer Lopez (she's the maid, he's the politician's son).
Fiennes first made an effort to broaden his image when he starred in The Avengers in 1998. This was on a par with Sylvester Stallone unveiling his light touch in Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot. But to be fair, everyone was wretched in The Avengers, even Sean Connery. It was the right idea, just the wrong vehicle.
His first attempt at being a Hollywood action hero in Strange Days, three years earlier, saw him reduced to a whining, snivelling loser who repeatedly needed his muscular, black girlfriend to bail him out.
One waits with interest for his next move because Britain produces so few classical leading men with international appeal. Before he drifted into noble, little-seen art-house efforts, Fiennes soared like a rocket in the early Nineties. Like Daniel Day-Lewis before him, his power comes from a reflective, ascetic rigour.
It was the reverse of the leading men of the 1960s - the hell-raisers like O'Toole, Harris, Finney and Burton - who thrived on a kind of poetic self-destruction. But both generations shared intensity and a willingness to play up the unappealing sides of their characters.
With his natural shyness, Fiennes can't help but make for interesting villains. His classical leading man's profile - strong and angular - is softened by a smooth, almost epicene, complexion. The promising villainous green of the eyes is diluted by a girlish red tint in the cheeks.
It always feels as if his softness will win out, which makes the atrocities he commits in Schindler's List all the more senseless. He got the part after Spielberg saw him in A Dangerous Man: Lawrence After Arabia. Spielberg responded to the "sexual evil" Fiennes conveyed, noting a lethal capriciousness that allowed his gaze to settle on a victim for a moment, then dismiss them entirely. Fiennes piled on 25lb (11.5kg) for the role of the concentration camp commandant Amon Goeth (using Guinness and a bloating protein drink) and his bulging gut silhouette, as he trains his rifle on scattering prisoners, remains an enduring image. Fiennes, in his research, had discovered that Goeth got more sadistic the more obese he became.
Fiennes proved his versatility the next year by playing an embodiment of modest New England Waspdom in Quiz Show. He starred as Charles Van Doren, the English professor who cheated on the TV show Twenty One, and actually met Van Doren, who had lived as a recluse since the Fifties, by posing as a lost visitor to his village. "I was very excited to actually have spotted him like that, like I'd spotted a rare bird."
The golden boy with a guilty secret is an archetype Fiennes could return to profitably. But he has found himself most happily miserable as the doomed adulterer. As Count Laszlo de Almásy in The English Patient, he snarls at the thought of tea parties while his chest is wracked with passion for married Kristin Scott Thomas.
In The End of the Affair, he snarls at God for taking away his beloved mistress. "I don't think, Oh, where's the next tortured part," he protests. "It's just that characters are more interesting if they've got opposite qualities inside them."
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© EL STEPHO
Added to the RF Reading Room on October 17, 2002
EL STEPHO