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In The English Patient, he tried in vain to rescue the woman he loved. In Quiz Show and Wuthering Heights, he played men destroyed by their passions. In Strange Days he needed a machine to relive a lost affair and in Schindler's List he was a monster, incapable of love.
Now 1998 dawns, with more emotional vexation for Fiennes. Oscar and Lucinda, opening Jan. 23, he's a minister who dices with both love and life, in the film based on Peter Carey's Booker Prize-winning novel about two compulsive gamblers in Victorian times.
Later in the year there's his film adaptation of Eugene Onegin, Pushkin's classic of unrequited love, which Fiennes will star in and co-produce. Also coming is The Avengers, in which he's Steed, the dapper hero who smolders but never sparks with Mrs. Peel.
"I don't think I've got the girl yet," the 35-year-old English actor says softly, calling from Los Angeles. "Maybe I will soon. I have reflected on this, and I don't think it's deliberate. I suppose I love it that it's hard. People don't always end up with the person that they love. I'm just drawn to where it's not a pat ending."
His characters are as complex as the pronunciation of his name (it's Rafe Fines) and so is his real-life love life -- which he studiously, but politely, avoids talking about.
He divorced Alex Kingston, whom he met while studying at London's Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, shortly after their marriage in 1993, after the pair had been together for 10 years.
He's currently paired with British actress Francesca Annis, who is 17 years his senior. She played Gertrude to his Hamlet in a Broadway production of the Shakespeare classic, which won Fiennes a Tony Award.
There's no shortage of Fiennes fans. His Oscar-nominated role as the tragic lover count Almasy in The English Patient won him numerous job offers, sent handkerchief sales soaring and earned lustful accolades such as this headline from a recent Elle magazine feature: "just where did Ralph Fiennes get his drop-dead good looks and staggering modesty?"
That 'staggering modesty' prevents Fiennes from taking praise too seriously.
"I'm no hunk," he laughs, then sniffs from a lingering cold.
"I'm very un-hunky."
In physical terms, it's true. He stands 5'11" and is so skinny he's often told that he must eat. His character in Oscar and Lucinda, which also stars Australian actress Cate Blanchett and which is directed by Gillian Armstrong (Little Women, My Brillian Career), has unruly red hair and looks as awkward as an ostrich.
Oscar seems slightly mad, too, as he takes on an absurd mission to transport a glass church to a remote Australian village, to prove his love for Lucinda.
Yet Fiennes' screen magnetism, and his gaze that could smoulder through concrete, has made him one of the most popular actors of the 1990s, with a range that can take him from the most vile of villains to near saints.
"I've just been following my hear, and that's the honest answer," he insists.
His portrayal of the vile Nazi commandant Amon Goeth in Schindler's List was so chillingly effective, it could easily have stamped him as the villain for the rest of his acting career. He knows it, too.
"I'll tell you why I was so lucky," he says. "I was offered the Quiz Show part (of social climber Charles Van Doren) before Schindler's List has come out, and I made it before Schindler's List came out.
"You see what I mean? I had Quiz Show to show something else. I think there's probably a danger in being typecast, and I thnk momentarily I got a few parts where I was playing psychopathic guys."
Oscar Hopkins, his gambling minister in Oscar and Lucinda is close to the perfect role for Fiennes. He's a jumble of strengths and weaknesses, as he shows in a scene in which he confronts a sabre-wielding adventruer who has been murdering peaceful Austrlian aboriginal people.
It begins with Oscar saying he can't fight well, because his wrists are too thin. It ends with the adventurer lying dead on the ground, an axe through his skull.
"That's one of my favourite scenes," Fiennes says.
"What I loved about Oscar is that he's so angry, that he does risk a brawl, even though he has a sabre in his face, and he doesn't want to die. At the same time, he's still going to be like the cheeky boy who says, 'Come on, then, come and get me,' and he runs away. I loved the fact that he's so full of fury he's not going to run away completely."
He appreciates complexity in other actors, too, on both screen and stage. He likes the films and plays of the great sirs of Britain, Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud, yet most of his favourite movie stars are American.
"James Stewart was one of the great films stars I've always admired," Fiennes says. "He had his own hallmark, but he often played different kinds of roles. I definitely think that in some actors, whether they choose to or not, there's a sort of consistency in certain qualities and situations in their films."
Does Fiennes incorporate these influences into his own acting?
"I don't know, really," he says. "I'd hate to mimic another actor. But I think that you learn a lot. I also love it when an actor is expressive and expansive and very brave. I love it when they're larger than life. When they're true, when the feelings are true, I think it can be really arresting. I think of Al Pacino in Scarface. That's a blistering performance. The physical energy is fantastic."
Most of Fiennes' roles lately have been in movies adpated from acclaimed works of literature, both contemporary and classic. It's fitting, given that he's the son of a novelist, Jini Fiennes, who wrote under the name of Jennifer Lash (she died of cancer in 1993).
Fiennes is like the male counterpart of Helena Bonham Carter, another actor who seems to gravitate toward period pieces.
It's an impression that will become stronger, follwing the release of Oscar and Lucinda and Eugene Onegin.
The latter movie is his next project, the first one with a production credit for him, as well as the starring role.
His sister Martha Fiennes, one of the six Fiennes siblings, will direct.
"I love the irony of it, the paradox of the story and the wit of it," Fiennes says of Eugene Onegin.
A classic of narrative verse by the Russian poet Pushkin, it's the tale of a bored aristocrat who spurns a country girl who has fallen in love with him, only to realize later -- and too late-- that he really does love her.
"I love the symmetry of it," Fiennes continues. "The tragedy of a man who is not able to know himself well or who has decided to hold himself apart until it's too late."
Not all Fiennes' projects are steeped in the classics, unless you count Prince of Egypt, a big-budget animated movie due this year, in which he is the voice of the Pharaoh Rases.
And then there's classic TV. The move he had the most fun with, and which could introduce him to a different kind of audience, in the Avengers, in which he plays Steed to Uma Thurman's Mrs. Peel.
It's the big-screen version of the cult British TV spy series from the 1960's, and it finished shooting in England just before Christmas.
"I think it's going to be very exciting seeing it on the big screen," Fiennes says. "It looked wild doing it. I thought 'God, this could be really great.' I've seen little clips of it, and it's promising, is all I can say at this stage. Uma looks fantastic."
John Steed is a very droll type of character, even droller than James Bond -- a role that both Fiennes and his adventurer brother Ranulph (sic) were considered for, after Timothy Dalton left the post.
Would Fiennes ever want to do ore action roels? He says he would, "but I'm concerned about the level of violence in some films now.
"I'd be hypocritical if I pretended that Strange Days wasn't violent in many places. I knew it was when I went into it. But I just think of something like Con Air -- it troubled me that this was entertainment. There were so many criminals in it, and somehow you had to make those kinds of crimes entertaining. I just had a problem at some point with it. The world is full of horrendous things, and I think film, like any other art form, must reflect what's out there. But I sometimes feel it's very exploitative. It's such a powerful medium that if people are going to do very violent films that delve into very dark areas of human behaviour, then you've got to know what you're doing."
The lasting impression Fiennes leaves, in both his films and his
conversation, is that he's a man who knows exactly what he's doing.
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© EL STEPHO
Added to the RF Reading Room on January 14, 1998
EL STEPHO