US Magazine Article
December 1996

"Unravelling Ralph Fiennes"

by Chris Heath

For Liam Neeson, Ralph Fiennes' Schindler's List co-star and now a good friend, it started with a hug. "I remember the meeting with Ralph so well. I was kind of like a raw nerve because I'd just finished a play on Broadway and I flew into Poland. Wejust gave each other a hug. It sounds so hippie-ish. Certain actors you have to do a little song and dance and tread a kind of path to get to know, but Ralph was as raw and as open and as vulnerable as I was."

There will be no hugs today. Ralph Fiennes and I are to spend the morning in a suite at London's Dorchester Hotel. He is a man who says he rarely reads what is written about him but who seems to have a strangely keen (and invariably unhappy) memory of those things he has read. When I mention a disparaging quote from a previous interviewer ("Would a little bit of charisma be too much to ask"), he leaps in to correct me (it was "charm" not "charisma"). We have not been talking for long when he confesses, with painful politeness, "I came into the hotel today feeling, okay, this is fine, I'll just talk, but I'm finding myself feeling as I talk that I don't want to be here. And I feel this more and more in other interviews. I just feel really put on the spot in some way." Which, of course, he is. And he's gracious enough to remain there.

Fiennes is 34, the eldest of seven children. You pronounce his first name to rhyme with safe, which is apparently the Old English pronunciation, and the second to rhyme with vines. When Fiennes was growing up, his family moved around a lot in the south of England and in Ireland. His father, Mark, worked as a tenant farmer before becoming a landscape photographer; Fiennes' mother, Jini, was a novelist (under the name Jennifer Lash). She died of breast cancer in 1993,just after she'd seen her son in Schindler's List. Fiennes belatedly decided to become an actor midway through art college. He rose through the British theatre ranks but his major break was his role as Amon Goeth, the vile, casually homicidal Nazi in Schindler's List. Not only did he receive an Oscar nomination, but his performance gave film-goers their first glimpse of his on-screen power. His beguiling forte - dark characters who are wounded - would surface again, in different roles, in Quiz Show and Strange Days. Although both were box-office failures, they did little to dispel Fiennes' growing reputation as one of the finest performers of his generation.

Says Australian Gillian Armstrong, director of the recently filmed Oscar and Lucinda (out at the end of the year): "Fiennes was the only person I ever wanted for Oscar." Fiennes' role as the tragic young nineteenth-century priest, in the movie based on Peter Carey's Booker Prize-winning novel about loss of innocence, was seemingly made for him. Armstrong met Fiennes just after he'd completed Schindler's List, and the first thing he ever said to her was: "I am Oscar". According to Armstrong, his ability of combining vulnerability and charm convinced her to offer him the role.

"He is blessed by looks and brains and talent, which is a very unusual cocktail of skills," notes Anthony Minghella, director of Fiennes' latest vehicle, The English Patient. ''You're lucky to have those three things in your suitcase." In the film based on the award-winning book by Michael Ondaatje, Fiennes plays a badly burnt man found lying in an abandoned Italian monastery toward the end of World War II. For half the film, Fiennes is on his back, burnt and disfigured, as he recounts his life; for the rest of the film, he appears in flashback, handsome and tormented, before his injuries.

Here, at last, was what half of Hollywood seemed to want but was unable to find or believe in anymore: An actor who could deal with the messy, contradictory depths of real characters but who also possessed the charm ofan old-fashioned leading man. Not to mention the mystery and intrigue. During our interview, Fiennes thinks hard about every question. Perhaps it's partly self-protection, but it's also because he is the kind of person who refuses to fill up the silence until he has something he thinks is worth saying. There is plenty he won't talk about (for example, the split from his wife, actor Alex Kingston, and romance with Francesca Annis, the 52-year-old actor who played his mother in their acclaimed theatre production of Hamlet), yet you get the feeling that this isn't a stance he has adopted specifically for interviews. Rather, that he barely talks about these things to anybody. Fiennes is, one imagines, the kind of person who lives his life on a strictly need-to-know basis. Kingston said after their split:"You can be in the same house as someone but feel they are on the other side of the world. That's something Ralph is extremely good at." And so the interview begins, in a quest to uncover the real Fiennes.

Q: Which things that you have read about yourself have made you feel most uncomfortable?
A: Oh, things like [reciting from memory]: "He gazes for ages at his ankles. There's a long pause; he looks up." That kind of thing.

Q: You were, of course, staring at the carpet as you said that.
A: [Laughs half-heartedly] I suppose all the things that I do, they suddenly become pinpointed. Seeing how someone else can see you ... You do a piece ofwork - a performance in a film or in a play - and I think that's where I'm open to being written about or talked about or criticised. I don't want to be scrutinised just as myself, particularly.

Q: Your mother once said that you didn't join in at parties, and you'd rather sit on your own in the corner doing a jigsaw.
A: Yes, already being a little self-sufficient in that way - quite happy not joining in but not feeling left out. I think early on I wasn't particularly impressed by festivities.

Q: Are you still the kind of person who doesn't join in at parties?
A: I think probably a bit. More so in the past two years.

Q: Because you feel more exposed now that you're famous?
A: [Quietly] Yeah, I think that has made a difference. It has. From the two years - '93, '94 - doing Schindler's List, Quiz Show and Strange Days, I felt the whole machinery of the American-based film industry, and especially the whole media machinery behind it. I felt exposed to and, in some ways, exposed by them. I just felt, and still feel, a very strong need to pull away. There's an insistence on [knowing about] your private life. What the publicity machinery is keen to exploit is: You desire this person. You, Joe Bloggs in the street, desire so-and-so up on the screen, so wouldn't you like to read an article that makes you think you know a bit more about his sexuality or who he's with or who he's left, blah blah blah? And I find it invasive because I do find that I want to close the door on my private life.

Q: So people know that you were married and now you're not. Is there anything about that situation that you think the world should know?
A: No.

Q: You were in the newspaper recently. Shall I read it to you?
A: [Nods, reaching for the coffee pot, something he tends to do when the conversation is at its stickiest] I've never had so much coffee in my life!

Q: "The Schindler's List star was seen enjoying a spot of tonsil-tickling with a mystery lady at a recent premiere." Is that mortifying?
A: No. I had a sense of oncoming panic as you were about to read it, and when you finished it, I thought, that's okay, I can deal with that one. I'm happy that on the whole I choose to be ignorant. Ignorance is bliss.

Q: Do you care about being liked?
A: I feel upset if I feel I've done someone an injustice. I care about that. But no, I don't really care. I do care as an actor if the work is liked. If you feel you put everything into it and people say, "Well, it wasn't that great", it's a rejection. That's crippling. I think critics can use words that make you feel as if you have no business being up there.

Q: Of your childhood, the usual impression given is that it was some kind of wonderful, bohemian gypsy life. Is that fair?
A: No, because it gives it a slightly rosy tint. It was always a struggle - we had no money. I remember lots of times when my mother was distressed and my father burdened by anxieties about work. There was a lot of moving around for survival reasons.

Q: Was all that moving around good preparation for the emotional promiscuity of being an actor?
A: I think it has been quite a good preparation, although now I feel [pause], I've had one attempt at that sort of settled home life as an adult which has ended in upheaval, so I feel a very strong sense ofwanting to have a home base. I had thought maybe I wanted to live in America, but at the moment I think I very much want to be in London.

Q: Do you like being considered a hot actor?
A: Yes, sometimes. No, when I suddenly started to see that people want you only because you're hot. Suddenly, scripts are sent to me for a part and sent to another actor who's completely different who's also hot. And you think, what is this about?

Q: ... Do you believe in God?
A: I certainly believe in a harmonising energy, which I think collectively at some level we all have the potential to recognise.

Q: I've read accounts of your mother's funeral - about how your family prepared the coffin and the body. You combed her hair, which made It sound incredibly unusual and rather beautiful. Why did you do it that way?
A: The idea of giving her a conventional funeralwith the black hearse and pallbearers was just out of the window immediately. My father, I think, was a prime mover in saying, "We will do it ourselves," which reflected very much their life together.

Q: So you physically buried you mother yourself?
A: We ordered a coffin ourselves. We painted it a strong peacock-blue. She wrote a children's book, not published, where blue was the colour of spiritual strength and peace. Some friends gave us their Volkswagen bus to carry the coffin. So, having put her in the coffin, it was taken to the chapel in this Volkswage bus. We didn't bury her ourselves because the digging of a grave is a highly specialised thing, and how you lower someone in. You have to understand the physics of it.

Q: You later tried to contact her?
A: Um, well, there is a spiritualist centre and we went there to one meeting - my two sisters and my father, the four of us. It wasn't done with the sense of "we're all so distressed." There was a sense of natural curiosity about it, and whether or not it was my mother coming through this medium, I don't know. But I sort of believe it was. She appeared to come through and, in away, that made us feel that wherever she was, she was very happy. I sort of believe that there is a spiritual world. It doesn't just finish. I know that in moments when I've been anxious, I feel that somehow there's a presence or an awareness of her or of what she would have been saying, which has helped me.

Q: Let's talk about Schindler's List. Were you scared to play someone so evil?
A: No, I wasn't. I was really excited to be someone that evil. I got disturbed reading up about it. At the same time, the actor's sensibility was raring to go. Fucked-up people, people with very strong ambivalences, with very strong dichotomies, are really interesting to play. People say, "Didn't you find it disturbing?" Looking back on it, I think, God, that *was* disturbing, how did I do that?

Q: I would worry it would slightly damage me.
A: Well, I don't know if I've been damaged. I think what frightened me most was how easy it was. To just key into the part of one who could want to be so destructive to other people - I don't think those doors in your head are far away. When I read about a horrendous murder or rape case, my initial instinct about anyone who perpetrates that is to put them up against a wall and blast their brains out. Just get rid of them. Fuck off. And that's the door opening. You only have to take it a step further to say, what if a whole regime builds itself on focusing that feeling on a group of people? It's not very far away.

Q: Spielberg once referred to your "sexual evil". What did he mean?
A: I don't know. I think you should ring him up and ask him.

Q: It's a rather scary compliment, don't you think?
A: It is a bit. It makes me really ....I mean, I know it's a compliment, but I feel very... [Trails offl He's looking at me for a particular part; the danger is it gets bandied about and then suddenly that becomes attached to you. People will think that's a quality you have, per se.

Q: Have you ever had any recurring nightmares?
A: I haven't had repetitive dreams for ages, but there's one I get where it's as if this real malevolent presence, something suffocating, is coming into the room and bearing down on me. And the worst thing is, I know I'm asleep and I'm in the room and I can't get up. It's not a person, it's just something really scary. It's like a sense of being pressed by something. Oppressed. I think it's all one's fears. The darkness that everyone must be afraid of at some point.

Q: How vain are you?
A: I'm sure I have my moments of inane vanity. I've gone through phases of "I don't give a shit how I look" and then being photographed and seeing the photograph and suddenly hating it and wishing I'd been more vain.

Q: Which song do you find always makes you happy?
A: Ella Fitzgerald, Nat King Cole, Billie Holiday, songs of the Thirties and Forties. I had to listen to quite a lot of it for The English Patient, and now I find Ella Fitzgerald extraordinary. I listen to her all day. A mixture of humour and emotion, so that makes me sad and happy.

Q: You once said, "There is so much black in me, I feel like a lot of the time I'm pretending to be nice."
A: Ohhh.

Q: Is that a groan of recognition?
A: Not recognition. I hate when people bring up quotes. You say things in one interview at one stage of your life and then they come back at you years later.

Q: Do you remember what you were talking about?
A: Yes, I do, and I don't know that I feel the same way at all now.

Q: So now you're happy?
A: Now I'm happy. I am happy.

Q: Which is a rare thing for many people to be able to say with a straight face.
A: I wouldn't have said it unless you had put the question to me. I wouldn't have volunteered it. [Usually] the announcing of your own happiness is something I'd be quite circumspect about. But, since you asked....