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Now you know how Ralph Fiennes has been keeping himself occupied lately.
Since coming to the attention of American movie audiences with Oscar-nominated performances in Schindler's List and The English Patient, the 37-year-old English actor has handily juggled his film projects with work for London's acclaimed Almeida Theatre, including a star turn as Shakespeare's Hamlet -- a role that brought him a 1994 Tony Award.
But Fiennes' current stage and screen efforts seem a particularly daunting pair. At the Almeida, he is tackling not one but two of the Bard's trickiest tragic heroes, Richard II and Coriolanus, in a double bill that will come to New York's Brooklyn Academy of Music in September.
If that's not enough to give a thespian a case of multiple-personality disorder, consider Fiennes' film, Sunshine, a three-hour epic from Mephisto director Istvan Szabo that opened in select cities Friday to impressive box office -- $92,583 on seven screens, for a $13,000 screen average.
In the movie, which expands to more cities June 23, the actor plays men representing three generations of a Jewish family in Hungary: Ignatz Sonnenschein, an ambitious judge during the Austro-Hungarian Empire; his son Adam, a champion fencer who confronts the horrors of the Holocaust; and Adam's son Ivan, who joins Hungary's Communist Party after World War II to avenge his family's oppressors.
''The script blew me away,'' says Fiennes, calling from London, where Coriolanus opens this week.
Fiennes strives for purity in his stage acting, though he acknowledges that ''the physical and vocal commitment is so different if you're telling a story for 750 people, as I'm doing now. That black hole of the camera is a smaller, more concentrated area. In theater, you have to, crudely speaking, be a bit bigger without losing the truth of it.''
The famously private Fiennes is still more comfortable dissecting his characters than he is discussing his personal life.
Asked about his relationship with 56-year-old actress Francesca Annis, to whom he has been linked in recent years, Fiennes responds with charming evasiveness.
''We've been photographed together in public, and I think most of the world believes that we are what they call an item,'' he says. ''I'm not going to say anything more about it, I'm afraid.
''I get cautious about what I want to see in print,'' Fiennes adds,
politely, before heading back onstage to brush up his Shakespeare.
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© EL STEPHO
Added to the RF Reading Room on June 15, 2000
EL STEPHO