Vogue Magazine Article

September 1996

By Rhoda Koenig

The view from the movie set is a watercolorist's paradise - a horizon of taupe, then blue, then violet, peach, and blue again on the beach where Dirk Bogarde expired of romantic longing and cholera. The set itself is the monumental Hotel des Bains, on the Lido, where Death in Venice was written by Thomas Mann and filmed by Luchino visconti, and where today a group of puzzled residents are staring at a technician on a high ladder arranging the gold letters H-E-A-R-D. For a scene in Cairo just before World War II, the hotel is standing in for Shepheard's (now moved and "improved") in the film version of The English Patient.

Workers arrange yards of hedge and clusters of palms to hide the Italian pines; one man touches up a decorative sphinx, and another dirties and ages the Thomas Cook advertisement for Nile cruises he has just painted on a wall. Then the filmmakers arrive. The director and screenwriter, Anthony Minghella, who made Truly, Madly, Deeply, checks in, as does Kristin Scott Thomas. (The film's other leading actress, Juliette Binoche, does not appear in this sequence.) But the main focus of interest, certainly for the Venetian ladies, is the male cast, headed by Ralph Fiennes. "I cast Ralph," says Minghella, "because character he plays is so austere, so tough, and Ralph has, as so many others have said, a hinge between so much obvious, manifest sensibility and dark, dangerous savagery. The poet and the beast seem to live hand in hand in his spirit." Gosh, they don't talk like that about Tom Cruise.

After overpowering filmgoers with his portrayal of a tormented Nazi in Schindler's List, and then playing a dishonest weakling in Quiz Show and a stringy-haired cyberpunk in the flop Strange Days, Fiennes needs a mainstream romantic role to exploit his looks as well as his talent. The English Patient, adapted from Michael Ondaatje's 1992 Booker Prize-winning novel, is not a simple love story. Set at the beginning and end of World war II, it is also concerned with spying and exploration and the traumas of war. But at its core is a love affair between Thomas, playing wife of an explorer (Colin Firth), and Fiennes, as the Hungarian Count Almasy. Moviegoers, however, won't hear Fiennes speaking in a middle-European accent - in the part, he is about as noticeably Hungarian as Leslie Howard.

So far, Fiennes has been able to keep his real persona under wraps, but now he gets to show his audience the side of himself theatergoers saw when he acted with the Royal Shakespeare Company - the thoughtful, reserved English gentleman - as well as his classic bronzed-blond-god looks. We will also see the result of a few creative additions to the action of the novel. Asked whether there are any hot love scenes in this film, Fiennes answers, "I believe there are one or two scenes where I'll be required to - yes, I think so." There are three actually - in bed, bath, and broom closet.

Fiennes is even edgier than usual at the moment, for the filming is taking place at the same time as the disintegration of his brief marriage to actress Alex Kingston. The third party responsible - and with whom he is still involved - is the beautiful Francesca Annis, 51, who played his mother in Hamlet on Broadway. (Critics had, unwittingly, commented on the "unusual" warmth of their bedroom scene.) But then Fiennes has never fallen in with the American convention that actors must not only publicize their films but undergo amateur psychoanalysis in public. He has become openly exasperated with interviewers who talk through their toes, and one can see why: Reporters have called him "the improbable hunk," demanded that he "say something in American," concluded that he "isn't your normal Hollywood guy," and stared at him, "wanting to know the truth," and found him "refined, praxitelean; but he remains an enigma...a flame-eyed, humiliated saint, whom every spectator must forgive." As I approach, the film's press agent sidles up to me and whispers, "No questions about his private life, OK?," but I wouldn't dare. And if I would, I'd forget about it after suggesting a word when he gropes for an answer to one question, only to have him say coldly, "Please don't put words in my mouth."

Fiennes has more than accent and profile to connect him to the English upper class. He is the third cousin once removed of the twenty-first Baron of Saye and Sele, as well as the second cousin of Ranulph Fiennes, the explorer who set out a few years ago to cross Antarctica on foot (he needed a bit of help getting back). The entire family name is really Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes, the same as a character in P.G. Wodehouse. Does Fiennes think it funny to have the name of a comic character famous for being dim? "No." Well, at least we got the annoying question out of the way first.

Ralph is the eldest of six children. His mom was a novelist and painter, his dad a farmer who became a photographer. But the family's life, while Fiennes was growing up, was more like that of Gypsies: They moved more than a dozen times, because his father, upper class in name only, would renovate houses in exchange for rent, then move on. Fiennes's favorite home was in Ireland. "In 1973," he says, "we lived in a chalet in West Cork, on a bay, adjacent to a shingle strand that separated the sea from a freshwater lake. Swans lived on that lake and in the evening would come flying in. That's what I remember - the sea and the sky and the wind and the swans."

Though the Fiennes children often lived in remote places, they were given a strong dose of culture from an early age. Fiennes's mother, who died three years ago, was the greatest influence on his life- "more a friend than a mother," he has called her, and he kept her photograph in his dressing room when he played Hamlet. When Ralph was eight, she had given him a recording of Laurence Olivier performing the role. "My father read Kipling to us, he read Treasure Island, and his own enthusiasm and love of books came through as he read them."

The Fiennes family was often called bohemian, "but lots about them was very conventional," their son says. "We were all brought up Catholic, baptized, and went to Mass when we were living in Ireland. My mother showed very palpable distress if we didn't." But Fiennes was not drawn to the faith or its expression. "It might have been the fault of the teaching, but the love and spirituality of the Church were never communicated to me. I'm not comfortable with the idea of Catholicism at all. I think one of the best things England ever did was to cast off the Church. But it's true you can never cast off the shadow." Fiennes would go to church "to watch other people," he says, a practice that may have been helpful not only to him as an actor but to his brother Joseph, who, at the time we spoke, was portraying Jesus on the London stage in Dennis Potter's The Son of Man. "I can connect better with that than I could with a lot of church services," says Fiennes.

Growing up in a rich and varied artistic household, Fiennes did not know which art would be his calling. He enrolled in art school, which, he says, enabled him to see more deeply within himself. "There was a strong encouragement to let things happen to you," he says. "I had the courage to recognize that I had a very strong impulse toward being an actor, toward the use of language to stimulate, reveal, and entertain." He transferred to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, where he met his wife, and, not long after graduation, joined the R.S.C. Classic roles were succeeded by playing T.E. Lawrence and Heathcliff in British TV movies, and then Fiennes was chosen by Steven Spielberg to play a concentration-camp commandant in Schindler's List. Though a great moan goes up every time a British classical actor decamps for Hollywood, Fiennes has probably made the right move for artistic as well as commercial success. The Hamlet in which he starred in London and New York may have left Demi Moore and those who had never seen a Shakespeare play before enraptured, but more experienced critics found his interpretation superficial. My own response to his stage acting has been favorable but not terribly excited; yet, when I saw him in the audition scene in Quiz Show, wordlessly expressing concentration, doubt, worry, and relief in a flicker, naturally yet unmistakably, I appreciated how the camera could open up and heighten the effects of an actor who works best on a small scale.

But Fiennes remains committed to the theater. The performances that have impressed him most have all been onstage - Vanessa Redgrave in Ghosts, Paul Scofield in Amadeus, Judi Dench in Anthony and Cleopatra." I retain a stronger impression of an evening in the theater," he says. "The cinema doesn't last. The work in theater is one of collaboration. People talk about what goes on as an act of seduction, but it's a mutual one. All the forces of the collective imaginative spirit are harnessed and taken on a journey."

What Fiennes likes about a character is a chance to bring more to a part than the action of a moment to show "the inner condition of the man, how that has changed. What is his inner landscape like? It's a thrill to be able to play a character through a great time span. It was wonderful to play Heathcliff after Cathy has died, when his pain has hardened into almost a kind of sadism. He's a terribly tragic figure. For an actor to have that sense of history is wonderful." That ability to stay with the character through time attracted him to The English Patient, "a very passionate story of people scarred by war."

Fiennes's thoughts, however, are still with Hamlet, which, he says, was "such a strong experience that in a way, I haven't finished it." The New York run was his first visit to the city - as he says that, his dark-blue eyes open wide and his brows lift to mime astonishment. "There is a momentum in New York - it's as if the buildings are growing every minute. There's an incredible sense of human endeavor made concrete - literally. It's as if it's always growing. In European cities there's a settled quality."

The desert scenes of The English Patient are yet to be filmed, in Tunisia, but Fiennes and Julian Wadham, who plays his best friend, have already become acclimated to the locale and each other. "We went into the Sahara, three or four hours south of Tozeur, on camels." Fiennes smiles, toying with the malachite-colored tassel on the key to room 216. "Camels can be very moody."

Wadham, a chattier type, is more forthcoming about this little get-acquainted safari. "Oh, yes, we went bonding. Now, I spend most of my life completely shattered. I got to this hotel looking forward to a rest, and Ralph said, 'I hope you don't mind. I've canceled the luxury hotel and added two nights to the time we spend in the desert.' So we drove six hours out into the desert and got on these camels, and my camel kept licking Ralph's camel's arse, and someone said, 'I hope this isn't a metaphor for your relationship.'"

Eight o'clock in the morning is a little early for evening dress, but not if you're filming a complicated ballroom scene. Italian men in wing collars and black tie practice waltzing with each other to a recording of Rodgers and Hart while I resist the impulse to ask, "Come here often?" Then their real partners whose costumes take a bit more time, make their way onto the floor. Nearly all are stunning black-haired women in frocks the color of petits fours - peach lace, coffee chiffon - with some plump and elderly dancers mixed in for verisimilitude. A nice looking middle-aged woman who had come to Venice to visit her daughter passes me, unrecognizable in rolled hair and full evening rig: "I told them I could fox-trot, so they said I could be in the movie!" The costume designer isn't so enthusiastic. "I don't believe it," she says, starring into a large box of white-orchid corsages. "They sent all those without pins!" she cries.

As a soignée marcel-waved extra in gunmetal satin takes a long drag from her cigarette holder and a crew member manipulates a Maxismoke Turbo to create even more of a prewar atmosphere, Colin Firth strolls onto the set. He has spent the previous evening sitting in a car outside the hotel and swigging champagne moodily from the bottle to convey his distress on discovering his wife's adultery ("OK," the director instructs him through the window, "so his world is gone now, he's shattered. His life is over") and relishes a day of watching the other actors work. "So exhausting," he says with a stretch and a grin, "to stand around doing nothing all day." We repair to the bar to have coffee and talk about "this thing we call sex," with which Firth has become very much identified since the BBC broadcast Pride and Prejudice, in which he played Mr. Darcy. Since he was away making another film while the miniseries was shown in England, he wasn't able to fully register the extent of the hysteria. Women have been naming their babies Darcy, buying Mr. Darcy-ish garments for their boyfriends. The BBC itself auctioned one of the film's famous frilly shirts for charity, inviting women to take "a last look at the shirt they longed to undo."

"I can't understand it," says Firth. "I've never tried harder not to be sexy in my life."

Julian Wadham arrives, wearing his best bib and tucker, and is watching the extras, now joined by Kristin Scott Thomas, rehearsing a few steps with one of the Italians. "Isn't that lovely?" Wadham says. "They gave us fox-trot lessons for this. Of course I've been to lots of dances in England, but not proper dancing. At Pony club dances in Hertfordshire, you asked a girl to dance, and she knew that that meant you'd find a quiet corner as soon as you could, and remain there with your tongue down her throat till your parents pried you apart, three hours later."

Now the set and the actors are ready. The corsages have been fixed; the tables are dressed with melon-colored roses and artfully arranged ashtrays and crumpled napkins. Thomas reappears in a dress of floating white chiffon with sequined straps, her blonde wave held off her face by a white ribbon.

The scene calls for Thomas to finish a dance and start walking back to her table, when Fiennes, looking gorgeous and sexy in a million-dollar tuxedo, enters and chooses her for the next dance, during which they have a few exchanges. It sounds simple, but the intricate movements and the crowded floor make the scene tricky. A man with a very loud voice booms, "Silence! Rehearsal! OK, enjoy yourself!" and they go through the sequence several times. Now it's time for the real thing.

"Action!" The band strikes up "Twelfth Street Rag," Thomas and her partner twirl gaily, the music stops. Fiennes laughs, and kisses her hand. Then, his blond head easily making him stand out amid the dark-suited men, Fiennes moves toward her, asks her to dance, and they start waltzing to "Where or When" while a cameraman hovers behind their shoulders and another man, next to him, crouches and gently guides other dancers out of the way. As is the way of moviemaking, this scene is repeated. And repeated again. But Fiennes isn't satisfied. "I'm feeling very uncomfortable," he tells the director. "I'm losing my center."

A few takes later, Fiennes explains, "I want to let the dance do what it does. I want to be relaxed enough to divert the dance, and I think that can only come with repetition." And so they repeat on into the afternoon and then into the night. Perfection achieved, everyone can now leave behind their gilded chairs, the ranks of champagne bottles, the pyramids of fruit, and collapse into bed.

A few months later, Fiennes is still worrying that the result isn't totally perfect, that it still needs work. "I'm not sure," he says, "that I'm looking forward to seeing this."

He needn't worry. The word, according to those who have seen the rough cut, is that The English Patient has a very good prognosis indeed.