Weekend Australian Magazine Article

January 1998

IN FIENNES DETAIL
The Oscar and Lucinda star's rise is due to outstanding talent, and a way with thinking women.
Story by Mike Safe

Over grilled fish and chardonnay on a sunny Sydney afternoon, Ralph Fiennes' striking blue eyes take on a megawatt glow. Gillian Armstrong, the director of 'Oscar and Lucinda', mentions that her films have always received their toughest reviews here in her homeland. Talk turns to the tall poppy syndrome. Fiennes says that it's not only an antipodean pastime; the English have the same thing. "Once you're up there, they want to pull you down."

He stops almost as soon as he starts. He doesn't seem to want to reveal too much of himself, his spectacular rise to the top and, apparently, its sometimes less-than-glamorous consequences. In our one hour together, it's the only hint this exceptional actor gives of the real-life role in which he has been cast - the thinking woman's sex object. This, of course, has been complicated by his much-publicised leaving of his younger wife, actress Alex Kingston, for an older women, actress Francesca Annis, amid breathless tabloid psycho-babble about mother fixations.

Still, when he, Armstrong and Cate Blanchett, the Australian actress who plays Lucinda to his Oscar and a star-on-the-rise herself, walk through the upmarket habourside restaurant on this fine day you can almost cut the oestrogen with your knife and fork. The bizoid babes and ladies who lunch are not quite ripping off their knickers and throwing them at him, but you get the impression they would if they could.

Fiennes has a way about him. There's a peculiar kind of smile, one side of his mouth slightly upturned; his not-quite-perfect teeth showing; his deepest of eyes looking not at you but into you. Even if this is just another by-the-numbers media inteview to promote a movie, you can't help but like him.

Early on, the four of us are discussing the adaption of cerebral books, such as Peter Carey's 'Oscar and Lucinda', for a visual medium. Both Armstrong, whose breakthrough came with Miles Franklin's 'My Brilliant Career', and Fiennes, who has been nominated for Academy Awards in two adaptions, Thomas Keneally's 'Schindler's Ark', which became Steven Spielberg's 'Schindler's List', and Micheal Ondaatje's 'The English Patient', know something about the subject.

Fiennes lays down his knife and fork and goes into a long and passionate rave. "Micheal Ondaajte said he really came to understand how a whole speech or a big moment that's described at length in a novel can happen in half-a-second on film - the turn of a head, someone's reaction to something and the way it's edited can mean everything. It's full of unknowns. You do your best to get the screenplay that reflects the heart of Peter Carey's book, but you don't know how on the day you'll be affected by conditions, or the mood of the actors, or whatever. A lot of it is in the dark..."

It is, I suggest, a matter of testing how every such moment might stand up on film, a "suck-it-and-see" approach. Fiennes, who has never heard this Aussie expression, all but falls off his chair with laughter.

Armstrong, a down-to-earth type who gives the impression she could talk rain into falling upwards, planned her 'Oscar and Lucinda" for six years. Fiennes was always her choice for the oddball Oscar, the tortured cleric caught between the heaven of a questing spirit and the hell of a repressed past, but then his flourishing career - "brilliant career," quips Blanchett - got in the way.

Because of his growing list of commitments, Fiennes agreed Armstrong should test others for the role, even though he still wanted it. "I saw many wonderful actors and it showed me even more why Ralph was right. We either found people who could be quirky and odd, the nerd and the misfit, or we found people who could be the romantic hero, but to find somebody who could balance both was difficult and, God, Ralph, there aren't many actors who can act like they've got a good heart." Fiennes actually looks shy upon receiving such praise.

Meanwhile, Blanchett had tested for Lucinda. Armstrong remembers her turning up with "no eyebrows, white hair and a cold" and still being exceptional. Once Fiennes was finally able to commit, Armstrong could cast her as Lucinda. "I always felt they had to be cast as a pair. That's when I asked Cate to come back to test again as she'd always been a favourite." Armstrong had heard good reports of her stage work and had seen her in an earlier episode of the TV soapy, 'GP'. "Oh, God," proclaims Blanchett. "And you still cast me?"

The movie absorbed their lives - Armstrong describes making a film as "like taking a lover" - but now it's beyond their control and it's up to audiences to do what they will with it. "You hope people find it and that they like it," she says. "Sure, in the end you hope some critics will tell people to go and see it, but it's out there on its own now."

"You don't make it for critics," says Fiennes. "It's strange," adds Blanchett, "good reviews don't mean people go to see it."

Still, they probably will. Fiennes puts all those pretty boy American actors in the shade and Blanchett's star is in the ascendancy. Then there's the oestrogen factor. If a Sydney restaurant is any guide, never underestimate knicker power.