RALPH Fiennes is enjoying some of the finest critical notices of his illustrious career these days, starring in the Brian Friel play, Faith Healer, at the Gate Theatre in Dublin.
The show, which will arrive on Broadway in April, set a record at the illustrious Gate before the curtain rose - every performance was sold out before the opening night on Tuesday, February 7, when the critics could then have their say.
Those who bought tickets well in advance are lucky. Fiennes "gives us a precise and beautifully judged portrait...(he) is utterly mesmerizing, as only a true faith healer can be," gushed the scribe from the London Independent.
The Irish Independent was equally effusive, saying that Fiennes' portrayal of the title character "is potent, subtle, elusive." Fintan O'Toole at the Irish Times wrote that Fiennes "brings elegance and intelligence" to the part.
It hasn't been an easy couple of weeks for Fiennes, as readers of the tabloid press undoubtedly know. The weekend before the show's opening a British rag broke the news that Fiennes, 43, had been cheating on his long-term and significantly older partner, Francesca Annis, 61, with a Romanian singer who's only 31.
The juicy gossip had reporters and photogs hunting Fiennes down in Dublin, but the actor took it all in his stride. He declined to comment on the matter in an interview with the Irish Times, but was happy to talk about anything else, particularly the time he spent in Ireland during his youth.
Fiennes' late mother Jennifer Lash was extremely fond of Ireland, and she moved her young family to Cork in 1973.
"We lived in west Cork for about a year and a half," Fiennes told the Times. "My father had been practicing as a photographer and I think he found it hard to make a living there. He had bought some plots of land and was planning to develop them, but it didn't really work.
"They had this idealistic plan of bringing the six of us up in this environment they loved and which was very different to England, but it didn't work out financially, so we moved to Kilkenny. I was 13 at the time.
"We rented a house while my father did up a town-house in the center of Kilkenny. I went to school at St. Kieran's College. I had been a boarder for a couple of terms at Newtown School in Waterford, and then a day pupil at St Kieran's, bicycling into school every day."
Returning to England wasn't the easiest thing to do, he recalls, thanks to the cruelty of his peers.
"When I came back to England after three years of childhood (in Ireland), I would be on the train going to school and there were boys who had been at primary school with me and they teased me mercilessly," he recalled.
"They took against me for no reason. I had a slight Irish accent, but because I had been away, I had a kind of blithe confidence because I had been to different Irish schools and moved to umpteen different houses. It was a quite eccentric, unsettled lifestyle, but happy. I remember being very happy."
Fiennes could be even happier after Faith Healer arrives at its home on Broadway, the Booth Theatre, for previews on April 18. Judging from the ecstatic reaction in Ireland, the show seems destined for a date with the Tony Awards.