By Jessica Berens
March 1995
South Ken to Waterloo, Waterloo to Elephant and Castle. Rodney Place, Balfour Street, subway, causeway, flyover. A number 63 bus full of brown school uniforms, then the land of Southwark council: New Cross, Tesco, Peckham Hill, Eel Pie House, the Greyhound Pub. Mrs. Brady-old-ladies in council brick with balconies; low rent, noisy neighbours, minimart and Big Girl Leisurewear. London SE22.
East Dulwich is a long way from Hollywood.
Ralph Fiennes lives here. So does his father Mark, nearby, in a house that he renovated himself, as he has always rebuilt and renovated his houses. On Mark's kitchen wall are black-and-white photographs of Ralph as Heathcliff in "Wuthering Heights," Ralph as Amon Goeth in "Schindler's List," and his younger brother Joseph as "Jude the Obscure." Will it be difficult for Joseph, also in the theatre, always "Ralph's brother"? Not necessarily, says Mark, for there may come a time when Ralph will be "Joseph's brother." "Ralph has hit the high spots and been to Hollywood and had good notices, but Joe is still only eighteen months out of drama school."
Mark Fiennes is a wise man who attributes much of his eldest son's success to professionalism and luck. "So much in life is being in the right place at the right time. It just happened that Ralph was seen in "Wuthering Heights" by Steven Spielberg who was casting a movie of immense importance. There are lots and lots of talented actors out there who did not have that incredible break. It's like winning on the horses."
It is here, in the father, that one can recognise Ralph's eyes, those impenetrable eyes behind which anything could be happening; and, in some lights, here too is his mouth. Bill Homewood, who taught Ralph at RADA, speaks of his humility, and, strange though it sounds, this quality can be found in the mouth of both father and son. S, too, can sex and fallibility. The eyes cannot read so the mouth must speak for the man.
Mark Fiennes has six children. That is a lot of school plays, a lot of kids in choruses and nativity scenes with little angels and little Joseph's and little Mary's. Mark is not surprised that two of his sons became actors. His late wife Jini, a novelist and painter, revered the arts and imbued her children with a deep sense of their importance. Indeed, in one book she wrote that: "Artists, like the saints, know why they are receivers, their job is to summon every skill, every kind of attention and remain skinlessly alert in order, as Picasso said, 'to find.'" Art was all in the Fiennes family and only the youngest, Jacob, has rebelled, removing himself to Wales to work as a gamekeeper. Martha is a director, Sophie a producer, Magnus a musician. "They have, says Mark (who is a photographer), inherited their mother's ability to see beyond. Sixth sense if your like."
Ralph, Martha, Magnus and Sophie were born on a farm in Suffolk from where, after nine years, they moved to a house in Dorset and then to Ireland, where Mark built two houses. Ralph attended a Quaker school and, when there was no money for the fees, a catholic college in Kilkenny. Then to Wiltshire, where the girls went to convents and Ralph to Bishop Wordsworth, a grammar school in Salisbury.
The house was nomadic and crowded, "like a mini-commune," says one friend. Jini, at the head, laughing and weeping with equal Celtic ease, occasionally terrified by the poverty, sometimes disappearing to write a novel. There would be visits from a disparate range of relatives - a communist aunt, an uncle who was a monk, and another who had become an archimandrite in the Greek Orthodox Church.
As a child Ralph has said he remembers doing everything "en masse." Later, as a teenager, privacy was a luxury. He shared a room with Magnus. They listened to 'Transformer.' Martha Fiennes sometimes jokes that she went to fourteen schools. "That is an appalling exaggeration," says her father. "No one went to fourteen schools. We did move a lot. I could not feed, clothe, and educate six children by photography. I did up houses and when they were finished we had to move so that we could sell them for a profit. I don't think the children suffered. Variety is the spice of life."
No one minded too much about exams. Jini, who could not spell, thought qualifications meant little and had none herself; Mark, ever independent of thought, refused to bite into a convention that called all to college. He thought university should be attended by those who were interested in a subject, not just for the sake of it.
So what, then, did he want for his family? "We always thought that fulfillment was important. It didn't matter if they were sweeping the road as long as they had a sense of purpose, that their heart and soul was in it."
In 1986, when Ralph was 24, his mother discovered that she had breast cancer. The disease brought questions and a quest. "Cancer," she wrote, "is a constellation, you become simply one of the thousands and thousands of stars within it. It is a common everyday disease."
In 1990 she bought a money belt and a rucksack and set off on a pilgrimage. The journey, which took her from Alencon in France, the birthplace of Ste. Therese, to Santiago de Compostela in Spain, is described in her last book, 'On Pilgrimage - A Time to Seek,' in which philosophical questions are faced and personal conclusions offered. "Perhaps," she wrote, "the interior way is the one that counts in the end. No journey can be more dark and difficult, unexpected and hazardous than that. There is always somewhere this deep, searching sense, that you are, in some respects, unlike anyone else, and, in this, there is a very particular purpose."
Ralph took this book with him when he went to Hollywood.
In 1993, three months after Ralph's marriage to Alex Kingston, the ravishing actress with whom he had been involved for ten years, Jini Fiennes died in a hospice outside Salisbury. Her husband, who hates hierarchy and distrusts convention, brought those values to his wife's death. The children buried their mother themselves. "I did not want black suits and black cars and funeral directors with professional piety," says Mark.
The coffin was painted electric blue after Silencia, the blue-coloured symbol of strength in 'Tristram and the Power of Lights', a children's book Jini had once written. The body was allowed to rest on its bed because, having studied Buddhism, Jini believed that the spirit must have grace to depart in peace. "She looked wonderful," says Mark. "She had a Victorian nightdress on and all her lines had disappeared -- something to do with the subcutaneous moisture." Finally, Jini was lifted by her husband and sons into her blue coffin and transferred in a friends' camping bus to her grave in a churchyard outside Tisbury. "Ralph thought he might not be able to do it at first, but he did. He ended up brushing her hair."
And so Ralph lost his mother. "I think her gift to us was in the truth of her illness," he says. "In an oblique way my response to it was that the work I do must be as truthful as possible. She always withheld judgment. Her perception on human beings was of incredible compassion and that was something I took on board."
These insights helped to create Untersturmfuhrer Goeth and became part of a portrayal which moved Fiennes into the edge of a realm where sagacious complexity meets instinct and becomes known as genius. His mother, who did not believe in evil, and who knew that the true artist will always feel humble with the knowledge of his inadequacy, did not live to see the world acclaim her son; but two weeks before her death, the cancer now on her lungs, she was taken in a wheelchair to see a private screening of "Schindler's List."
"She was a very emotional person so I'm sure she wept," Mark says. "I don't know, I was too busy crying myself. Did it worry me that Ralph was so convincing as a Nazi? No. He had a hideous blackness of character as Heathcliff, and he had been Edmund in King Lear. People get caught up. They forget that these are professionals doing a job. Ralph just happens to be extremely professional. He read the books and went to the war museum and saw all that footage and the Leni Riefenstahl films. He really tried to understand what it was like to be a brainwashed SS officer who thought that Jews were vermin who had to be got rid of 'like rabbits.'"
Fiennes is aware of "the shadow of Schindler." Few actors have had to live with a monster such as this, a monster who might always whisper: "I was your masterpiece, you will never be as good as this again." He says that Krakow is still within him -- it will probably never leave -- but there have been two other characters since then: Charles van Doren for Robert Redford's "Quiz Show" and Lenny, a Los Angelino street hustler in Kathryn Bigelow's "Strange Days."
He has just finished filming the latter -- enjoying the character for his "snappiness, sharpness, fucked-up emotional life"; living in Hollywood; shooting at night in downtown LA; reading Chandler; liking the scene: "The whole weird nature of it fascinated me."
He is still wearing some of Lenny's garb, and quite rightly, for it is a stunning ensemble -- leather trousers, black drape coat, pointy shoes. His hair is long, Beard - boho -- seems to have been lent by a member of the Black Crowes. The effect is strangely mortifying, as extreme physical beauty sometimes is, and there are few people who, in real life, are as attractive as Ralph Fiennes. Movie stars are usually so small that if they rolled underneath the seat in the cinema you would never find them without a torch, and so boring you wouldn't bother trying. "But Ralph had always had magnificence," says Bill Homewood, who taught him at RADA. "And I don't mean in a Victorian ham sense, I mean he can hold the stage." Homewood is right; as Ralph holds the stage, so he holds the room, even if he is only eating chocolate biscuits.
Off-screen the eyes are easier, kinder; the mien is a mixture of diffidence, defence, and the occasional flicker of real goatish sex; sex that would probably know what it was doing; sex that appears and disappears like a magic trick, concealed, possibly, from the poor old journalist. Spielberg once said he saw "sexual evil" in Fiennes. His personal presence is underpinned by an intellectual intensity that does not allow itself enough light relief. There is no comforting small talk. He can be as silent as gum disease. "Impossible," says one friend. "And not beyond going to sleep in a chair at a party." Even his father admits that he is probably "not easy to live with."
Fiennes had little time to prepare for "Quiz Show," released this month. Redford (directing) wanted him; still fat from "Schindler," he flew straight from Poland to New York. There was some dialect coaching but not enough to provide convincing ease. As Charles van Doren he is an intellectual WASP who, persuaded to cheat on an American television quiz show in the fifties, is then exposed and disgraced. The LA Times described Fiennes' performance, a mixture of gravitas and duplicity, as "devastating."
"I hear myself being very boring when I talk about acting," Ralph says, "but I think that Ralph should not judge the character he plays. The job is to get inside the head of the character -- not to feed in little comments that tell people how to judge him. Inside the heads of Goeth and van Doren right and wrong are blurred; for me there has been no moral debate. Those watching are doing the moral debating."
In America they pronounce his name Ralph Fiends; here, correctly, he is Rafe Fines. In America waitresses write their telephone numbers on the bill, Bel Air bimbos attempt to affix themselves to his person, Demi Moore asks him round for brunch and Steven Spielberg tell TIME magazine: "If he picks the right roles and doesn't forget the theatre, he can eventually be Alec Guinness or Laurence Olivier." Here there is only slightly more composure -- his lips have been compared to a pair of rolled-up silk stockings and one headline asked: "Is this the Sexiest Man in the World?" Reference to Ralph-as-crumpet tends to ignite mirth in the Fiennes family. They make jokes that (luckily) only his back view can be seen on the poster for "Quiz Show," but they know that with the release of "Strange Days" -- a $40 million blockbuster -- his life may never be the same again. He recently turned down nearly $5 million to play the part of a pirate. His father is amused, but remembers other British actors who sailed to Hollywood in the Sixties in a ticker tape of glory and were never seen again.
"If you have attained some kind of celebrity, people fall for that," Ralph admits. "America works so much on the cult of celebrity; but it is not me, it is an idea of who they think I am that has been relayed to them. The danger is when you begin to want it, when you think 'Why aren't they recognising me?' Robert Redford has been a great friend. He has been very concerned on my behalf that all this stuff does not take on any importance."
But is flattery pleasurable?
A long silence. He is lying on the sofa. There has been a cup of tea followed by a whiskey.
"I think I find it a little frightening."
This month he is also playing "Hamlet" (put on by the Almeida Theatre Company at the Hackney Empire) and although he "suffers waves of fear" because he has not been on stage for three years, it does not seem right that he should leave the kingdom of Bill & Ted for the centre of what has been called "the most problematic play written by Shakespeare."
He is at home among the Orsics and Reynaldos of Elizabethan drama. He started off as a fairy in "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and ascended to Romeo before joining the RSC in 1988. Homewood, who taught him his first workshops in Shakespearean texts, remembers that as a student Fiennes was "always different," set apart by attributes such as "courage, a feeling for verse, and a wonderful speaking voice." He thinks Ralph will remain attuned to stage work "because he has not fallen prey to the discreet naturalism developed by many young actors because it is what is required by television." Fiennes himself is keen to find out what he had learned from "working with the kind of detail that film demands."
The Prince of Denmark tends to cause luvvies, thesps, and double kissers to grunt and sweat and contort with the strain of Oedipal conundrum -- and he has, of course, driven some of them mad. Or madder. "Ralph will be fine," says his father. "It is like being a professionally trained soldier in the army: you can face any battle if your training is there."
"The emotions of Hamlet are not the hard stuff," says Ralph. "Anyone can work themselves up into a state; what is hard is the speed and clarity of thought, not to mention the physical demands that the text requires, on stage, night after night. It is not like film -- where you can gear everything to the one day you're doing that scene -- not sleep, listen to the music that makes you cry or whatever -- so that everything is explosive. In the theatre you can do that in rehearsals, maybe, but not night after night. You often have to fall back on the support of technique."
The universal themes that play in Hamlet have also been played in Fiennes' life. From the spectre on the battlements to the bodkins and fardels of "to be or not to be," hamlet is much about death and thereafter. Ralph has "no problems with the spirit world," and speaks calmly of the time he and his sisters visted a spiritualist church to contact their mother (successfully, he believes). He has not seen a ghost himself, thought he did feel "an intensity that was quite alarming" when he visited T. E. Lawrences's house as part of his research for "A Dangerous Man." He has thought much about life after death, believes in the eternity of the soul, and knows what it is to think of suicide. "I'd argue that the majority of people, at one time or another, have considered what it would be like to take their own life."
In the end, though, as he patiently points out, he is an actor; he is pretending; the process is private; and he does not like "showing people backstage."
"The real Ralph is very secret," says one friend. "He is paid to be a liar. Always remember how good he was at being that Nazi." But the real Ralph is also the product of an extraordinary, alive, eccentric line, a line that understands about greatness and art and faith and all the burdens therein.
"Jini made them believe they could do
it," says Mark Fiennes. "and she is still around. Only recently
I felt her sitting next to me on a flight to Los Angeles. The seat
was empty but I am sure she was there."