Ralph's Brand New Role


By Marion McMullen
Evening Telegraph
May 2, 2003




The eyes that sent Jennifer Lopez weak at the knees in Hollywood movie Maid in Manhattan are alight with passion.

But it’s not J-Lo’s famous backside that is the cause of the spark. British leading man Ralph Fiennes is back on the Warwickshire stage after more than 13 years and he is consumed by the acting challenge of playing the title role in Ibsen’s Brand.

“I had a gut instinct to the role when I read the play,” he explains. “I don’t take a part thinking ‘will this show how versatile I am?’ It’s a gut response, an instinctive thing.”

Ralph was not familiar initially with the play about a devout and driven priest, but it has given him a taste to do more Ibsen and he describes Brand as a “powerful and complex man” who is prepared to sacrifice everything for his vocation to God.
Fiennes, the oldest of six children, says he is not religious himself, but his novelist mother Jini was a devout Catholic at one point and the family went to mass on a Sunday.

“I remember when I was 13 saying ‘I didn’t want to go to church, I think it’s boring,’ ” he recalls with a wry grin. “My mother got very upset, but I grew up in a family that talked about God and was at ease about religious matters.”

Brand reunites director Adrian Noble and Ralph Fiennes for the first time since their work on the groundbreaking cycle of history plays, The Plantaganets, in 1988.

Fiennes has taken a break from filming to concentrate on the stage production and says returning to Stratford has been a bit like stepping through a time-warp. “I had a memorable season when I was back here in 1988 and keep expecting to see actors I worked with then. I walk down the corridors and I remember conversations I had.

“Everything is still here - the river, the swans, the tourists. It’s like time has collapsed and I’m back.”

Adrian Noble and Ralph went to Norway to help research the production and the director graciously says it takes an actor of Ralph Fiennes’s stature to make a drama like Brand work.

“He won’t say it,” says Adrian gesturing to Ralph, “but there are not many actors who can do a play like Brand. The demands on the actor are not far off from those performing King Lear. You’ve got to have an extraordinary talent.” Theatre-trained Fiennes has always returned to the stage in between film work and has enjoyed success with Hamlet, Ivanov and Richard II and Coriolanus. It’s almost 10 years since he shot to fame and gained his first Oscar nomination for Schindler’s List. His portrayal of Nazi Amon Goeth took him on to the Hollywood A-list, a position cemented the following year with his sympathetic performance as Charles Van Doren in Quiz Show.

Since then he’s been the doomed lover in The English Patient and the psychotic serial killer in Red Dragon and turned to romantic comedy this year with Maid in Manhattan.

The 40-year-old says he is looking at future film scripts, but all his attention at the moment is on Brand.

His long-term partner, actress Francesca Annis, has already been to see the production at Swan Theatre in Stratford. “She gave me a few notes afterwards,” he laughs, “but I’m not revealing what she said.”






 

Please visit the other link pages on this site:
Ralph Fiennes Links Page

 Ralph Fiennes Astrology Page

Back to the Jennifer Lash Links page
 

Back to the Ralph Fiennes - Jennifer Lash Main Page

This page was created with the Stonehenge.ttf font and is best enjoyed if you
have the font yourself.  If you want it please click on the green name Stonehenge.ttf above to download and install it to your PC.
Sorry not available for Mac's.  Thanks.
 

These pages are Copy written by Mary Sibley.  All rights reserved.
Please do not use anything within these pages without permission.
Please send an EMail to Mary Sibley for permission, thanks.