by Elizabeth McCracken

ELLE Magazine, December 1997
 
 

           Ralph Fiennes is standing in a fake snowstorm, watching Uma Thurman shoot a gun. The two of them are filming The Avengers, and Thurman is wearing the traditional Mrs. Peel devastating black catsuit, this one covered with buckles and zippers; over it, she wears a full-length fake-fur coat. Fiennes is a little overdressed for the part -- he isn't yet in the perfectly tailored suit his role requires; he's wearing a white shirt and khakis, both a bit wrinkled. Sean Connery, also in the movie, is nowhere to be seen.

          The sled dogs have just left the set. The snow is made from recycled paper. Machines on cherry pickers blow it over the eponymous trees of Pinewood studios, England's most famous film complex. (Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman are somewhere else on the grounds, my cab driver says, working on Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut.) Some of the crew are wearing white masks over their mouths to filter out the artificial snow. Even when the machines are off, there's a fine paper fog wafting through the air; breathe too much of it, and you feel ready to cough up a composition book.

       The Avengers, based on the 1960's cult TV show, is wrapping up. Fiennes is John Steed, the elegant gentleman intelligence agent originated by Patrick Macnee. Today, they are filming bits of business for previously shot scenes. Most of the shooting will be done in a week; after that, the set's safety expert tells me, another crew has a fortnight of car chases to shoot." There are plenty of people standing around, quite a few cigarettes and mobile phones, and the stand-ins, a Fiennesish man and a Thurmanoid woman. Fiennes's stand-in has a tattoo on his arm that shows through the thin fabric of his dress shirt. The stand-ins are kind of heartbreaking, staring seriously into the camera so that the camera will be ready to stare upon the stars; it's like kissing a person you love who only wants to practice in order to kiss someone else. Nevertheless, they pose patiently. Their main talent, as far as I can tell, is that in dim light, with the right haircut, they could possibly pass for movie stars. Even so, their lives are a good deal more glamorous than mine.
                                                                                                                                                       
        My normal life does not include movie stars; I had to take a week off from my job as a librarian to come here. The reaction of my friends, when I tell them I am going to London to interview Ralph Fiennes, can best be summed up in three words: No Fucking Way. And then: Why you? It does seem odd, and initially I'm worried, because if I were having a psychotic episode, it could easily manifest itself as a conviction that somewhere a movie star was supposed to talk to me. I go to the Pelham Hotel to meet Ralph Fiennes -- this is a few days before The Avengers shoot -- and sit in the lobby, hoping the day doesn't end with me being wrestled into an English psych ward, all the time insisting, "But Ralph is waiting for me. He's expecting me."

          So it's a relief when Ralph Fiennes does himself show up, and we adjourn to one of the Pelham's back sitting rooms. It's the week after Princess Di's funeral; the streets still smell of rotted flowers. His hair is reddish-brown, long and floppy on top and short in the back. His shirt is very white, and his checked coat has large, turned-back cuffs.

          Ralph Fiennes is, of course, wonderful to look at. He doesn't quite match any of the characters he's played in movies, which makes sense, since his characters don't much resemble each other. In person, he doesn't exactly seem like the matinee idol: He's not made up of the dull angles that some might think add up to a Handsome Face. His skin is flawless; his eyes are remarkable; but there's a soft sweetness to his face -- he's not nearly as sharp-featured as he sometimes comes out looking in photographs. Strangely enough, though, Ralph Fiennes can act movie-star handsome. He's played, in fact, two different versions of it -- blond, broad-shouldered good looks in Quiz Show; squinting, brooding, Olivierian handsomeness in The English Patient. Onscreen, he's someone you stare at.

          The fact is that what makes someone transfixing has very little to do with the arrangement of features -- physical perfection (if such a thing exists) is nothing more than an absolutely grammatical sentence, inoffensive and pleasant, but not, in itself, moving. It's what animates a face that makes it extraordinary, what moves a body that makes it, well, moving. Up till now, he's played reserved characters: the physically and emotionally damaged Count Laszlo de Almasy of     The English Patient; the neurotic postmodern addict Lenny Nero of Strange Days; the vicious Amon Goeth in Schindler's List.

          Fiennes has agreed to talk to me about his new movie, Oscar and Lucinda, directed by Gillian Armstrong and based on Peter Carey's wonderful Booker       Prize-winning novel. Oscar and Lucinda, both film and book, is about two pure and eccentric characters in late-nineteenth-century Australia. Fiennes is Oscar, a holy innocent and compulsive gambler, a gawky redhead minister who wears ill-fitting coats that show his bony wrists; Australian actress Cate Blanchett plays Lucinda, a fellow gambler and the owner of a glassworks in Sydney.

          There is nothing reserved in Fiennes's Oscar Hopkins. He's exuberant, he's sweet, he's brave, and foolish: He's like a lost silent-movie comedian, in his worn-out, misfit clothing and with his hair sticking out in clumps; you'd recognize his silhouette from a street away. I've never seen and actor so closely match my idea of a character from a book (which may be merely a coincidence, since everybody has a different idea of characters from books).

           One of the interesting things about Ralph Fiennes's roles is that it seems something utterly different animates each of the people he's portrayed.               The English Patient is chiseled and icy; his face, for all its passion, is often closed to the people he's looking at. Oscar is goofily lovely, a man with twice the muscles in his face than most humans, all working in joy or rapture or fear or doubt or repentance. It's an open, faithful face.

         The words are the same; the music's entirely different.

         My friends -- the ones who cannot quite believe or understand that I get to meet a famous person, one many of them devoutly wish to meet -- have armed me with several probing questions. For instance, start with, "Darling -- may I call your darling?" Or, "Do you like my shoes?" Or, "I've heard you're related to Larry Fine, of the Three Stooges -- is that true?" Or, "What are your views on monogamy?"

          Right, then: Ralph Fiennes is exceptionally polite. Not an earthshaking revelation, of course, but still. Maybe polite isn't the right word. Ralph Fiennes has beautiful manners, and even all his evasions of questions he finds too personal, or possibly embarrassing to answer, are dodged in a lovely and direct way. He doesn't brush them off, and he doesn't lie. He has apologetically ordered a full English tea. He is trying to answer questions while not saying things that will horrify him later. "I don't know how to be in an interview yet without suddenly feeling completely guarded," he says. Then he adds, "I don't find this totally horrible. It can be quite beguiling. You get to talk about yourself and the things you like. But one learns about talking too openly, the way things get quoted back at you so frighteningly.

          "People say that I'm shy," he says. "I don't really think I'm that shy. I think I give the impression I'm shy because I'm naturally defensive. When I get uncomfortable I close down. Maybe that's shyness." He quotes Helen Mirren (early in his career, he appeared in an episode of Prime Suspect), who has stated that all actors sound like wankers when they talk about their work; he has an ear out for what they sound like, and he's not always happy with the sound. "I can hear myself resisting, when I feel like what I'm saying is probably bullshit, is probably crap, is probably typical actor talking, blah-di blah di blah, this film, that film. I think, Oh, shut up."

           I read him a quote from the novelist Jennifer Lash: "Only when all sense of ambition, recognition and esteem are silenced, only then is creativity truly free to be itself."  Lash, Fiennes's mother (her real name was Jini Fiennes), died of cancer in 1993.

          "Well, you see," he says. "That's my mother. My mother knew how to talk about such things -- she understood." The quote is from "From May to October," a book about Michael and Caroline Lambert, an extremely loving couple with five children; Caroline is a painter who is trying to find time to paint. "We were all a little embarrassed when that book came out, it was so close to home," says Fiennes. "We never had a bookshop ever (as the Lamberts do), but it's a fictitious arena for what did exist between my mother and father and their work." His father, Mark Fiennes, is a farmer-turned-photographer. Fiennes was born on December 22, 1962, in Suffolk; the family moved around England and Ireland quite a bit when the children were growing up. Lash's last book, "Blood Ties" (a transfixing novel about bad blood and bad families), was published this year in England; she wrote five other novels and one memoir before that, leaving behind seven books and six children. "I think it's a big achievement," her son says. "Huge. Especially six children so close together. I was the oldest of six at the age of seven."

         I try another "From May to October" quote: "The best way to manage the hard and terrible human programme from birth to death; to experience the least suffering, and to avoid the more impossible disorders; is to work and to love."
                                                                                                                                                        
         He's quiet for a long moment. Then he says, softly and pensively, "I was thinking of my mother. Being the mother of six, and trying to write, was really a huge problem. The space in your life just allowed you the time to say, I want to write, before you were even writing. And I can understand it now, I didn't when I was younger. You know, when the clothes are washed, and are they at school, and are there plans for their trip to wherever, or they're ill, they've got a cold -- just being able to let go, still care about your children, but put those cares to one side. So you can allow all the other voices and ideas to come forward, onto the page. . . . She did manage it. And she was loving at the same time."

           The son of a novelist, Fiennes is something of a writer's actor, having appeared in other films of very good books -- from the barely seen           Wuthering Heights to the much-praised Schindler's List and The English Patient, and now Oscar and Lucinda -- though he says this is merely a coincidence, that part of him believes that an original screenplay is more "pure" than screenplays based on existing stories. "If I was really being a purist, I'd say you never adapt any book into a film, but I'd be hypocritical because I'm already doing it myself." His next project is an adaptation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin; he'll star, his sister Martha Fiennes will direct. Together, along with another writer, they're developing the script. It's his first project on the production side of a movie, and though it's had "its hairy moments," he feels "very lucky" to be involved. His sister is in Russia at the moment, scouting locations.

          Oscar and Lucinda is, as befits a movie about gambling, an optimistic movie about futility. It is also -- as befits a movie about a glassworks -- beautiful to look at, from the high coloring of its two lead actors to the glass church that is floated down a river near the movie's end. The whole thing looks like stained glass, in fact. "I loved doing Oscar and Lucinda, says Fiennes, who was especially pleased to work with the costume designer, Janet Patterson; they collaborated on Oscar's odd wardrobe.

           "It's not an easy book to film," says Fiennes. "I fell in love with the part and wanted to do it immediately, but that was before I went to do Schindler's List and Quiz Show. But eventually Gillian and I and Robin Dalton (one of the producers) came together at the right time. Actually, I was reading Oscar and Lucinda while I was doing Schindler's List. That was nice. A nice change."

            As Oscar, Fiennes is ridiculous-looking to those who don't understand him, and lovely and angelic to those who do. The camera is one of the ones that do. Fiennes says he now has a feel for being aware enough -- but not over-aware -- of the camera. "When I first started, I just focused totally on the other actor. Just working with experienced cinematographers who say, 'The light's better here,' you realize there's more going on than just your performance. Then when you see the picture, you say, My God."

          "There's huge guilt there, but there's huge love of life," Fiennes says of Oscar, "huge exuberance, fantastic -- the moment he's gambling is some huge life-defining thing. There's that speech that believing in God is an act of gambling. That's one of the reasons I did the film. Oscar's particular kind of faith I fell in love with. It made sense to me. Because it was so flawed and unsure of itself, but the pulse, the beat, the real spontaneous generosity -- it was very exhilarating."

           Does he have faith? "Well, yes, I've done some stupid things, I'm sure. I'm no stranger to guilt. But faith -- well, yes, I think that's quite a personal area." He pauses, considering whether to go on and answer anyhow, and then continues. "If people say they have no belief, then that is their belief. And they will live by that: There is nothing, there is just me, existing, and I die. I think that's very destructive, really, ultimately. That's not something I accept. There is something else beyond, above, even now, here, there's something bigger, more potent."

          He's told me up front that he won't answer any questions relating to his personal life. I'm reasonably polite myself, and so I scratch the monogamy question off my list, though I know his marriage to Alex Kingston, a classmate of his at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, broke up shortly after they were married in 1993 (they'd been together for nearly a decade before that). I've heard that he now lives with Francesca Annis, an actress seventeen years his senior; she's played Gertrude to his Hamlet on Broadway. (Fiennes won a Tony for the role.) I have been told by a man who has met her (and who, like Fiennes, is in his thirties), "Nobody our age can touch her. She's extraordinary." This man -- who hadn't lacked words (or criticism) for any other subject -- seemed stymied by the impossibility of adequately describing the wonders of Annis.

           Back on The Avengers set, four pairs of Uma Thurman's crucial shoes in plastic bags lie on the ground, shiny black thigh-high boots marked "Uma--Bad Emma" with the height of the heel (medium, low, flat) written beneath. It looks like the outside of a Japanese restaurant hosting a convention of dominatrices. (Earlier, Fiennes told me, "I think Alec Guinness said, 'Shoes are crucial' for an actor finding his way into a part.") When she finishes the scene -- coolly tossing aside a harpoon gun, coolly firing a pistol at the camera, coolly walking away -- she will be helped out of the thigh-high stiletto boots she's wearing and into a pair of worn black Chinese slippers. She undoes the zippers that run down the arms of the catsuit (it's that kind of outfit) presumably to catch a breeze. She has zipper marks on her biceps.

          "What happened to your hair?" Jerry Weintraub, the producer, asks    Jeremiah Chechik, the director.

          The improbable answer is Ralph Fiennes, who for some reason has         hand-styled Chechik's Caesar haircut into something slightly Oliver Hardy-ish: He's curled the bangs meticulously, and rather seriously, so they stand up from Chechik's forehead. He's done it playfully -- Chechik had been explaining what he tells his barber before he gets a cut -- but also with a level of concentration usually seen in ship-in-bottle building or bonsai. Fiennes isn't in this scene; he's standing around. At one point, he lies down on the ground by the camera, possibly to make faces at Uma Thurman while she shoots her gun, and has to be told to stand up. "You don't want to be there," says Chechik. "That's right where she's going to shoot."

           Ralph Fiennes knows that devoted fans of The Avengers series may resist seeing any version not their beloved own. "I was very happy that Patrick Macnee gave his blessing, because I think he could have not." I confess that my brother, an Avengers fan, is in fact a little concerned about the whole enterprise. "Tell him not to worry," Fiennes says.

           It's a jolly set -- "happy," the safety expert informs me. Uma is great with the crew, he says, and Ralph is nice, though quiet. I'm twice alarmed when both Chechik and Weintraub make the same joke, at different times: They see me and bellow, "NO PRESS." ("Especially no Oscar and Lucinda press," says Chechik.) When Weintraub tells Fiennes that I'll have to go, Fiennes looks worried for a second, then smiles, and says, "Bullshit."

           Uma Thurman fires her gun. Then she does it again. Finally they finish. "I thought Ralph was rather good in that scene," Jerry Weintraub says loudly.

           The next scene is Fiennes's; he has changed out of his khakis into a perfect green wool suit. He walks out of a stand of snow-covered pines into a snowstorm, and into a clearing, a hand visoring his eyes, and then comes near enough for a close-up, dazed and bedazzled, clearly seeing something but not knowing what it is. Then someone yells, "Bang!" and he falls to the ground. I feel like asking the safety inspector whether it's safe for the crew to be smoking in a fake paper snowstorm, or whether there's such a thing as white lung disease.

          The lights and the snow make Fiennes's skin glow. The snow looks real. It's a blizzard. Between every take, someone rakes the snow on the ground to make it perfect; someone else plucks flakes from Fiennes's hair. The scene will end with Fiennes's face filling the screen; chances are it will look beautiful. He will be alone in the snow, no hint of weather forgery, stagehands, or stand-ins. Like most movies, it won't looked filmed on a set. Still, it's hard not to see what's literally happening: A small crowd of people are standing in the clearing. Some of them are smoking. From out of the woods, a handsome man appears. He is wearing a green suit with a red windowpane check; despite the weather, his umbrella is in his hand, furled. He can't quite believe it's snowing. When he looks around, he sees something. He walks toward the strange apparition, a camera, as if that's what's confusing him, a movie camera in weather like this. When he reaches it, he stops. He stares wonderingly at the lens. He tries to figure it out.

           When I get home, my friends will ask me, "What was he like?" He was polite. He was very polite. Very nice and polite. Kind, actually. The first time I met him, I told him my birthday was the next day; when I saw him again, he asked me whether I'd had a nice birthday. He was sitting in his trailer, in socks but no shoes, which I thought was rather dear. He uttered the words "Fascinating being a librarian, isn't it?" He was wonderful to look at.

           But what was he really like?

           Oh, good grief, who knows? I have only recently started to get an idea of what my family is really like. This is impossible, to meet somebody -- a nice somebody and an unbelievably talented somebody -- and figure out how to get him to tell you what he's like, and then put it on paper. In an afternoon you have to get everything you can; things that shouldn't be significant become hugely so. No wonder so many celebrity pieces read like hopeful, slightly glamorous, cinema verite: He picks up a sandwich; he chews thoughtfully. He rescues a crumb that has fallen to his shirt front. We sit in this hotel room or that restaurant.

           The waiter interrupts us. The waiter interrupts us again.

           He has revealed his socks to me. He has offered me cups of tea and places to sit. In the real world, this is more than I would expect of a strange charming man. This much I can tell you: The socks were green-striped.