by Ann Patchett
                                                                                                                                                        
GQ Magazine

July, 1998
 
 

      Walking through Kensington Gardens with Ralph Fiennes, I am not thinking about the day, which is crisp and almost blindingly blue, nor am I thinking about Princess Diana. Fiennes is pointing across the grounds to show me how far out the flowers extended after her death. He explains that there were banks of candles under each of these trees. I am barely listening. I am not thinking about the fact that I am taking a stroll with a famous actor, a handsome man. I am not thinking about all the people, complete strangers and dear friends, who would kill to be where I am at this minute.

       I am thinking about Pushkin.

      Aleksandr Pushkin, Russian author, 1799-1837. Remember him?

      I hit the books before I left for London. I read Peter Carey's brilliant and very large Booker Prize-winning novel, Oscar and Lucinda, to better discuss with Fiennes the movie of the same name in which he recently starred. I read two of the seven books by Jennifer Lash, Lash being the pen name of Ralph's mother, Jini Fiennes. I brushed up on Hamlet, as Fiennes had great success with Hamlet in both England and the States. I even doubled back over some Chekov, because you never know when Chekov is going to come up. But Pushkin?

       "All the time, in my head, I'm thinking about Onegin," he says as we walk along the edge of a swan-laden pond.

       That would be Eugene Onegin, title character of that famous Pushkin novel I've never read. Because even though Oscar and Lucinda has opened and  The Avengers will be out this summer, Fiennes is looking ahead. He is prepared to leave for Russia with his sister Martha Fiennes to make the film of Onegin. He will star and executive-produce. Martha will direct. And let's stop worrying about how to pronounce Ralph Fiennes (Rafe Fines). Let us, instead, worry about how to pronounce Onegin (On-yea-ghen).

       "It has a very bleak ending and one that we're trying to stick to and not compromise on at all. Onegin is a semi-demonic character with the potential for love, which he denies himself until it's too late. I think he's Byronic."

        As in Lord Byron, another great writer I will admit to not having taken a swipe at this week. Fiennes kindly outlines Byronic tendencies: "Disaffected men who have some heart of darkness, which actually isn't always there. It is quintessentially romantic, the heart of darkness that could possibly change, like Heathcliff."

       Fiennes does not shy away from dark hearts. He doesn't seem to shy away from much of anything where work is concerned.

       And while I instantly like him as a person, this encounter is about as comfortable as an oral defense of a doctoral dissertation. Except, of course, I'm the one asking the questions.

       What exactly does it mean to be an executive producer?

       He thinks about it for a moment. This will emerge as a theme. Fiennes is a thoughtful guy, and this thoughtfulness often manifests itself as a healthy pause between question and answer. He's not trying to be elusive; at every moment he seems to be trying hard to be honest, to answer truthfully in a way that doesn't conflict his sense of privacy. In the end, he tells me he's not really sure. Maybe
more responsibility, maybe nothing. It's different for everyone.

       Does it mean he worries more about raising money and about people putting down money for a movie ticket?

       "I feel it more and more. Where I used to be, 'Well, fuck it; I'll just do the film,' now I have to think.  I feel this especially with Onegin, where, by and large, my commitment to the film has booked money for it. If it makes a loss, I'll feel responsible. I can't ignore the box-office element. Of course, it's great when something's a hit, especially if it's the kind of film that's more of a risk. It's wonderful when they succeed on their own terms at the box office, because that gives people the confidence to make more of these kinds of films."

       We take a little table outside at a park cafe and order tea and toast. A low-riding basset hound sniffs around our feet and I play with his ears.

       "Tragic!" a young man calls to the dog, who lifts his sad head toward the voice and then ambles away.

       "'Tragic,'" Fiennes says. "I like that."

       So he makes intelligent, visually beautiful films -- Oscar and Lucinda in Australia, Onegin in Russia -- and then he takes on the role of John Steed in       The Avengers, the movie version of the classically camp 1960s television series, this time with Uma Thurman in the black leather catsuit. That seems like a balanced film diet of indies and blockbusters. If The Avengers is a hit, would he be willing to put the bowler hat back on in a couple years?

        "Yes. I loved making The Avengers; it was very good fun. It's difficulty in its own way, sort of floaty and relaxed. There definitely is a style that was in the television series. When you watch Diana Rigg and Patrick Macnee, they're brilliant. (As a child watching), I never would have appreciated their technique, their skills. People just think, Oh, they're having such a great time up there. We could easily do this -- *bang, bang bang!* Oh, isn't that great?!"

       It is only logical that a person would be more animated when discussing       The Avengers than he would be going over Pushkin, but I'm glad to see Fiennes shoot an imaginary gun into the air.

       "That's all very hard to achieve, especially now, when everyone is so telly literate or cinema literate.  It's a very particular style -- slightly camp, with a sort of veneer of Bondian slickness. It's all a bit ludicrous, but it nods at its own ludicrousness. It has enough style to it; you can say, 'Yes, he is in the pinstripe and she is in the black leather catsuit, and they're incredibly charming and call each other Mr. and Mrs.' There's just the vaguest hint of attraction and flirtation, but it never goes beyond one kiss." He reflects for a moment, perhaps remembering Uma in black leather. "Quite a chaste kiss."

       Did you get to keep the suits?

       He holds his lapel and shows it to me. "This is an Avengers suit."

       It is one seriously beautiful suit, John steed's suit, a plaid wool of oranges and browns and just a hint of blue. The pants come up so high that they sit halfway up his rib cage, giving his long legs the illusion of endlessness. For all those disappointing stories you've heard about movie stars being as short as corgis in real life, Fiennes is a noticeable exception. He is tall and, at 35, boyishly straight and slim. And he knows how to make a gift from the wardrobe department his own, with bright, complicated braces and a shirt that is as beautiful as it is hopelessly crumpled.

        The whole day we are out walking, only one person stops to ask for his autograph. Fiennes looks like the kind of man who might often hear the line "Did anyone ever tell you look like Ralph Fiennes?" He bears only a passing resemblance to his characters, who look nothing at all like one another. I like to imagine a dinner party comprising only the men Fiennes has played. It would be a horrible evening: Amon Goeth of Schindler's List, fat and menacing, popping off the kitchen help with a pistol; Charles Van Doren of Quiz Show, desperately handsome and tying to make polite conversation; Lenny Nero of Strange Days, with his misguided facial hair, looking like a nervous drug dealer decked out in Gucci; Count Laszlo de Almasy of The English Patient, standing away from them all, brooding; Oscar Hopkins of Oscar and Lucinda, underweight and 18, all bony wrists and nervous good manners; and then John Steed, arriving at the last minute in his Savile Row suit and bowler hat. There seems to be no discernible pattern here. The man moves seamlessly from being devastatingly attractive to utterly repulsive. From Schindler's List to Quiz Show, he actually seem to go from short to tall, which is tough when you're in your thirties. I ask him if he thinks there has been any common thread in the roles he's played.

       "(These characters) are interested in some of the same things as me. Or they provoke me in some way," he says, "challenge me in a way that I like. I think that's the way I respond to a part. I don't want to prove a point about-" He waves his hand. "Anyway, I don't think I'm that versatile."

       "You're faking it," I say helpfully.

        He nods. "I'm just faking it."

        If there were such a thing as an emotional barometer and one were to tape it onto Fiennes's forehead, it would rise and fall sharply during the course of out conversations. He tries. At every moment, one feels he is doing his level best to take this whole process seriously, to really listen to all my questions about acting and answer them as thoughtfully as he is able. He can go along with great animation for several minutes, and then, slowly, his energy for the whole endeavor evaporates.

       "You're asking me question, and so I'm breaking it down," he says, becoming weary of all the explanations. "But acting is much more the part of your brain you use playing a ball game. If someone hits a tennis ball to you, you don't think, Oh, she's hit that there. You go. There's a part of your brain that's working very fast to get the ball back, and then the more relaxed and skilled you are, the more you start to place it." He pauses to check his metaphor. "I don't know; I'm not a tennis player."

       "Do you want to interview over lunch?" He is looking over the available tables at the unassuming private club he belongs to, wondering if he should pick a quiet one. When I suggest we just eat like regular people, he looks relieved. What  Ralph Fiennes talks about at lunch over wine and fish cakes, when he is in his own private club and the tape recorder is off, is books. Maybe he's being polite -- he is extremely polite (pulls out chairs, helps with coats, is attentive at curbs, looks troubled over every check I promise is going on my expense account) -- and knowing that I'm a novelist, he's trying to steer things in that direction, but he seems genuinely pleased to be swapping favorites of Cormac McCarthy and  Raymond Chandler. He wants my recommendations on William Faulkner.  He suggests I read the new Martin Amis. He tells me his favorite authors include T.S. Eliot, Shakespeare, Ted Hughes.

       But the books I want to talk about are his mother's. Jini Fiennes died of breast cancer in 1993, leaving behind a legacy of seven children and seven books. Her books are complicated and generous, so full of love and family and the importance of goodwill that I feel a real sense of loss in having missed her. After his mother's death, while filming The English Patient, Ralph, with help from the publisher of the Michael Ondaatje novel, arranged to have her last book, Blood Ties, printed. I tell him that while preparing for the interview, I found myself most interested in his mother.

       "You should be," he says, as if it were only logical.

       Much of what I learned about Jini Fiennes I found through the Internet, where the sheer bulk of information on her some and all things related to him must rival the CIA's files on Castro. I give him a copy of a five-page resume I've downloaded, and I tell him he's welcome to peruse my extensive Fiennes file while I got to find a phone to let the photographer know we're going to be late.

        When I return to the table, Fiennes is deep in his reading. "This is really very good," he tells me, holding up the resume. He is especially impressed with the section on his genealogy, which to me seems like an overly complicated math word problem ("Ranulph is the great-grandson of Frederick Fiennes, sixteen Baron of Saye and Sele, and Ralph is the great-great-grandson of the fourth son of the seventeenth Baron").

        "I didn't look through the file," he says, handing it back to me. Ralph Fiennes, great-great-grandson of the fourth son of the seventeenth baron, isn't the kind of man who would read your files while you are on the phone, even if you said he was welcome to them.

         When we return to the hotel for the photo shoot, Fiennes has accrued a stack of phone messages:  His sister Martha has questions about the trip to Russia, another producer has called, and what about the dance lesson tonight? (Fiennes is learning to waltz for Onegin. "No, no, no, I can't dance," he tells me later. "Please don't get me wrong. Don't let anyone read this article and think, He can dance.") The hotel room contains ten people and a couple of hundred suits. Fiennes's assistant, an extremely competent young woman named Eliza, who wears a furry boa around her neck, prioritizes the calls and makes the plans. Fiennes is in the bathroom shaving and talking on the phone. Yes, he received the scripts. No, the stylist may not cut his hair. Arrangements are shouted across the room as several calls go out to and come in from Francesca. Francesca is Francesca Annis, the famous British stage actress who is Fiennes's companion. She played Gertrude to his Hamlet in 1995. Yes, she was playing his mother, and, yes, she is seventeen years older than he is. One must remember that seventeen-year age differences are common between handsome actors and women they love, and we can only thank Ralph Fiennes for taking the trend in the other direction for a change. Annis is legendarily beautiful and appears to be a real favorite in London. Whenever I tell someone here that I am interviewing Ralph Fiennes, the most common response is. "Isn't he that guy who lives with Francesca Annis?" Overhearing phone conversations is as close as I come to asking about his love life. All I can say is that if you had just spent the afternoon with him, you wouldn't have asked either.

       Ralph Fiennes is a good-looking man, but not in a distracting way. He has perfect skin, lovely hands, really extraordinary eyes, but still, he is not as good-looking as, say, the photographer's assistant on this particular photo shoot. That is, until he steps in front of the camera. In front of the camera, Fiennes does something that he did not do all day as we walked around in the cold and ate our fish cakes: He turns it on. I had never thought that whatever "it" is -- star quality, magnetism, sheer old-fashioned handsomeness -- was something that could be flipped on like a light switch, but it is, that  mugs; he laughs; he bites the collar of his raincoat in a way that makes every woman in the room feel the need to lean up against something. It is suddenly clear to me why this man does so well in the movies, and thought I believe it is partly due to his intelligence, it is also due to this thing that cannot be measured or named. While he acts for the camera, he also make appointments, requests John Coltrane, talks about Pushkin, suffers countless hands plucking at his hair. Then he stops and says to the photographer, "I've got something for you." The way he smiles and leans forward, I think he's about to tell a joke. "He who binds himself a joy / Doth the winged life destroy / But he who kisses the joy as it flies / Lives in eternity's sunrise."

       Everything in the room goes quiet, and we stare at him.

       "That's Blake," he says.

       I know that quoting Blake is seen as pretentious in some circles, but there is nothing pretentious about this. It's like a gift, the best thing he has to give, and those of us who are watching him work receive it with pleasure.

       Somewhere around the third change of clothes, the photographer tells him to smolder. "Think about sex or something. I just want that really *hot* look." I cannot imagine saying this with a straight face, but Fiennes listens and thinks, and then, by God, he smolders, as if "smolder" were a setting on a stove: simmer, medium, smolder. Fiennes's well-reported sense of privacy clearly does not extend to the camera. For the camera, there is everything.

        The next morning, when we meet at the Pelham Hotel to wrap things up, he is simply Ralph again.  He does not smolder a bit. He is cheerful and friendly, decked out in a different Avengers suit with an equally artfully squashed shirt. I ask him more questions about acting, and he patiently takes me through his story, how he went to art school wanting to be a painter and then thought about set design and then thought about acting. He landed the part of Romeo with an amateur youth company at 19. He did some more acting with the company, finished up his art course, took a job in a hotel, "basically polishing and Hoovering," and then secured a place at RADA, the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. "I think to get a place in drama school -- when everyone wants to be an actor and no one will stop telling you how you shouldn't be an actor, how you'll always be out of work, and how it's hard to get into drama school, which is true -- if, in the face of all that, you get offered a place, it's a great buzz. I had a wonderful time at RADA."

       He gives a great deal of credit to his parents, who were both unflagging in their support of his choice of acting, of any choice he could have made in a career. ("I wanted to go into the army at one point, and my mother said, 'Fine, go do it. Have a look; go see.' I went one day to an army barracks and changed my mind.") After graduation, he signed on at the successful Open-Air Theatre in Regent's Park, where he got an Equity card. Where, for the first time, he was paid to act, sweep the stage and make tea. Things kept moving from there.

       But what if they hadn't? Could he have kept Hoovering? Could he be 35 and waiting tables if things had not come through?

       He puts down his cup of coffee. "No, I couldn't," he says and takes a minute to puzzle over the complete awfulness of that scenario. "No. I thought I could have at the time, but you ask me that now. I've been very lucky. There are people who will stick it out, whatever, who've had to wait tables; they've just completely made that decision, and I think that's incredibly courageous and brave and amazing. You know the story of what Napoleon always asked his general -- 'Are you lucky?'"

       So he's been lucky, as well as good. What is there to do now? What is ambition?

       He speaks slowly, almost one word at a time. "If I had one ambition when I started off, I was really interested only in classical theater, mainly Shakespeare, because I found it moving and stimulating."

       It is cliche to say that this person in an actor and all those other good-looking guys staring out from the magazine covers are movie stars, but I'll say it anyway, because when Ralph Fiennes talks about Shakespeare, he sounds the way those other guys do when they talk about women. He sounds love struck, thrilled, desperate and full of yearning. He rambles about lyrical verse and what it means to be in a production of King Lear. His hands dart through the air, and he is not cautious about anything. When I ask him what roles he still wants to play, he tells me. He has clearly thought this one over.

       "Richard II," he starts off. "And I'd like to play Coriolanus and the Scottish play. And I'd like to play Henry IV and Henry V.

       "I love making films; I love seeing films; I love the process where I watch all the different parts. I find that thrilling, but I do want to be in the theater. I'd hate to reach the age of 45, 50, thinking, I didn't play those parts. I think being onstage is the purest, purest form for an actor. When I think about being on stage, I think of it as being always on the knife's edge, and many nights I feel embarrassed by what I've done or uneasy. Especially now, when I know tickets are selling because this actor's done a movie: This is the actor who was in Schindler's List or The English Patient. And I'm still the person in the Open-Air Theatre thinking, I want to play the part. I want to try it."

       Writing a profile is a little like writing a book review in which, instead of reading the whole book, you open it at random and study, oh, maybe three pages in the middle. Then you go on to speak about the text with great authority. Who   Ralph Fiennes was before I met him, I have no idea. What he'll go on to do is anyone's guess. But based on the time I spent with him, I have drawn the following reckless assessment of his character: This is someone who was going to succeed. If he had decided he wanted to be a novelist, an astrophysicist, a shoe salesman or a principal dancer in the Bolshoi Ballet, I have no doubt he would have done it. He has the intelligence, but more than that, he has the focus and the intensity of a man who gets the job done. What he decided to be was an actor.  Fiennes is not a politician.  If he were, he wouldn't play a Nazi or the cruel Onegin; he wouldn't dabble in small film. He would spend every minute as if he were in front of the camera. He would flirt.

       Not that being an actor is without its movie-star perks. He's just finished a film with Uma Thurman, and he's about to start one with Liv Tyler. He's done two with Juliette Binoche. "After a while, do you go to work in he morning and just think, It's Uma; it's Liv; it's Juliette? Or do you still think, Damn, these are beautiful women?"

       "I'll tell you what, I think they are beautiful women, but I say that with the professional button switched to on, in the sense that this business is full of quote-unquote beautiful people. And some people say," his voice takes on the tone of  Ru Paul gossiping, "'I think he/she/it is the most gorgeous sexy, blah-de-blah-de- blah.' 'You think so-and-so is the most gorgeous, sexy-? Oh God! Please!  No! I think so-and-so is much more blah-blah.'"

        A rarely reported fact about the very serious Mr. Fiennes: He can be extremely funny when he feels like it.

       "My sense of beauty," he continues without the camp, "if it's about a person, obviously, the person one is closest to is beautiful in a much more profound way than physical beauty."

       But the person he's closest to happens to be profoundly beautiful. I should mention that, while Ralph Fiennes is no politician, he is a diplomat.

       "I would hate to answer this question just about t people," he says, trying to move me away from good-looking actresses. "Yesterday, I thought, was a beautiful day, and a bit of me was frustrated that I had to be interviewed, talking to you -- not you personally," he quickly adds (point taken) -- "when I thought how wonderful to be walking in this park, just the light, the shape of the trees. It's a funny word, beautiful. Once you start to use it too much, it sort of falls apart. I feel more comfortable using the word beauty or beautiful to describe light, dawn, the sea, mist, a moment in the sunlight, a shape, a man looking across the ice of the frozen river in Pushkin's estate. To see the dots of men who drill holes in the ice when they are fishing, that seems to me to be beautiful." Then he appears to be uneasy about using the word beautiful to describe poor men drilling in the ice. He tells me a story of when he was a child living in the country. Some friends came to visit and said how wonderful it was that the man still drove his milk into the dairy with a horse and cart. Fiennes's mother replied that she was sure the man would rather have a truck.

       We've spoken often of his mother over the past two days, of both her novels and her constant encouragement and support of her children. From all accounts, Jini Fiennes was an extraordinary woman. I read him a quote from her novel     From May to October. "'True love allows great space, great scope, and possession is not part of it. Possession is simply a stage at the beginning, really nothing more than the marking of fresh circumstances. The commitment is to be there and allow all manner of growth and opportunity. To allow divergence. To allow privation even in a sense of unity, because unity depends on parts.'"

       He listens carefully, and when I'm finished he nods, making me feel as if I'd done it right. "My mother used to say, 'Keep going, darling. Keep on trying. Don't give up.' She wouldn't say yes or no. She'd say 'God, it's going to be hard -- of course it's hard.' She'd always constantly reaffirm the importance of love. Her voice -- often I will hear that voice, in different work, in different moods, saying, 'All right, keep going. Keep going. Don't give up.'"

       Clearly, Ralph Fiennes is listening.