This story begins where it will end. "I had an accident on this street my third week in L.A.," says Ralph Fiennes, cruising down Sunset Boulevard. "I wasn't concentrating and I drove into the back of this girl's car." He snaps his head violently forward, his hair flying over the wheel and back again. In a wickedly keen Valley Girly voice he mimics her: "'Oh shit! Oh Jesus! God! I just had an accident and you come along!'". He smiles. "We have a mutual friend who told me this girl tells people, 'That Nazi from Schindler's List rear-ended me!'."He laughs. His teeth are pointy. He entered our consciousness as a man in an SS uniform. In his Oscar-nominated turn as Amon Goeth in Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List, Fiennes embodied Nazism. That definitive performance was made even more disturbing by the sexuality that Fiennes brought to the character. If you could just kick the fascist out of him, he would be........desirable. For those of you have kept this particular impression between yourselves and your therapists, Spielberg offers up some psychological relief: "That's one of the things that made Goeth attractive as well as heinous," explains the director. "People who knew him said he was unrelenting in his hatred and the carrying out of hate crimes against Jews. At the same time other witnesses testify that he was a very seductive and charismatic individual."
But it's Fiennes' costar and confidant, Ben Kingsley, who reveals the root of this incarnation of Goeth. "Ralph told me in Krakow that his starting point for that character was the man's pain," says Kingsley, adding, "a brave and very intelligent decision." Given Fiennes' performance in Robert Redford's Quiz Show, it could be deduced that the actor mined the same internal, alienated place to find his next real-life persona. Based on the Twenty-One scandal of the 1950s, the film follows the rise and demise of Charles Van Doren, the popular game-show contestant who was eventually exposed as a fraud.
Van Doren's Faustian dance with the devil (who this time around assumed the form of the NBC peacock) was, of course, considerably less diabolical than Goeth's. Before each show, Van Doren was provided with the answers to the questions; in exchange the handsome, Waspy, Columbia University literature professor helped make Twenty-One wildly popular, which in turn sent its advertising sales soaring. It was a communion that illustrated the power of television long before the Nixon-Kennedy debates. So what if the guy was immoral; he was telegenic. And therein lies the brilliance of the player -- we're being taken, yet we actually feel sympathy for Van Doren, because even while he is winning, we sense his pain.
If ever there were a question of Fiennes's potential in Hollywood after Schindler's, this movie answers it. The sucking-up lines forms to the right. Huge. Big. Major. Player. Even a publicist couldn't come up with a plaudit all-encompassing enough. It would take a Van Doren-size IQ.
Yet on a cool summer evening, Fiennes strolls unrecognized through the L.A. restaurant Orso. He wears slacks, a white button-down shirt, and a bright Guatemalan cotton
jacket, which, once removed, reveals a frame 30 pounds lighter than in Schindler's. Pulling out a chair, he settles into a corner table facing the room. He smells of fresh soap. His longish hair, still damp, falls in crooked middle part. As it dries, it brushes across his face, forcing him to wage a losing battle to keep it from his eyes.
He does not want to be here. He acts polite. He acts like "No, really, I don't mind." But he does. "I had a tough day, to be honest," he says, ordering a Glenlivet neat. "I'm rehearsing a big role in a big script. It's a lot of discussion and throwing up of ideas and kicking the thing around. By the end of the day, you're reeling."
He's speaking of Strange Days, director Kathryn Bigelow's latest dark outing, produced by James Cameron. Fiennes plays the lead, Lenny, a cyberpunk black marketeer who trades in virtual reality tapes. But he is liplocked on the project: "I never talk about something I'm doing." He means it. Look into his eyes. Marbled gray, teal, gold, and ringed in deepest blue. The stare reads below freezing. "Why do you need to talk to me about it if you've read the script?"
Has it been mentioned that he stopped smoking today?
Two other films that Ralph Fiennes does not care to discuss are Schindler's List and Quiz Show.
Menus are a good idea. Free-range chicken with rosemary and a white-bean salad appetizer, with a nicotine patch on the side, please. And more drinks.
Time passes. He contrasts the directorial styles of Redford and Spielberg. "Steven works very fast. Very high energy. I was used to him saying, 'Come on, come on! ' While Redford has a much more legato rhythm -- he just takes his time and won't yield to pressure." He talks about having only three weeks to lose the extra weight between films. "They gave me a personal trainer six days a week and I dieted heavily," he says. "It's not very good for you to lose weight quickly because you lose muscle tissue" (pronounced tiss-you in his Masterpiece Theatre accent). He says he ended up paying the price of a bad knee "because my legs were weakened with the muscles reduced, and I was misusing them. By the time we started shooting, I still had to lose ten pounds. You can't see it on film."
Ahhh, a smile. "But I knew that last ten pounds was there." Time for another attempt. So what about that guy Van Doren? Fiennes' smile collapses. His brow furrows. "I rehearsed ten days on and off before we started filming. They weren't very keen -- do we have to talk about this?" A look of resignation. "I suppose we do. It's just that......it's all so long ago now. I'm on to other things."
Yes. Other things we can't talk about. He laughs. It is lovely and lyrical and envelops anyone within a two-foot radius in warmth.
"Okay, okay, okay," he says, throwing his hands up in surrender. "I watched a lot of kinescopes of Van Doren on the old quiz shows. I wanted to meet him, but the studio lawyers thought he would want to see the script and if he didn't like it, he would cause legal problems."
But Fiennes was unable to resist, so he and a producer drove up to Cornwall, Connecticut, where Van Doren is retired from his job writing for the Encyclopaedia Britannica. "I saw him sitting on the veranda of his little house," Fiennes recalls. "I rolled down the window and I asked him directions just to hear his voice. He seemed very nice. I felt guilty for disturbing his solitude. I would have been tempted to say, 'Hi, I'm the actor who's playing you in this movie,' but it would have been really wrong. It would have been unfair. He would have been shocked and probably disturbed.
"I sympathize with him," he continues. "I kind of think that the country got what it deserved. They take this TV thing so seriously. Van Doren, the producers -- everyone wanted the same thing. They all liked him, they all bought into it. Then they turn around and say, 'Oh, we're so shocked! It's a put-up job.' It was naive. I sort of feel the argument in his head. When Eisenhower writes his memoirs -- is that really Eisenhower [writing]?" Fiennes starts pounding his index fingers into the table, emphasizing each point. "When Gregory Peck jumps out of an airplane, is that really Gregory Peck? No, it's just some actor! With Van Doren it's the same thing! " A hand slams down.
But Van Doren wasn't acting; he was cheating. It's a point worth mentioning. Or is it?
A waiter approaches, then reconsiders. Surrounding diners fall silent. Others turn up their Miracle Ears. Fiennes runs a hand back through his hair. He takes a drink and says gently, "I'm not upset. I just want to be clear." And softer yet, "I'm not upset."
He is still new to the game. Despite his recent initiation into the million-dollar-a-movie club, it was only three years ago that he made his screen debut -- in a single scene -- in the British miniseries Prime Suspect. He'd been lauded for his work with the Royal Shakespeare Company as Edmund in King Lear, Troilus, and Henry VI. And it was in an RSC production that director Chris Menaul spotted Fiennes; he then cast him as the bereaved boyfriend of a murdered girl. "I threw him into a cell with Helen Mirren and he acquitted himself very well," says Menaul. He must have: The next year Menaul gave Fiennes the lead in the TV movie A Dangerous Man: Lawrence After Arabia. "We never considered anyone else." Lawrence won an International Emmy for Drama, and creator Clive Irving observes, "One of the major things about Ralph -- and it's not often achieved by these Royal Shakespeare actors -- is, he made that transition from the sort of thespianism that works so powerfully well when you're doing Shakespeare in London, to the entirely different kind of challenge that making this film demands. Kenneth Branagh, for all his brilliance, is still the thespian on film, Ralph isn't. Clearly the camera loves Ralph, but there's much more to it than that. It's the way in which he's able to internalize the lines. The lines go in and come out -- they don't just come out."
A sloppy remake of Wuthering Heights with Juliette Binoche followed, along with a Peter Greenaway art film, The Baby of Macon. Though Fiennes was singled out for good reviews in the first film, both movies were critical bombs. It would be ironic, given what RSC director Adrian Noble calls Fiennes' "extraordinary good looks -- those eyes, you know," if success as a straightforward romantic lead were to escape him. Even onstage, his Romeo was criticized -- and by one whose opinion he greatly respects. But don't remind him.
"Did you see my Romeo?" His orbs narrow. "It's a difficult part, Romeo. You've got to be all youthful and you need this huge acting experience to really know how to judge it and it's very rare to get both. I just think I was inexperienced."
Trying to seem casual, he asks, "What are you getting these quotes from -- people saying I wasn't good?" He is annoyed.
"You said it in an old article. 'I have played Romeo, but I wasn't very good.'
His cheeks blush the palest pink. Busted. "I did?" A grin fills his face. "Well, I was right! I remember being so frustrated because all the actors had to project this stuff out in a big amphitheater. It was impossible, really. I mean, the open-air theater is great for Midsummer Night's Dream. But to do any of the tragedies there is just tough technically." He would have been a killer Mercutio.
Noble, who is happy to take credit for giving Fiennes his first big break at the RSC, has a theory. "Like many men who are good-looking, he's usually happiest in disguise," he says. "Danny [Day-Lewis] is like that. I gave Danny his very first job. He created a character of the village idiot and he was absolutely mesmeric. In a play I didn't direct, he played a good-looking young man and he was absolutely dreadful! Ralph is much the same. He has these beautiful looks and beautiful voice, but I think he is actually dying to play a character.
"I was slightly sad to lose him to film," says Noble, sounding slightly sad now. "As soon as you become what he's become.....it's difficult to do the long theater stint." Fiennes's former dresser, an ex-army man named Black Mac, sorely misses him too. "He's not in America, is he?" Mac asks in a heavy Welsh accent. "No wonder I can't get the bastard! You tell 'im I've been tryin' to get hold of 'im to tell 'im to pick up the bird feeder I made 'im."
Apparently, dressing his young charge was a challenge indeed. "I called 'im the Flasher," Mac reveals. "Because he went around starkers and flashing his tackle. You know, in the nude."
The things you learn. Fiennes was truly lost to Mac and the rest of the British theater when, one night, Steven Spielberg was watching television and a young unknown appeared on the Bravo channel. There, in Lawrence, the director saw a potential Amon Goeth. While on business in London, he arranged a meeting. Remembers Spielberg, "He walked in and my first impression was, How could this skinny British actor with a sparkle of delight in his eyes frighten me into thinking he could murder another human being?"
He was cast at the eleventh hour in Quiz Show, before Schindler's wrapped, and then, too, there were those who wondered about his ability. "Nobody knew who he was, and nobody knew if he would pull it off," says costar Christopher McDonald, who portrays the quiz-show host. "We were hanging out one night and I asked him what he had done and he said he did this 'little movie with Steven Spielberg and what was nice about it was that it was shot in black and white.' Me, I would have been doing backflips if I had done that part. And Van Doren, obviously that's one of the most coveted parts in recent history."
Which may explain the rumblings around Hollywood that followed Fiennes' abrupt departure from Paradigm agent Clifford Stevens for CAA's Bryan Lourd and Kevin Huvane last winter. Stevens, who represents Andy Garcia and Laurence Fishburne, sniped about it in the press. "I hope [Fiennes] gets everything he deserves," Stevens told Entertainment Weekly. When contacted for this article, he refused comment, instructing his assistant Doug Wald to say, "You can use those exact words again." Asked in what context the statement was given, Wald checked with his boss and reported back, "Interpret it the way you see fit."
A nasty bit of business. But according to other sources who are well placed enough to know and objective enough to be believed, Fiennes had gotten the Goeth and Van Doren roles without the help of Stevens. "First of all, Clifford began to represent me through a connection with my English agent. I never actively sought his representation. That's fact number one," Fiennes says carefully. "Secondly, my feeling is that it's primarily a business agreement. Inevitably it becomes personal. But primarily it's a business agreement. And actors are entitled, as they are with publicists or lawyers, to leave an agent if they feel so inclined. For whatever reason. Thirdly, I've never left an agent before. I hope I don't ever have to do it again. I do know that the way I handled leaving Clifford was inept and hurtful to him and I regret the way that I left him. But I don't, at the moment, regret the decision to leave him. I don't want to say any more except that the way I handled this at the time was hurtful and I think that was due to me being anxious and inexperienced and nervous about it.
"Much more worrying than Clifford Stevens is, what did my sister tell you about me?" A nervous laugh. "This is where I get really worried."
When Ralph Nathaniel Fiennes was just a toddler, his mother dressed him up in a frilly, white shirt and trotted him off to a birthday party. There, amid screaming children sitting around a table, Ralph jumped up out of his chair, ran to the front of the room, and started singing the theme song to Rawhide over and over again. It was perhaps the first time the actor commanded an audience's attention. Fiennes entered the world on December 22, 1962, in Suffolk, the first of six children born over seven years. According to his sister, Martha (the second oldest), their mother, Jini, always maintained that all her children were in birth and infancy exactly to character. "And you know," Martha says, calling from her London home, "Ralph took three days to be born."
Six years after that event, Mark Fiennes, a farmer turned photographer, moved his wife and children to Ireland. From there, no fewer than fifteen moves were made throughout southwestern England -- many of the homes built or renovated by Mark's own hand. Though raised Catholic, Ralph says, he "chucked it all in before I was confirmed."
"People always think, Oh, the pressure on the oldest -- they're at the head of the family," says Martha. "I think it's important to say I don't think Ralph ever felt that responsibility. He didn't operate in that way. From a tiny child he has had an incredible sense of self-containment, sense of his own purpose." True to form, even when faced with having to make new friends, constantly transferring from Episcopalian to Roman Catholic to Quaker to state schools, "Ralph has never had the slightest interest to put on masks or behave in certain way to make himself attractive to people."
Acting, of course, was one mask he was willing to wear. And in his three brothers and two sisters he had a hostage audience. When he was seven, Ralph's parents bought him a Victorian-style Pollock's toy theater. Complete with a proscenium and a curtain, the wooden set had cardboard characters operated with wires. "We wanted to help backstage, or play a girl's part -- but no, no! Ralph had to play all the parts," Martha tattles. "And we had to sit down in front and watch three-hour-long, really wordy plays! Like really long versions of Treasure Island or The Corsican Brothers." She sighs. "He did it beautifully. And the footlights were brilliant."
He also had a talent for painting. After graduating from secondary school, Fiennes spent a year at the Chelsea College of Art and Design before being accepted into the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. But any question on what motivated him to leave one art form for another earns the inquirer another evil eyeballing. ("Suffer one of Ralph's withering looks and you can be turned to dust," confirms Martha. "I say that affectionately. That look is what he deals in, that's his currency.")
"I don't know," he says, clearly irritated, carving away at his chicken with a fork in one hand and a knife in the other. "I guess being in art school, where all the kinds of linear thinking are knocked out of you, gave me confidence to say, 'Actually, if I can think about doing design or painting or sculpture or whatever, I can think about being an actor.' " He pauses, looks up: "I've bored you with that answer."
The punishment for being bored with a Ralph Fiennes answer? "Your time is up soon."
"I thought he was a total wanker!" says Neil Dudgeon, who met Fiennes at RADA in their first year. "The only thing I heard him say the first three weeks was, 'Um, it's Rafe, actually. It's the correct, Old English pronunciation.' I thought, You're a complete upper-class git!" (A git? "It's a bit less than a wanker.")
Dudgeon was won over the day Fiennes handed him a cassette in choir practice and introduced him to Billie Holiday. "He turned around quite rapidly in my estimation. We had just seemed to be totally different people who couldn't possibly have anything in common, which was partly about my working-class chip on me shoulder." Before long the two were spending school breaks together. "He said, 'Oh, you must come down, my mum's got a cottage in Dorset.' And I thought, I don't know if this is a good idea. And he said, 'No, it's a tiny little place.' And not knowing him very well at that stage, I imagined, Oh, we'll go to your great big mansion and you'll have your snooty family around and I'm not going to fit in at all. And he said, 'No, no, really, it's ever so small. And Mum's there and the twins and me sister.' We got there and it was the smallest place you've ever seen! Totally lovely."
The Fiennes side of the family can be traced back through the centuries. But as is common with long lines, after the money has worn itself out from one generation to the next, all that remains to be passed down are the cultural accoutrements of class. Or, as Dudgeon puts it, "the best part of it -- their intelligence, compassion, and decency. He's had a lot of love in his life."
Fiennes softens visibly when speaking of his parents. Asked if there is a childhood moment that he holds dear, he pulls out a verbal snapshot. "When I was quite young, my father used to get me up very early, and I would come into the darkroom and watch him develop," recalls Fiennes. "Occasionally I would go on a walk with him and then go to the darkroom. I think he was making an effort because it was a tough time economically for my parents. In hindsight, he was giving me his time, one to one. The rest of the day was taken up [with work]. I just remember damp English mornings. They're so still and quiet and no one's around. And I could hear the pigeons cooing." In the middle of Orso, in a beautiful, aching voice, he coos: "Coooo, coooo. Like that. That's one of those sounds that's very haunting to me."
Fiennes says that Schindler's List was the last movie his mother saw. She died last Christmas at 54, from complications of breast cancer. He's not uncomfortable speaking of her, but he is palpably sad. "I just feel lucky that all of us were there," he says. He pauses. "You grieve. A person you love dies and in the way they die, they're giving you a gift." He stares at the table, a long, elegant finger absently tracing the tablecloth. "It's hard to explain, really. It's the experience of being a witness to death that, in a way, is so revealing. It is the way that you are a witness, in that it is really full of love. That is its own gift."
