THE REEL MR FIENNES

By Mary Colbert
Vogue Magazine
Australia
Photographs by Uli Weber
January 1998

Actor Ralph Fiennes is always searching, questioning and reviewing his craft. Here he talks to Mary Colbert about his latest role in Oscar and Lucinda

"America works on a cult of celebrity, but that's not me; it's not who I am," says Ralph Fiennes.

Millions of women would envy this assignment, thousands would pay to take my place. So why, as I sit at a corner table at London's hangout of the entertainment, elite, the Groucho Club, with one of the world's most charismatic actors, Ralph Fiennes, do I feel so ill at ease? Why can't I just enjoy the scoop?

Those amazingly piercing eyes, so expressive on screen, are much more impenetrable now. The light brown hair is slicked back, revealing slight furrows in a translucent forehead. Furrows of worry, I suspect. Despite the polite veneer, the body language indicates that there are probably many places Fiennes would rather be.

"You won't feel left out if I have a glass of red?" he asks, with a wan half-smile, averting his gaze to study the menu. "It might make me a better interview subject." He glances furtively around, as if he's afraid we're being watched. I feel as if at the slightest provocation, he might, fawn-like, find a reason to disappear.

"I envy actors who can do interviews, come across as easy sound bites, perceptive comments. It's to do with who they are..." he trails off. Obviously it is not to do with who Ralph Fiennes is. In his elegant suit and shirt, he has too much of a pedigree for that.

To ease the pain, I try some film-related small talk. Immediately, Fiennes perks up: "Watching films for 24 hours in a tent in Iceland?... I'd love to do that... You know (director Nikita) Mikhalkov? I'd love to meet him!"

Suddenly the tables have turned; now the 35 year old actor is interviewing me. A wee-practised ploy to defect attention from himself, you figure. But it is also, I'm soon to discover, the product of insatiable curiosity. And, as he talks -- questions -- so the furrowed forehead and elegant trappings recede. All I can see is the boyish excitement of Peter Carey's Oscar.

In that flash I'm given an insight into what producer Robin Dalton and Gillian Armstrong saw in 1992 when they offered him the role in their film adaptation of Carey's book before Ralph Fiennes became famous. "When I met Ralph he was much more like Oscar than any of the stronger characters he has played," said Armstrong. "He was the sweetest most vulnerable man with a true heart and soul which I think comes through."

"We saw many people who could play an odd Oscar, but did they have the romantic side and strength?" she asked. "We saw many romantic heroes who were too strong. They didn't have the combination of depth and delicacy, strength and a true heart...It's a tricky thing to play innocence without coming over as a fool. What we were looking for, essentially, was a charming nerd."

Fiennes pricks up. "Did she say that?" He seems to find this quite amusing, in fact he's close to a chuckle now. "She thought I was [one]? The difficult thing was in making Oscar's eccentricities and outsiderness balance, so you don't think, 'Oh, I get him; he's peculiar,'" he ways. "He is highly intelligent and I wanted to convey that and his excitement. It does come out, doesn't it?"

For Fiennes, the initial hook was Laura Jone's script. "I loved its simplicity and depth. I read it before the book, and I was really moved...Do you think people will be? I hope so. Immediately I felt Oscar was me. I loved the fantastic quality of it, that's it's about deep, deep faith -- so rare today. I know Peter was thrilled with it; I love that there weren't any cliches or heroic deeds."

Fiennes often opts for anti-heroes, flawed men such as Amon Goeth (Schindler's List), Charles van Doren (Quiz Show), Count Ladislaus de Almasy (The English Patient) and Heathcliff, his first screen role in the disastrous Wuthering Heights, where Steven Spielberg first spotted him. Then, of course, there was the long stage flirtation with Hamlet, six weeks in London, three months in the US. This year he plays Pushkin's Eugene Onegin who kills his best friend in a film which he will executive produce and star in, which his sister Martha, a commercials director, will direct. Even as John Steed, in the forthcoming The Avengers opposite Uma, he is hardly your classic hero.

Oscar Hopkin's fatal flaw is gambling but Fiennes sees it as a metaphor for his lust for life. "The moment of not knowing which way the cards or dice are gong to fall, which horse will win is the moment Oscar feels totally present and alive," says Fiennes. "Tragically, he has the potential to live to the fullest but is pulled back by guilt. Lucinda is the only person who makes him feel comfortable and is able to heal him."

Animated by the subject, Fiennes's self-consciousness has receded. We talk of Oscar's penance and love quest, his ultimate wager of transporting the glass church inland from the coast. "Did you like the scene of the church in Grafton?" Fiennes interjects with a dreamy look. "Aren't those locations fantastic?"

Fiennes views things with the eye of the painter he once aspired to be. "I had the facility to draw and paint but didn't know how to focus and extend it," says the actor, who attended the Foundation course at Chelsea Art School for a year before deciding to become an actor. "One day I'd like to direct because I think dramatic image-making is the ultimate combination."

In a sense he already does practice this art. Actor Scott Glenn once said that actors put colours on a palette for directors to paint with. What's remarkable about Fiennes's palette is its range. Within one year, Armstrong and Dalton chose him for his innocence Spielberg for his "Sexual evil" as the Nazi commandant Goeth in Schindler's List, the film that transformed his life.

Fiennes had theatre pedigree from RADA, the Royal Shakespeare Company and The National Theatre but screenwise he was a virtual unknown. Schindler's List not only catapulted him to Oscar contention, but also made an indelible imprint on his psyche. "It was one of my most formative experiences," he acknowledges.

An immaculate researcher who immersed himself in every facet of gambling -- card games, casinos, horse racing -- to prepare for Oscar, Fiennes had read voraciously about the Holocaust for Schindler's List. And he hasn't lost the fascination. After talks in Hungary with director István Szabó (Colonel Redl) he will do an as-yet untitled film later this about three generations of a Jewish family (he will play one of the sons) early this century.

On Schindler's List he savoured the sense of surrogate family prevalent on film sets. "Although the subject matter was so disturbing, everyone working on it has an extraordinary feeling of ensemble," he says. "Everyone thought there was unquestionable integrity behind the project and everyone adored Steven."

Fiennes soaks up support and loyalty, experienced on several of his other movies, Armstrong and Dalton - "so loyal and good to me" -- come in for special praise. "Gillian was under incredible pressure all the time and she had such great humour and such caring yet was very tough when she needed to be."

As one of six children in a close-knit family, Fiennes had such camaraderie instilled, along with a love of self-expression and the arts, by his father, a farmer turned photographer who supplemented family income by renovating houses and selling them for profit, and mother Jini, a novelist, who died of breast cancer four years ago. Prior to her death she wrote a philosophical book, Pilgrimage: A Time To Seek, that Fiennes took with him to Hollywood. "Perhaps the interior way is the one that counts in the end," she wrote. Her eldest son: "My oblique response to it was that the work I do must be as truthful as possible."

Born in Suffolk, Fiennes attended Episcopalian, Catholic and Quaker schools in Britain and Ireland. The moving around was a bit of an upheaval but excellent preparation for later life. "I've had upheavals recently," he ventures. "I think I can handle major changes and uprooting because of the adjustments in those early days."

But surely life has been good to Fiennes; he must be content?

"You get very spoilt being sent scripts all the time and you do get choosy, but it is so exhilarating when something touches a chord, and you feel 'that's what I believe, want to make happen, be a part of.'" But contentment? Fiennes smiles wryly. "I guess so...? Then maybe I don't want to feel contented."

Certainly his best roles depict pained characters. Is he drawn to the exorcism-through-performance catharsis? "People ask me that," he responds. "I don't think 'Oh, there's a pained character, let me play it.' The attraction to some of these roles varies." Chekhov. "Talk about pain!" Fiennes exclaims.

He is concerned about being typecast in period pieces. "I had a bee in my bonnet about that but realise I have to go with what feels right, what interests me. Besides, period works are about today; seeing ourselves through the prism of another way of life. Finding a truth of a piece is always difficult," says Fiennes. "I find it easier to view it like a work in progress, not a finite target, the one who makes it finite is the person who cuts the film."

This sense of evolution is what challenges Fiennes, particularly his favourite Hamlet, which he wants to perform again. "You can never say you got it. There are so many unknowns: it's a fantastic role, a fantastic play." On that note he prepares to dash across town, late for another appointment. But he doesn't rush out. He continues talking for a few minutes. Masochism? Or relief that the ordeal is over? He even smiles as he leaves.