Ralph Fiennes
- Thread starter Odette
- Start date
www.liveinternet.ru
[FONT=arial,sans-serif][SIZE=-1]ralphfiennes.ning.com/
http://ralph-fiennes.blog.onet.pl/
[/SIZE][/FONT]
[FONT=arial,sans-serif][SIZE=-1]ralphfiennes.ning.com/
http://ralph-fiennes.blog.onet.pl/
[/SIZE][/FONT]
http://home.the-wire.com/~steph/rfrr/rfvfint.html
Vanity Fair Article
November 1995
A FIENNES MADNESS
By Leslie Bennetts
After packing theaters with his brooding, electric Hamlet, Ralph Fiennes is now the high-tech hero of Strange Days. Leslie Bennetts talks to the fiercely private star and his family about the darkness beneath his aristocratic exterior and the legacy of a powerful and unpredictable mother.
"Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me! You would play upon me, you would seem to know my stops, you would pluck out the heart of my mystery, you would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass; and there is much music, excellent voice, in this little organ yet cannot you make it speak. 'Sblood, do you think that I am easier to be played on than a pipe? Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, you cannot play upon me."
---Hamlet to Guildenstern in HAMLET, Act Three, Scene Two.
He is elusive as smoke. Pale and haggard, he drifts around the stifling loft like a wraith; he is tall but so gaunt and wan he seems fragile as a hothouse bloom. Finally he settles into an armchair and remains motionless, staring straight ahead, his noble John Barrymore profile tilted ever so slightly upward, as if he were listening for ethereal music coarser mortals cannot hear.
He manages to spend the next two hours talking to me without ever looking at me. His voice is scarcely audible, even from three feet away; he makes so faint an imprint on his surroundings, I keep fighting the uneasy sensation that he might dematerialize before my eyes. FAMOUS ACTOR VAPORIZES INTO THIN AIR; WITNESS HELD FOR QUESTIONING. It's most disconcertng.
I shouldn't be surprised, of course. Was it mere coincidence that when Fiennes opened on Broadway in Hamlet last spring, he chose to play much of the first scene standing motionless with his back to the audience? "Ralph Fiennes is a man who does not want to be seen," observed one critic.
No kidding. On my second visit, we flee the suffocating tropical swelter of Fiennes's rented warehouse for a restaurant around the corner. He's still as pale as death, his chiseled chin shadowed with stubble. Sitting across from me at a tiny bistro table, Fiennes fixes me with those piercing green eyes, the color of the Atlantic Ocean on a stormy winter day; his gaze is cold and unforgiving.
Not that one expected a teddy bear. Maybe an infinitesimal bit of charm, perhaps - would that be too much to ask? But all it takes is a look at Fiennes's film roles to understand that this guy is not going to be a barrel of laughs. When he burst upon the public consciousness as Amon Geoth in Schindler's List, Fiennes was a respectd classical actor in Britain, but largely unknown to the rest of the world. Schindler's List changed everything, with international acclaim and an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actor to reward his unforgettable portrait of the Nazi commandant whose idea of casual recreation was to lounge on the balcony of his mansion and pick off a few Jews with his rifle before getting dressed in the morning.
Then came Quiz Show, in which the oily, porcine Goeth had been astonishingly transformed into the Wasp prince Charles Van Doren, fine-boned and silk-threaded, the quintessence of ruling-class entitlement. But underneath that elegant exterior lurked the fatal character flaw that wrecks a life, and Fiennes was mesmerizing as Van Doren went down in flames. He didn't break your heart - the portrait was too chilly and remote for that - but in a role where almost everything important had to be conveyed without words, Fiennes filled you with awe at the prodigiousness of his gifts.
Then came Halmet, first in London and then, triumphantly, in New York, where the sold-out 15 week run became the hottest ticket in town. Celebrities thronged the audience - Keanu Reeves, Barbra Streisand, Tom Hanks, Demi Mooore, Bruce Willis, Steven Spielberg, Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, Cher, Kirk Douglas, Bette Midler, Lauren Bacall, Hugh Grant - and desperate would-be theatergoers camped out on lawn chairs overnight, hoping for standing-room admissions. The reviews were respectful if not reverential, but box-office sales swelled to 102.3 percent of capacity, and Fiennes snagged the Tony Award. If he could supercharge Shakespeare - never an easy sell on Broadway - so explosively, what couldn't he do?
But at least he can pick and choose. Indeed, at the age of 32, Fiennes certainly seems to be sitting in the catbird seat. After Hamlet, he started shooting the film version of Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient. The movie, co-starring Juliette Binoche, is being shot in Italy - scarcely hardship duty, after all. (Is it simply another coincidence that Fiennes plays a badly burned victim of World War II who - swathed in bandages - conceals his identity until the end?)
And October brought the release of Strange Days, which Fiennes describes as "a hybrid of old film noir with your basic thriller." Set in the last two days of the millennium, in an apocalyptic version of Los Angeles, this project actually elicits visible enthusiasm. "I was really thrilled to be offered Strange Days," Fiennes says, showing some uncharacteristic animation. "It's not a part someone would necessarily think of me for."
To the contrary, demurs director Kathryn Bigelow, "given the extraordinary range of his talents." After seeing Fiennes in Quiz Show and Schindler's List, she was stunned by "how incredibly diverse the characterizations were." Strange Days, which co-stars Juliette Lewis and Angela Bassett, will now present Ralph Fiennes as low-life sleazeball. He plays a corrupt ex-cop who has been kicked off the vice squad, only to become a black-market hustler trafficking in a form of virtual reality. "He sells a technology that enables you to experience other people's experiences," Bigelow explains. "He's the Santa Claus of the subconscious."
"He's a form of drug dealer," Fiennes offers, a knowing smile lifting his thin lips (which one journalist described as having "the sheen of rolled silk stockings" - an observation that, when applied to this particular actor, seems distinctly sinister).
It was the character's ambiguity that most appealed to Fiennes. "I like it when a character is not easy for the audience," he says slyly.
As usual, Fiennes manages to sustain that complexity; his Lenny may be a con artist and a loser, but he is also angst-ridden and achingly vulnerable - hardly your usual action hero. Fiennes conveys an odd, almost childlike sweetness in the midst of murder and mayhem; his ultimate motivation is always love, however doomed and misplaced it may be.
Whatever the fate of Strange Days, which was shown as the "Festival Centerpiece" of the New York Film Festival in September, Fiennes's contribution adds yet another unusual character to his body of work. Great roles, tons of work - these are problems?
Apparently so, at least for Fiennes. "To be in a position where people are talking about getting your commitment to a piece of work very far ahead in your calendar is something you only dream about as an actor - but suddenly, when it's there, it's quite alarming," he says glumly. "It's everything you ever wanted - but it's taking you away from your sense of who you are and what you know."
Even the enviable roles he's landed have contributed to that sense of erosion, it seems. "You put your energy, your thought, your imagination, your spirit into something," he explains. "It's all rooted in who you are. Your skin is what you manipulate to create the illusion of being someone else. And that costs you every time."
What does it cost you? "It costs you yourself," Fiennes says, so softly I can barely hear him.
Then there's all that troublesome adulation to contend with; clearly such a fastidious sensibility is offended by those sweating, eager bodies pressing in on him. "I feel ambivalent," he concedes. "I feel flattered... " He hesitates, and then adds with exasperation, "But I feel that if they really were a fan they would leave me alone and go home!"
There is real hostility in his voice, but then he checks himself and sighs wearily. "I try to remmber it can mean a lot to people, being moved or affected by a performance. They've gone on a journey; they believe they know you." He glares at me fiercely. "And, of course, they don't know you."
Moreover, one of Fiennes's overriding concerns is to prevent people form knowing him. He is throroughly incensed when asked personal questions; he refuses to say anything at all about his wife, a British actress named Alex Kingston, whom he met at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. (Friends describe Kingston as ravishingly beautiful, a very good actress, far more of an extrovert than Ralph, and a wonderful homemaker to boot.) Indeed, Fiennes recoils as if struck by a rattlesnake when I ask him why, after being together for nearly a decade, he and Kingston finally married a couple of years ago.
"Why I got married is deeply personal between my wife and me," he exclaims, his face darkening with anger. "There are some areas I just don't want to have in print..... People want to know about us, but it's our last area of privacy. This insistence on people knowing about your private life - " He shakes his head with disgust. "I did not become an actor because I wanted to be in magazines," he adds contemptuously. "I became an actor because I love the theater, because I love language. I love painting, I love all art forms!"
Given Fiennes's general state of irritation, I don't even dare ask about his name, which he pronounces "Rafe Fines." He claims that's the proper Old English pronunciation, but gets so annoyed when people question it that I can't quite face his scorn.
It's a great relief to talk to Fiennes's sisters later on and learn I'm not the only one to find him supercilious and impenatrable. "Martha said something I thought was so brilliant - that 'the withering look is his currency,'" reports Sophie Fiennes, quoting her older sister with a giggle. "Ralph can just look at you and cut you right down. Don't take it personally."
Martha Fiennes is equally amused by my experience with Ralph. "No, I don't think he's a happy-go-lucky, cheery, cheekie chappie - you could tell that by shaking his hand," she says, laughing merrily. "I think a lot of people find him difficult to read. He's always had that aloofness, and I don't think he would be offended by my saying he has an arrogant streak in him. You'll be talking to him and suddenly there will be a sort of gauze that creeps over his eyes - an extreme level of disinterest. He just sarts thinking about something else. He won't feel the social pressure to nod politely and say, "Oh, really - the weather was good last Friday?"
"My mother used to joke that it was such a relief when I came along; she said, 'You were so social, a busy, normal child!' I was obviously interacting with people, whereas Ralph would go to children's parties and, instead of interacting with the other children, he would go up to the hostess and very politely ask, 'I wonder if you have any jigsaw puzzles I could do?' On his own, if you please!"
Ralph's fierce need to carve out some solitude for himself is quite understandable, given his upbringing. He was raised as the eldest of six children in a wellborn but decidedly bohemian family. His grandfather was the managing director of a big steel corporation, but Ralph's father, Mark, began his career by working on sheep farms in Australia and Texas, and when he returned to England it was as a tenant farmer. Ralph's mother, Jini, was equally difficult to categorize; she wrote novels and poetry, she painted, and she seemed to dazzle everyone. The daughter of a brigadier in the Indian army, Jini cut quite a figure as a young woman living in the barn of a parsonage in Essex: She astonished the villagers by riding a motorscooter in a mixture of twinset and pearls with beatnik garb, considered dashing in 1961," reports one account.
Vanity Fair Article
November 1995
A FIENNES MADNESS
By Leslie Bennetts
After packing theaters with his brooding, electric Hamlet, Ralph Fiennes is now the high-tech hero of Strange Days. Leslie Bennetts talks to the fiercely private star and his family about the darkness beneath his aristocratic exterior and the legacy of a powerful and unpredictable mother.
"Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me! You would play upon me, you would seem to know my stops, you would pluck out the heart of my mystery, you would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass; and there is much music, excellent voice, in this little organ yet cannot you make it speak. 'Sblood, do you think that I am easier to be played on than a pipe? Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, you cannot play upon me."
---Hamlet to Guildenstern in HAMLET, Act Three, Scene Two.
He is elusive as smoke. Pale and haggard, he drifts around the stifling loft like a wraith; he is tall but so gaunt and wan he seems fragile as a hothouse bloom. Finally he settles into an armchair and remains motionless, staring straight ahead, his noble John Barrymore profile tilted ever so slightly upward, as if he were listening for ethereal music coarser mortals cannot hear.
He manages to spend the next two hours talking to me without ever looking at me. His voice is scarcely audible, even from three feet away; he makes so faint an imprint on his surroundings, I keep fighting the uneasy sensation that he might dematerialize before my eyes. FAMOUS ACTOR VAPORIZES INTO THIN AIR; WITNESS HELD FOR QUESTIONING. It's most disconcertng.
I shouldn't be surprised, of course. Was it mere coincidence that when Fiennes opened on Broadway in Hamlet last spring, he chose to play much of the first scene standing motionless with his back to the audience? "Ralph Fiennes is a man who does not want to be seen," observed one critic.
No kidding. On my second visit, we flee the suffocating tropical swelter of Fiennes's rented warehouse for a restaurant around the corner. He's still as pale as death, his chiseled chin shadowed with stubble. Sitting across from me at a tiny bistro table, Fiennes fixes me with those piercing green eyes, the color of the Atlantic Ocean on a stormy winter day; his gaze is cold and unforgiving.
Not that one expected a teddy bear. Maybe an infinitesimal bit of charm, perhaps - would that be too much to ask? But all it takes is a look at Fiennes's film roles to understand that this guy is not going to be a barrel of laughs. When he burst upon the public consciousness as Amon Geoth in Schindler's List, Fiennes was a respectd classical actor in Britain, but largely unknown to the rest of the world. Schindler's List changed everything, with international acclaim and an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actor to reward his unforgettable portrait of the Nazi commandant whose idea of casual recreation was to lounge on the balcony of his mansion and pick off a few Jews with his rifle before getting dressed in the morning.
Then came Quiz Show, in which the oily, porcine Goeth had been astonishingly transformed into the Wasp prince Charles Van Doren, fine-boned and silk-threaded, the quintessence of ruling-class entitlement. But underneath that elegant exterior lurked the fatal character flaw that wrecks a life, and Fiennes was mesmerizing as Van Doren went down in flames. He didn't break your heart - the portrait was too chilly and remote for that - but in a role where almost everything important had to be conveyed without words, Fiennes filled you with awe at the prodigiousness of his gifts.
Then came Halmet, first in London and then, triumphantly, in New York, where the sold-out 15 week run became the hottest ticket in town. Celebrities thronged the audience - Keanu Reeves, Barbra Streisand, Tom Hanks, Demi Mooore, Bruce Willis, Steven Spielberg, Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, Cher, Kirk Douglas, Bette Midler, Lauren Bacall, Hugh Grant - and desperate would-be theatergoers camped out on lawn chairs overnight, hoping for standing-room admissions. The reviews were respectful if not reverential, but box-office sales swelled to 102.3 percent of capacity, and Fiennes snagged the Tony Award. If he could supercharge Shakespeare - never an easy sell on Broadway - so explosively, what couldn't he do?
But at least he can pick and choose. Indeed, at the age of 32, Fiennes certainly seems to be sitting in the catbird seat. After Hamlet, he started shooting the film version of Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient. The movie, co-starring Juliette Binoche, is being shot in Italy - scarcely hardship duty, after all. (Is it simply another coincidence that Fiennes plays a badly burned victim of World War II who - swathed in bandages - conceals his identity until the end?)
And October brought the release of Strange Days, which Fiennes describes as "a hybrid of old film noir with your basic thriller." Set in the last two days of the millennium, in an apocalyptic version of Los Angeles, this project actually elicits visible enthusiasm. "I was really thrilled to be offered Strange Days," Fiennes says, showing some uncharacteristic animation. "It's not a part someone would necessarily think of me for."
To the contrary, demurs director Kathryn Bigelow, "given the extraordinary range of his talents." After seeing Fiennes in Quiz Show and Schindler's List, she was stunned by "how incredibly diverse the characterizations were." Strange Days, which co-stars Juliette Lewis and Angela Bassett, will now present Ralph Fiennes as low-life sleazeball. He plays a corrupt ex-cop who has been kicked off the vice squad, only to become a black-market hustler trafficking in a form of virtual reality. "He sells a technology that enables you to experience other people's experiences," Bigelow explains. "He's the Santa Claus of the subconscious."
"He's a form of drug dealer," Fiennes offers, a knowing smile lifting his thin lips (which one journalist described as having "the sheen of rolled silk stockings" - an observation that, when applied to this particular actor, seems distinctly sinister).
It was the character's ambiguity that most appealed to Fiennes. "I like it when a character is not easy for the audience," he says slyly.
As usual, Fiennes manages to sustain that complexity; his Lenny may be a con artist and a loser, but he is also angst-ridden and achingly vulnerable - hardly your usual action hero. Fiennes conveys an odd, almost childlike sweetness in the midst of murder and mayhem; his ultimate motivation is always love, however doomed and misplaced it may be.
Whatever the fate of Strange Days, which was shown as the "Festival Centerpiece" of the New York Film Festival in September, Fiennes's contribution adds yet another unusual character to his body of work. Great roles, tons of work - these are problems?
Apparently so, at least for Fiennes. "To be in a position where people are talking about getting your commitment to a piece of work very far ahead in your calendar is something you only dream about as an actor - but suddenly, when it's there, it's quite alarming," he says glumly. "It's everything you ever wanted - but it's taking you away from your sense of who you are and what you know."
Even the enviable roles he's landed have contributed to that sense of erosion, it seems. "You put your energy, your thought, your imagination, your spirit into something," he explains. "It's all rooted in who you are. Your skin is what you manipulate to create the illusion of being someone else. And that costs you every time."
What does it cost you? "It costs you yourself," Fiennes says, so softly I can barely hear him.
Then there's all that troublesome adulation to contend with; clearly such a fastidious sensibility is offended by those sweating, eager bodies pressing in on him. "I feel ambivalent," he concedes. "I feel flattered... " He hesitates, and then adds with exasperation, "But I feel that if they really were a fan they would leave me alone and go home!"
There is real hostility in his voice, but then he checks himself and sighs wearily. "I try to remmber it can mean a lot to people, being moved or affected by a performance. They've gone on a journey; they believe they know you." He glares at me fiercely. "And, of course, they don't know you."
Moreover, one of Fiennes's overriding concerns is to prevent people form knowing him. He is throroughly incensed when asked personal questions; he refuses to say anything at all about his wife, a British actress named Alex Kingston, whom he met at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. (Friends describe Kingston as ravishingly beautiful, a very good actress, far more of an extrovert than Ralph, and a wonderful homemaker to boot.) Indeed, Fiennes recoils as if struck by a rattlesnake when I ask him why, after being together for nearly a decade, he and Kingston finally married a couple of years ago.
"Why I got married is deeply personal between my wife and me," he exclaims, his face darkening with anger. "There are some areas I just don't want to have in print..... People want to know about us, but it's our last area of privacy. This insistence on people knowing about your private life - " He shakes his head with disgust. "I did not become an actor because I wanted to be in magazines," he adds contemptuously. "I became an actor because I love the theater, because I love language. I love painting, I love all art forms!"
Given Fiennes's general state of irritation, I don't even dare ask about his name, which he pronounces "Rafe Fines." He claims that's the proper Old English pronunciation, but gets so annoyed when people question it that I can't quite face his scorn.
It's a great relief to talk to Fiennes's sisters later on and learn I'm not the only one to find him supercilious and impenatrable. "Martha said something I thought was so brilliant - that 'the withering look is his currency,'" reports Sophie Fiennes, quoting her older sister with a giggle. "Ralph can just look at you and cut you right down. Don't take it personally."
Martha Fiennes is equally amused by my experience with Ralph. "No, I don't think he's a happy-go-lucky, cheery, cheekie chappie - you could tell that by shaking his hand," she says, laughing merrily. "I think a lot of people find him difficult to read. He's always had that aloofness, and I don't think he would be offended by my saying he has an arrogant streak in him. You'll be talking to him and suddenly there will be a sort of gauze that creeps over his eyes - an extreme level of disinterest. He just sarts thinking about something else. He won't feel the social pressure to nod politely and say, "Oh, really - the weather was good last Friday?"
"My mother used to joke that it was such a relief when I came along; she said, 'You were so social, a busy, normal child!' I was obviously interacting with people, whereas Ralph would go to children's parties and, instead of interacting with the other children, he would go up to the hostess and very politely ask, 'I wonder if you have any jigsaw puzzles I could do?' On his own, if you please!"
Ralph's fierce need to carve out some solitude for himself is quite understandable, given his upbringing. He was raised as the eldest of six children in a wellborn but decidedly bohemian family. His grandfather was the managing director of a big steel corporation, but Ralph's father, Mark, began his career by working on sheep farms in Australia and Texas, and when he returned to England it was as a tenant farmer. Ralph's mother, Jini, was equally difficult to categorize; she wrote novels and poetry, she painted, and she seemed to dazzle everyone. The daughter of a brigadier in the Indian army, Jini cut quite a figure as a young woman living in the barn of a parsonage in Essex: She astonished the villagers by riding a motorscooter in a mixture of twinset and pearls with beatnik garb, considered dashing in 1961," reports one account.
Ralph was born in Suffolk, where he spent his first few years living in a small farmhouse near the sea. "It was an idyllic childhood, that period on the farm," he recalls. "We would often go to the beach in the summer. I was six when we moved away from the farm; my father taught himself photography, and things were tough for a while, while he sought to establish himself as a photographer."
But after that they moved constantly - Ralph estimates 10 or 12 times while he was growing up. The constant upheavals took their toll on Mark Fiennes's professional prospects: "My father was always freelance, and any contacts that had been set up would be lost when we moved on to the next place," Ralph says.
Money was always tight, and for the children, who were never shielded from the family's financial straits, some of the moves were quite traumatic, particularly when the family decamped to Ireland. Schooling was equally chopped up; at times Jini taught the children at home, and at other times - Ralph remembers with particular fondness a brief stint at a Quaker boarding school - his parents scraped up enough money to send him away to school. When the money ran out and he was told he couldn't go back, "I was very, very distressed," he says.
But after that, "I didn't care. From then on I don't think I ever considered that any school would be permanent, that any friendships would be permanent. I would always move on; there would always be change.... It helped me to know that nothing is forever."
The Fiennes children remember their mother, who died two years ago from breast cancer, as enormously loving and supportive of their individual talents. "Express yourself! - that's what my mother was about," Martha says. It was Jini who first read Hamlet to Ralph at age eight, and then - seeing how avid his interest was - gave him a recording of Laurence Olivier in the role. Ralph also remembers vividly how enthralled he was by a toy theater his parents got him. "I loved the world - the lights, the scenery, the color, the gaudiness of it," he says dreamily.
Since Ralph became famous, articles about the Fiennes family have shown a distinct tendancy to mythologize Jini as a sort of artistically inclined Earth Mother. She did raise a notably creative brood. Ralph started out as an art student who intended to be a painter. When I ask why he became an actor, Ralph shrugs. "The glibbest answer would be that it's a form of escapism."
Escapism from what? "No - to what," he corrects me. "I think that if you inhabit the world of a play, the world of a film, it's like a painter: you are creating a world."
His other siblings have similar drives. The second-eldest is Martha, a director of music videos and commercials who is now planning her first feature film. Then came Magnus, a musician; Sophie, a freelance stage and film producer; and the twins, Joseph, an actor, and Jacob, a gameskeeper. ("He's the true rebel," says Sophie.) There is also Michael, known as Mick, a foster brother the Fienneses took in when he was 11 years old; he is now an archaeologist.
"My mother was always full of massive enthusiasm," says Sophie. "She switched everyone on; she lit them like lamps." But Jini Fiennes had troubling dimensions as well. "There were enormous problems; my mother often showed a great level of distress as an individual," Martha acknowledges. "As a young woman, she had been diagnosed psychiatrically as an 'incurable hysteric,' and there was a side to Jini that was very, very unpredictable. She was close to the edge at times, and as children we all witnessed it. It was frightening.... She would scream, break crockery, threaten to kill us all. And yet she was immensely loving and totally encouraging."
Martha suspects that her mother's volatility had a formative impact on her elder brother. "We all witnessed Jini's derangement at times, and I'm sure Ralph absorbed it," she says. "I think Ralph has a dark side; he has an innate understanding of human nature at the nether-region level. He understands great distress and sadness. There is always a strange beauty in tragedy."
Sophie agrees. "Ralph has a disciplined mind; he is not so emotional as my mother," she says. "But he has a lot of understanding of darkness, of pain, of the twisted, darker recesses of the human psyche."
The subject of Ralph's dark side emerges as a tantalizing question from even the most cursory analysis of his work. Various commentators have attributed different qualities to it; the common thread in his roles, according to one critic, is a "loneliness driven to extremes." Perhaps so, but that seems only a partial explanation; someone can portray loneliness without communicating the potent sense of darkness one feels in Fiennes's work. It is difficult to define precisely, but that is part of its power. "He carries a mystery with him," says Terry Hands, who directed Fiennes in Love's Labour's Lost at the Royal Shakespeare Company. "There is an enigma, and it's very compelling."
"I saw him play Edmund in King Lear at the RSC, and I was astonished at his qualities," says Peter Markham, who later directed Fiennes in The Cormorant. "He has a very powerful and ambiguous presence; it's that ambiguity between gentleness and pathology that I find fascinating. All eyes are on him when he's on the stage; other actors have to fight to get my attention."
Fiennes's directors have clearly discerned the murky depths that lurk beneath his aristocratic exterior. Robert Redford has said that he cast Fiennes as Van Doren because he saw in him a "dark, haunted quality underneath the perfect shell." Speilberg has spoken of a certain "sexual evil" in Fiennes that inspired his being chosen for Amon Goeth. "He's the polar opposite to someone like Tom Hanks, who doesn't have that dark side," remarks Chris Menaul, who directed Fiennes in the British television film A Dangerous Man: Lawrence After Arabia. "But that dark side is very interesting to watch, isn't it? It's what gives Ralph his unusual quality as an actor."
Fiennes even manages to infuse famously heroic roles with dark dimensions. In A Dangerous Man, he turned the dashing T.E. Lawrence into a vision from Conrad, "a spooky, almost Kurtzian egotist," as one writer put it. After Fiennes starred in a remake of Wuthering Heights, one British critic described his characterization as a moody, mean Heathcliff"; another called it a "violent, unromantic, self-hating Heathcliff"; and a third writer complained that Fiennes portrayed the ultimate romantic hero "as though he had permanent indigestion."
Moreover, Fiennes is actively unhappy when someone tries to impose a happy ending on him. In The Cormorant, he plays a young husband and father who inherits a wild seabird and finds himself inexorably drawn to the sinister force it represents, even at the cost of his marriage and the safety of his loved ones. "A normal everyday story of family, isn't it?" Fiennes remarks, grinning wickedly. The original plans called for a horrific ending, and Fiennes was extremelyy disappointed when the filmmakers decided against having the young father burned alive in a fire. "I sort of felt something horrendous needed to happen," he concedes.
Given all this, it seems like remarkable disingenuousness when Fiennes professes astonishment that others detect a dark side in him. He claims to have no idea what they're talking about. "People are always trying to think that in order to play a sadist you have to be one," he says disdainfully. "I was not required to hurt when I was playing Amon Goeth. I tried to put myself in a place where I could imagine what it was like to have a form of prejudice that was so extreme that certain groups of people became equivalent to cockroaches or rats." As an actor, Fiennes focused on bringing out Goeth's humanity. "I'm drawn to... not what is dark - I'm interested in the flip side, the B-side of people," he explains. "As an actor, your challenge is to get your mind around the psychology of another human being - and the bigger the polarity, the more dramatic that is."
It was the complexity of Shakespearean roles that originally attracted Fiennes to the theater, where his gift was apparent early on. When Fiennes auditioned for the Royal Shakespeare Company, "he gave one of the three best auditions I have ever seen here," recalls Adrian Noble, the company's current artistic director.
Fiennes quickly made his mark. "I remember rounds of applause at the ends of his speeches," says Terry Hands, who was RSC's artistic director during Fiennes's time there. "We were all very embarrassed by it, but what it was was the audience responding to the performer doing something superlatively well - they thanked him for it. I have not heard that kind of reaction for decades."
Although many stage actors find the transition to film quite difficult, Fiennes proved a natural. "It would be four in the morning, it would be 90 degrees, there would be a million extras talking, and he'd be so focused it blew me away," Juliette Lewis reports of the Strange Days shoot. "He would do take after take with the same precision as the first time."
Fiennes has always impressed colleagues with his determination. "He's very strong; he's got a backbone of steel," says Michael Rudman, a director who worked with Fiennes at the Royal National Theatre. But such certitude does not breed intransigence. "He is one of the most open-minded actors I've ever had the pleasure of working with," attests Speilberg. "Ralph does a great deal of research into the characters he is playing. When he gets to the set he.... has a game plan for the day - even though he is extremely maleable and will throw it all out if you want him to. Ralph becomes your variable-speed power tool."
Mindful of such accolades, knowledgeable observers are forecasting a durable career on stage and screen. No doubt we will see Fiennes in many guises over time. But don't expect him to let anyone pluck out the heart of his mystery. "He's this beautiful house, but there are a couple of rooms that are locked. You can't go in," observes Angela Bassett, who worked with Fiennes in Strange Days.
Part of this may be calculation. "Ralph actually said to me once that there are areas of his self that he only reveals when he's acting," notes Jonathan Kent.
But mere technique is not sufficient to explain Fiennes's impact. Before taking my leave, I remind him what a friend of his once said: "The real Ralph is very secret. He is paid to be a liar. Always remember how good he was at being that Nazi."
There is a crafty look in Fiennes's eyes as he considers this assessment. "I can be secret when I want to be," he concedes after a moment, a faint smile curling his lip. His incisors are pointed as fangs. "I'm in the business of pretending," he adds, and shrugs. "I'm only an illusionist." His smile broadens, but it does not warm. It scorches like dry ice.
But after that they moved constantly - Ralph estimates 10 or 12 times while he was growing up. The constant upheavals took their toll on Mark Fiennes's professional prospects: "My father was always freelance, and any contacts that had been set up would be lost when we moved on to the next place," Ralph says.
Money was always tight, and for the children, who were never shielded from the family's financial straits, some of the moves were quite traumatic, particularly when the family decamped to Ireland. Schooling was equally chopped up; at times Jini taught the children at home, and at other times - Ralph remembers with particular fondness a brief stint at a Quaker boarding school - his parents scraped up enough money to send him away to school. When the money ran out and he was told he couldn't go back, "I was very, very distressed," he says.
But after that, "I didn't care. From then on I don't think I ever considered that any school would be permanent, that any friendships would be permanent. I would always move on; there would always be change.... It helped me to know that nothing is forever."
The Fiennes children remember their mother, who died two years ago from breast cancer, as enormously loving and supportive of their individual talents. "Express yourself! - that's what my mother was about," Martha says. It was Jini who first read Hamlet to Ralph at age eight, and then - seeing how avid his interest was - gave him a recording of Laurence Olivier in the role. Ralph also remembers vividly how enthralled he was by a toy theater his parents got him. "I loved the world - the lights, the scenery, the color, the gaudiness of it," he says dreamily.
Since Ralph became famous, articles about the Fiennes family have shown a distinct tendancy to mythologize Jini as a sort of artistically inclined Earth Mother. She did raise a notably creative brood. Ralph started out as an art student who intended to be a painter. When I ask why he became an actor, Ralph shrugs. "The glibbest answer would be that it's a form of escapism."
Escapism from what? "No - to what," he corrects me. "I think that if you inhabit the world of a play, the world of a film, it's like a painter: you are creating a world."
His other siblings have similar drives. The second-eldest is Martha, a director of music videos and commercials who is now planning her first feature film. Then came Magnus, a musician; Sophie, a freelance stage and film producer; and the twins, Joseph, an actor, and Jacob, a gameskeeper. ("He's the true rebel," says Sophie.) There is also Michael, known as Mick, a foster brother the Fienneses took in when he was 11 years old; he is now an archaeologist.
"My mother was always full of massive enthusiasm," says Sophie. "She switched everyone on; she lit them like lamps." But Jini Fiennes had troubling dimensions as well. "There were enormous problems; my mother often showed a great level of distress as an individual," Martha acknowledges. "As a young woman, she had been diagnosed psychiatrically as an 'incurable hysteric,' and there was a side to Jini that was very, very unpredictable. She was close to the edge at times, and as children we all witnessed it. It was frightening.... She would scream, break crockery, threaten to kill us all. And yet she was immensely loving and totally encouraging."
Martha suspects that her mother's volatility had a formative impact on her elder brother. "We all witnessed Jini's derangement at times, and I'm sure Ralph absorbed it," she says. "I think Ralph has a dark side; he has an innate understanding of human nature at the nether-region level. He understands great distress and sadness. There is always a strange beauty in tragedy."
Sophie agrees. "Ralph has a disciplined mind; he is not so emotional as my mother," she says. "But he has a lot of understanding of darkness, of pain, of the twisted, darker recesses of the human psyche."
The subject of Ralph's dark side emerges as a tantalizing question from even the most cursory analysis of his work. Various commentators have attributed different qualities to it; the common thread in his roles, according to one critic, is a "loneliness driven to extremes." Perhaps so, but that seems only a partial explanation; someone can portray loneliness without communicating the potent sense of darkness one feels in Fiennes's work. It is difficult to define precisely, but that is part of its power. "He carries a mystery with him," says Terry Hands, who directed Fiennes in Love's Labour's Lost at the Royal Shakespeare Company. "There is an enigma, and it's very compelling."
"I saw him play Edmund in King Lear at the RSC, and I was astonished at his qualities," says Peter Markham, who later directed Fiennes in The Cormorant. "He has a very powerful and ambiguous presence; it's that ambiguity between gentleness and pathology that I find fascinating. All eyes are on him when he's on the stage; other actors have to fight to get my attention."
Fiennes's directors have clearly discerned the murky depths that lurk beneath his aristocratic exterior. Robert Redford has said that he cast Fiennes as Van Doren because he saw in him a "dark, haunted quality underneath the perfect shell." Speilberg has spoken of a certain "sexual evil" in Fiennes that inspired his being chosen for Amon Goeth. "He's the polar opposite to someone like Tom Hanks, who doesn't have that dark side," remarks Chris Menaul, who directed Fiennes in the British television film A Dangerous Man: Lawrence After Arabia. "But that dark side is very interesting to watch, isn't it? It's what gives Ralph his unusual quality as an actor."
Fiennes even manages to infuse famously heroic roles with dark dimensions. In A Dangerous Man, he turned the dashing T.E. Lawrence into a vision from Conrad, "a spooky, almost Kurtzian egotist," as one writer put it. After Fiennes starred in a remake of Wuthering Heights, one British critic described his characterization as a moody, mean Heathcliff"; another called it a "violent, unromantic, self-hating Heathcliff"; and a third writer complained that Fiennes portrayed the ultimate romantic hero "as though he had permanent indigestion."
Moreover, Fiennes is actively unhappy when someone tries to impose a happy ending on him. In The Cormorant, he plays a young husband and father who inherits a wild seabird and finds himself inexorably drawn to the sinister force it represents, even at the cost of his marriage and the safety of his loved ones. "A normal everyday story of family, isn't it?" Fiennes remarks, grinning wickedly. The original plans called for a horrific ending, and Fiennes was extremelyy disappointed when the filmmakers decided against having the young father burned alive in a fire. "I sort of felt something horrendous needed to happen," he concedes.
Given all this, it seems like remarkable disingenuousness when Fiennes professes astonishment that others detect a dark side in him. He claims to have no idea what they're talking about. "People are always trying to think that in order to play a sadist you have to be one," he says disdainfully. "I was not required to hurt when I was playing Amon Goeth. I tried to put myself in a place where I could imagine what it was like to have a form of prejudice that was so extreme that certain groups of people became equivalent to cockroaches or rats." As an actor, Fiennes focused on bringing out Goeth's humanity. "I'm drawn to... not what is dark - I'm interested in the flip side, the B-side of people," he explains. "As an actor, your challenge is to get your mind around the psychology of another human being - and the bigger the polarity, the more dramatic that is."
It was the complexity of Shakespearean roles that originally attracted Fiennes to the theater, where his gift was apparent early on. When Fiennes auditioned for the Royal Shakespeare Company, "he gave one of the three best auditions I have ever seen here," recalls Adrian Noble, the company's current artistic director.
Fiennes quickly made his mark. "I remember rounds of applause at the ends of his speeches," says Terry Hands, who was RSC's artistic director during Fiennes's time there. "We were all very embarrassed by it, but what it was was the audience responding to the performer doing something superlatively well - they thanked him for it. I have not heard that kind of reaction for decades."
Although many stage actors find the transition to film quite difficult, Fiennes proved a natural. "It would be four in the morning, it would be 90 degrees, there would be a million extras talking, and he'd be so focused it blew me away," Juliette Lewis reports of the Strange Days shoot. "He would do take after take with the same precision as the first time."
Fiennes has always impressed colleagues with his determination. "He's very strong; he's got a backbone of steel," says Michael Rudman, a director who worked with Fiennes at the Royal National Theatre. But such certitude does not breed intransigence. "He is one of the most open-minded actors I've ever had the pleasure of working with," attests Speilberg. "Ralph does a great deal of research into the characters he is playing. When he gets to the set he.... has a game plan for the day - even though he is extremely maleable and will throw it all out if you want him to. Ralph becomes your variable-speed power tool."
Mindful of such accolades, knowledgeable observers are forecasting a durable career on stage and screen. No doubt we will see Fiennes in many guises over time. But don't expect him to let anyone pluck out the heart of his mystery. "He's this beautiful house, but there are a couple of rooms that are locked. You can't go in," observes Angela Bassett, who worked with Fiennes in Strange Days.
Part of this may be calculation. "Ralph actually said to me once that there are areas of his self that he only reveals when he's acting," notes Jonathan Kent.
But mere technique is not sufficient to explain Fiennes's impact. Before taking my leave, I remind him what a friend of his once said: "The real Ralph is very secret. He is paid to be a liar. Always remember how good he was at being that Nazi."
There is a crafty look in Fiennes's eyes as he considers this assessment. "I can be secret when I want to be," he concedes after a moment, a faint smile curling his lip. His incisors are pointed as fangs. "I'm in the business of pretending," he adds, and shrugs. "I'm only an illusionist." His smile broadens, but it does not warm. It scorches like dry ice.
littlepaperstars
Active Member
- Joined
- Feb 2, 2011
- Messages
- 1,488
- Reaction score
- 2
Few Tempest pics. Runs at the Theatre Royal Haymarket from tomorrow (Aug 27) until October 29.
westendtheatre.com
westendtheatre.com
