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Ralph Fiennes
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"I can do scary," Ralph Fiennes says, leaning across a restaurant table. Fiennes smiles at the mention of his playing a serial killer alongside famous movie monster Hannibal Lecter in Red Dragon, a remake of the Michael Mann film Manhunter. Fiennes pauses for a moment. He doesn't say anything. He doesn't have to. His solemn pale eyes speak for him. He's been declared the "Hamlet of his time" and remains best known for romantic leading man roles in director Anthony Minghella's Oscar-winning The English Patient and director Neil Jordan's The End of the Affair.
Talk of Red Dragon has the veteran actor reflecting on his frightening performance as Concentration Camp Commandant Amon Goeth in director Steven Spielberg's Holocaust drama Schindler's List. Midway into the film, Fiennes displays Goeth's evil with bold swagger. Goeth stands on his balcony, rifle in hand, and takes target practice on the camp's Jewish inmates. Later in the film, alone in his cellar with a pretty Jewish inmate, Goetz reveals a flicker of kindness for the woman. The moment is fleeting, ending when Goeth regains his vicious composure and delivers a brutal punch.
Fiennes' thin lips curl into a smile at the memory of his scene-stealing performance. At that instant, you feel as if you can read his thoughts. He's played a monster before. So why not revisit evil in one of the most anticipated films of the year?
"The key to playing a villain is to be restrained," the 39-year-old actor says, speaking recently in Toronto. "It's also important play it subtly, to show audiences something that they haven't seen before."
Red Dragon is Fiennes' first shot at surprising audiences who are used to seeing him in more classical roles. In director David Cronenberg's Spider, Fiennes plays a man recently discharged from a mental institution who's still haunted by his childhood memories. Later in the year, Fiennes tries his hand at romantic comedy, playing a wealthy bachelor who falls in love with Jennifer Lopez's hotel housekeeper in Maid in Manhattan. For a stage-trained English actor, the challenge with comedy and horror is to find the physical side of the performance.
"In Spider, Ralph had to act without dialogue, and I don't think that was a problem for him," Cronenberg says. "He did so much with his body. But it wasn't the performance of a mime. He was able to show emotion through body language, the clothes he wore and the tobacco stains on his fingers."
According to Fiennes, dialogue is just one piece of the performance. "People say it's a very internal peformance and it is. I also think that a perceptive audience sees what Spider is feeling and thinking."
It seems as if Fiennes' life has always revolved around the arts. He was born Dec. 22, 1962 in Suffolk, England, one of six children who felt greatly influenced by his mother's love for art and literature. Their middle-class family moved frequently between England and Ireland. Fiennes' father, Mark, was a farmer who later became a photographer. His mother, Jini, who died of breast cancer in 1993, was a novelist who published under the name Jennifer Lash. Her love of culture made a powerful impact. Ralph's brother Joseph has gained success in the films Shakespeare in Love and Elizabeth, two box office hits. Ralph's sister Martha directed him in a version of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin. When Ralph took a stage production of Hamlet to Moscow, Martha directed a documentary about the tour. Another brother is a composer. The only sibling who didn't go into the arts is an older brother who's a gamekeeper.
Fiennes entered college as a painter but quit the Chelsea School of Art and won a place at the drama school RADA. He soon played roles at the Regent's Park Open Air Theater and then graduated to the Royal Shakespeare Company where he played Claudio in Much Ado About Nothing and Berowne in Love's Labour's Lost.
Fiennes' first brush with on-screen fame came when David Puttnam cast him in the TV movie, A Dangerous Man: Lawrence After Arabia. In an adaptation of Wuthering Heights, he played the self-hating Heathcliff. Wuthering Heights was the film that caught Spielberg's eye and convinced him to cast Fiennes in Schindler's List. The rest is show-biz history.
More film roles followed, and Fiennes earned critical acclaim as TV game show cheat Charles Van Doren in the film Quiz Show. He played an anxious gambler in Oscar and Lucinda and a sensation-addicted future cop in Strange Days. His sex scenes as the jealous lover Bendix opposite Jullianne Moore in The End of the Affair surprised people for their frankness. In Sunshine, Fiennes worked with director Istvan Szabo on an epic tale of three generations of one Jewish family in Budapest. As an added bonus, he played three separate roles. Still, there are always missteps: Consider his role as secret agent John Steed in the misfired action-comedy The Avengers.
Fiennes is known to be intense and brooding, but he is unpretentious in person. He chooses his words intelligently, as if every answer matters. He's open when it comes to his work. When conversations lead to his personal life, whether his marriage and divorce from actress Alex Kingston, or his relationship with actress Francesca Annis, an older woman who played Gertrude to his Hamlet onstage, Fiennes turns politely quiet.
Like veteran British actor Ralph Richardson, Fiennes also pronounces his first name as 'Rafe.' His love for theater remains strong. His preference for classic stage work has also earned him the label as an old fogey. But Red Dragon should change that.
"I always wondered why certain scripts weren't sent to me," Fiennes says. "I think to myself: I could have done that. Red Dragon was a great script with great actors attached. Schindler's List convinced people I could play Francis Dolarhyde."
It's been said that Fiennes captures the pain endured by villains. He also endured the discomfort of a body tattoo for his Red Dragon role.
"The first design we thought was too much Heavy Metal album cover," Fiennes says. There were additional talks about the design, and the tattoo became a two-footed beast with horns inspired by the William Blake poem. It took two or three days to apply the tattoo, and I only wore it for three days of shooting."
Fiennes met FBI profilers and prison hospital psychiatrists to prepare for Red Dragon. What he learned was surprising.
"I remember one man I met who was the most charming, and I told that to the doctors who informed me he was also the most dangerous."
Clothes and costumes are important to Fiennes. He helped choose the clothes for his role in Spider. He became obsessed with the contents of his pockets. He had to have the same items every day.
"I remember a play in college and how invigorated I felt when I put a putty nose on my face. It was as if I looked in the mirror and I suddenly knew what to say and how to feel. Clothes and costumes are like that. They're important to me.
"My method is that I read lots of stuff. It feeds me intellectually with great tales of imagination. I focus on the 'what if,' that magic if. I think about, if I had to make a choice, what would I do as this character?"
Fiennes won a Tony for his role in the Broadway production of Hamlet. He's been nominated twice for Oscars. He laughs when remembering how he was locked out of the auditorium during the Oscars ceremony. He went to the bathroom, and security wouldn't let him back inside.
"I told them my category was coming up, and I needed to get back inside." he says, laughing. "All they kept saying was 'Who are you?' I did eventually get back inside."
His second Oscar night was more laid-back. Still, Fiennes admits that the recognition that means the most to him doesn't involve golden statues.
"What's important is the feeling that people are responding to the work. I like it when people write me a letter talking about a performance they saw and how much it touched them. I often feel that way performing on-stage. Sometimes you are lucky and you get a letter and you know you got to somebody. It's very gratifying to feel that you communicated." ©
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