Daily Telegraph - A beautiful mind (2007)

[eruwen]

Diesen hier habe ich heute morgen gefunden und finde ihn recht amüsant, obwohl er schon etwas alt ist...

Daily Telegraph (UK) Article

December 7, 2002

A beautiful mind
Ralph Fiennes, one of the film world's deeper thinkers, is the ideal actor to handle the complexities of a schizophrenic in his new movie "Spider" and to play Jung on stage. Still, he reckons he's far more relaxed these days - he even dances at parties.
Interview by Jessica Berens.

Ralph Fiennes is 40 this month. December 22 to be exact. There probably won't be a party, but only because he is in the middle of rehearsals and hasn't got time to organise one; and if he did organise one he would want it to be "special and interesting" so it would take some doing. It will probably end up as friends and family for dinner, which, when it comes to his family, will mean a full room; seven siblings, their father, and nieces and nephews as well. He doesn't mind the idea of being 40; he won't suddenly go mad with Lamborghinis. Anyway, he does not see people in terms of their age. His girlfriend, Francesca Annis, is 58, and this matters not a jot. "I have always found older women very sexy. Francesca is amazing. I love to see a woman's life experience in her face, and I find it sexy, not in a tabloid way, but it is exotic, it has allure."
He goes to the gym, does yoga, will have a facial if a director suggests it, but he is not unduly worried about physical disrepair, no more than any other actor, anyway. You have to look in the mirror a lot, he says, an hour every day, at least, when the make-up is going on. "Your face, your body, that is who you are. And of course you watch it. Sometimes you hate it, sometimes you feel quite pleased with it."

In some ways Ralph Fiennes has always had the wisdom of middle age, and that is why, when he was younger, he was always different. Sometimes inaccessible, sometimes pompous, he was once described as having a "grumpy public demeanour."

He knows he has been "precious" about the press in the past. "I have been criticised for being too guarded," he says. He remembers, early on, that he was persuaded to do interviews for Wuthering Heights, which received mixed reviews, and people wondered what all the fuss was about. Then there was the public break-up of his marriage to the actress Alex Kingston, which was not at all easy.

Nowadays he thinks he is more relaxed, settling into himself. He has managed to combat the feeling of physical gaucheness which meant that, despite being fabulous looking, he was often uncomfortable in his skin, a characteristic that he has used to effect in the creation of some of his characters - Oscar of Oscar and Lucinda, for instance, who was always saying "I just don't fit." This gangly uncoordination meant that, when young, he was useless at sport and "a terrible dancer, terrible."

Does he dance when drunk, I wonder?

"I'm better now at just getting up and dancing. I got really mad with someone the other day when he said "Oh, that's white-boy dancing", because it had taken me so long to get to that point. I think everyone should feel they can get up and sing and dance without being laughed at. It is an energy that should be allowed to play out, and we should be able to do it not drunk. But if I do it's "There's Ralph. He's so serious and intense and...Ohmygod, look he's dancing. How embarrassing!""

So there won't be a mid-life crisis.

"I feel released by it," he says. "Before you are 40, as an actor, my experience has been quote unquote leading man, and that is a terrible cul de sac. I am ambitious still, and I want to do certain things, but as your awareness of mortality crystallises, in a funny way I take comfort from it, I take comfort from the cycle of life going on, seeing your parents' generation getting old, your friends' children getting really grown up."

Does he want children? "No," he says. "I am pretty certain that that is something that is not going to happen. I remember from my own parents that strain of responsibility, the worry etched onto their faces, and though I don't have that financial worry, something in me at some level knows I don't want to go down that road."

It should perhaps be mentioned at this point that we are conducting all this from the enclosed precinct of a very odd closet; the backroom of a west London brasserie which has chosen to present itself with four noses in gold frames, votive candles and a menu which offers, among the pickled enoki and miso glazes, a grilled Donald Russell. I don't know what Donald has done to anyone, but there he is, with a seasonal vegetable. There is an army of waiters and a cantilevered crab cake, and Ralph, understated, with a glass of pink champagne and a brown moustache, not for decoration, but because he is in a play about Jung at the moment. You can't have a false one because God knows it might drop off in the middle of things. And it's not a comedy.

The Talking Cure, due to open at the Cottesloe Theatre in London next week, is written by Christopher Hampton and deals with the events of Jung's life when, in his late 30s, a young woman named Sabina Spielrein came to him for treatment as a sexual hysteric. Jung, having cured her, had a relationship with her, then split up with her, and the heartbroken Spielrein informed Freud of the relationship and was instrumental in severing the two men's friendship. The director Howard Davies says the role needed someone with Fiennes's "intellectual zeal"; and one can expect to find the good doctor imbued with a sexual charisma that one might not otherwise have imagined.

So Fiennes is reading Psychology of the Unconsious and moving slowly towards the character of the visionary psychoanalyst. You can see why he would like the ideas of a man who was not concerned with statistical normality, or with adaptation to society's expectations, and who saw the importance of facilitating the potential of an individual in order to realise authenticity. It is no coincidence that Fiennes - who was described as having a mother complex after his affair with Annis started when she was playing his mother in Hamlet - is involved with Jung's writing about individuation and, in particular, is interested by "the leap of faith that is required to discard parental figures and, by breaking the incestuous tie, become your own person."

His own mother, Jini, died of cancer in 1993, but two weeks before her death, she was conveyed in a wheelchair to see her son play Untersturmfuhrer Amon Goeth in Schinlder's List - the portrayal during which Fiennes moved to a realm where sagacious complexity becomes instinct and can be described as genius.

"Jini was a very emotional person," his father Mark Fiennes told me after this. "So I'm sure she wept. I don't know. I was too busy crying myself. Did it worry me that Ralph was so convincing as a Nazi? No. He had a hideous blackness of character as Heathcliff, and he had been Edmund in King Lear. People get caught up. They forget that these are professionals doing a job."

Jini recognised her eldest son's abilities. After seeing him at a very young age in one school play, she told him, "You know, Ralph, if you want to, you could be an actor." In fact, he went to Chelsea Art School before the decision finally gelled and he was accepted by Rada.

With seven children (one adopted), the Fiennes parents often struggled. Jini, though full of love for her brood, was desperate to write, and had to organise nannies if she was to find the seclusion that she needed. Mark Fiennes, a photographer, told me, "I could not feed, clothe and educate seven children by photography. I did up houses, and when they were finished we had to move so that we could sell them for a profit. I don't think the children suffered. Variety is the spice of life."

Ralph, Martha, Magnus and Sophie were born on a farm in Suffolk from where, after nine years, they moved to a house in Dorset and then to Ireland. Ralph attended a Quaker school and then, when there was no money for fees, a Catholic college in Kilkenny. After this came Wiltshire where the girls went to convents and Ralph to Bishop Wordsworth, a grammar school in Salisbury.

Martha went on to direct Onegin, Magnus is a composer, Sophie recently made a documentary. The youngest, twins, are Jacob, a gamekeeper working in Norfolk, and Joseph, who has enjoyed memorable success as an actor after the success of Shakespeare in Love. Michael Emery, now 50, was adopted by the family in 1963. Now an eminent archaeologist, he is overseeing the Poulton Research Project, an excavation site in Chester for which Ralph has helped raise funds.

Asked how he felt about the rise of his youngest brother Joseph, Ralph says he doesn't feel competitive, but he did have to adjust.

"Families are odd, aren't they? There is a paradox going on. We are all quite close, but at the same time we are all desperately trying to be independent. One of the things we laugh about when we are together is the fact that we can't bear being called "the Fiennes children." We all of us have pretty big egos, and we want to say "I'm not a Fiennes, I'm Ralph, or I'm Sophie."

"I think when I decided to be an actor and I went to acting school and everything, that was a passport away from the family in that it was the beginning of the stamp of "Yes, someone thinks you're talented, and here you are," it was quite odd when suddenly another member of the family was doing exactly the same thing. I did an internal double take, but actually we are completely different, and it is only a state of mind that makes it a problem.

"If you feel your tail is being chased it is your own insecurity that is doing it to you; but nobody can take what I am away from me - it is only stupid paranoia that makes you think your shadow is going to be stolen."

He grew up with the ideas of Jung, as his mother often talked about him, and if one was going to read things from a Jungian viewpoint one might say that, frustrated in her own creative fulfilment, Jini made sure that her children would not be.

There is a strange logic in the fact that Fiennes is now playing a psychoanalyst, as his body of work has embraced many eccentrics and more than one serious maniac. Red Dragon, the third instalment of the Hannibal series, sees him as serial killer Francis Dolarhyde, a tattooed nutter driven insane by the discarnate voice of Ellen Burstyn, and disadvantaged by a set of false teeth resembling a market town war memorial vandalised by drunks in the middle of the night.

He is more wary of big studio films since The Avengers ignited howls of derision. "You are tarnished by the crash," he says. "Even if your agents are telling you you are not, you are." But he liked the script for Red Dragon, and the cast, including Anthony Hopkins and Edward Norton, was stellar.

Next month he will be seen playing a schizophrenic in Spider, a film that came his way in 1995 via the producer Catherine Bailey with whom he was working at the time. He read the script overnight and immediately said he wanted to play the man who returns to the East End of his childhood and, memories awakened, is confronted by past traumas in the form of the realistic hallucinations of paranoid delusion. "It was his journey that intrigued me," he says, "what's going on inside his head and his perception of the world."

Fiennes's commitment gave the project wings. The director David Cronenberg has admitted that he read the script mainly because Fiennes was attached to it. He quickly realised that the actor was perfect to play a lonely, mad person who is "essentially in hell", which, in the arcane language of luvvies, is known as a compliment.

Cronenberg saw Spider as "neither pathetic nor psychotic", and it is his clear scrutiny, aided by Patrick McGrath (who wrote both the screenplay and the novel on which it is based) that elevates the film from a freakshow about loonies to an illuminating statement about a man who has been discharged from an institution too early.

McGrath, who has developed his material from a childhood spent at Broadmoor Hospital where his father was the medical superintendent, observes that the character in Spider is "like many of those men who we see wandering around our cities mumbling to themselves, and who we tend to shun."

The project was difficult to finance, and at one point the backers dropped out and Miramax turned down distribution. "No one was going to compromise," says Fiennes. "Everyone who had put money into it had to swallow hard and say, "This is a Cronenberg film, and we have to accept it for what it is." The onus to make money is so crippling, but there are [films] in the middle found that can make money, and I think we are losing that."

Fiennes likes things that "engage the mind and spirit" and he views contemporary culture as something that only purveys the quick laugh or the quick idea to create a meaningless fix. When pressed he will admit to reading Hello!, but only in the gym, and he recently bought CDs by Coldplay and Moby.

"I love classical music, but people see that as a class thing. But I saw Simon Rattle conducting Fidelio at Glyndebourne and it was exciting, dangerous and moving. Nothing contemporary operates on that level. I live to be challenged, that's why I like Shakespeare - not because it is some elite intellectual thing, but because, on so many levels, it is popular and entertaining and I think that people are hungry to be engaged in that way."

He has a good choice of scripts how, of course, having an extraordinary track record. He can weave between Hollywood, art house cinema and theatre with the enviable nerve of an artist funded by his own "very generous pay cheque." And, anyway, he's not flash. He lives with Francesca Annis in Hammersmith, drives but doesn't have a car, travels a lot but usually for work. There's no diamante display.

Over the years he has worked with the best people, not to mention the most beautiful - an incandescent array including Uma Thurman (The Avengers), Kristin Scott Thomas (The English Patient), Cate Blanchett (Oscar and Lucinda), Julianne Moore (The End of the Affair) and Liv Tyler (Onegin). Most recently he has finished Maid in Manhattan with Jennifer Lopez, a romantic comedy that he took because he wanted to do something lighter.

It is easy, viewing this range of pulchritude, to think that his life must be an orgy of sensuality - and there have been descriptions of him in the past, sitting in dressing-rooms that undulate with over-excited girls. But he points out that we, the public, watch the red carpet and the evening dresses and hair, and believe a myth that doesn't actually exist. Are beautiful women different in some way, I wonder? Are there universal characteristics that they share?

"Every woman is completely different," he says. "I couldn't make a generalisation about that. There are some actresses who you think are very beautiful, about whom the world is saying "They are so lucky," but who have vulnerabilities and neuroses to do with acting. What interests me is the flesh and blood, the person has arrived looking frazzled, who grabs her lines, needs a coffee, needs a cigarette. A person who says "God, I'm sweating, I must change my shirt" is more attractive than a person being a mask of glamour, which is just scary."

And so, as the platoons of waiters march away to waiterly resting places, and the last Marlboro Light is crammed down in the ashtray and the votive candles flicker out, Fiennes finishes a pudding that, given the right agent, could easily appear in a Christmas pantomime. It is 11pm. We talk about suicide. He knows what it is to think about the ultimate escape. Who doesn't?

I realise that this is a person whose public persona has been formed because he does not believe in the flatteries of success and has little time for idle thinking, a fact that he does not have the capacity to hide. He is not going to sit around talking rubbish just because everyone else does. He has always been interested in art and ideas, and the complexities of his work, but this meant that he never fell in with expectations of people in their 20s or 30s, who, nowadays, are expected to be like Jordan, and often are. I laugh when he asks "Who is Frank Skinner?" and say he should be a judge, but actually it is a relief to discover that there is someone in this world who doesn't know who Frank Skinner is, and doesn't care

[Dolarhyde]

danke, eruwen.
dies ist wirklich ein sehr interessanter bericht. (frauen, tanzen, nachwuchs, familie, theater, film ... wurde alles abgearbeitet)

wessen auto fährt er?

yours
who the fuck is frank skinner?