The Sunday Times (February 12, 2006)
It's all very well being a right bastard on screen...
During the filming of Wuthering Heights, Ralph Fiennes insisted on keeping a scene from the book in which Heathcliff bangs his head against a tree, pining for Cathy. He did it with such zeal that he drew blood. Re-enacting the scene may have seemed irresistible in the days since this most reclusive of actors has found himself plastered over front pages after revelations of his infidelity to Francesca Annis, the actress 18 years his senior, and her severance of their 11-year relationship. Suddenly Fiennes, one moment praised to the skies and Bafta-nominated for his performance in The Constant Gardener, is receiving the green-slime douche as a love rat. Journalists contrast his airs and graces with his unsavoury affair with a Romanian singer half Annis’s age. He once joked that his relationship with the press was summed up in Red Dragon, in which he played the serial killer Francis Dolarhyde: “I get the chance to bite the face off a tabloid journalist.” Now the roles are reversed. Nor have the broadsheets held back from earnest analysis of the inherent tensions between a woman of 61 and a man of 43. “Is she just a sad old doormat, desperate to cling on to a young lover?” Virginia Ironside asked in The Independent.
On Tuesday Annis gave her terse answer, announcing the couple’s separation through her lawyers. Learning that the affair had gone on for two years was bad enough. The claim by raven-haired Cornelia Crisan that Fiennes insisted on her wearing high heels during their love-making cannot have improved matters. They said she wasn’t the first, either. It was the ultimate test of Fiennes’s nerve as an actor. As news of the separation broke, he was appearing in the opening night of Faith Healer in Dublin. Yet the critics found him compelling as Frank Hardy, an Irishman who travels to the remote villages of Scotland and Wales attempting to cure the sick and desperate. The scandal has thrown into sharp relief the actor’s intriguing contradictions. Although painfully shy in interviews, he was blessed with the icy good looks of a heartless bastard and played the part to the full in angst-ridden roles. Some thought his strong and angular profile, which drew screams at premieres, was diluted by the feminine red tint of his cheeks. “I saw sexual evil,” the producer-director Steven Spielberg pronounced after watching Fiennes in Wuthering Heights. “There were moments of kindness that would move across his eyes and then instantly run cold.” It was this performance that persuaded Spielberg to cast Fiennes as Amon Goeth, the sadistic concentration camp commandant in Schindler’s List. The role won Fiennes an Oscar nomination and catapulted him into the Hollywood firmament.
That same quality of running hot and cold featured in Crisan’s colourful description of their affair. By her account it began in February 2004 at the Dorchester hotel in London, where the 31-year-old singer had been invited to a party. Standing in the bar, she caught Fiennes’s eye. “I felt his eyes burning into me,” she said. Within minutes he arranged the first of their clandestine meetings, giving her his hotel room number. To the soulful sounds of Aretha Franklin, they drank champagne and then he stripped off her clothes. “The only items he didn’t remove were my diamanté high heels. He said, ‘Keep them on, they are nice’.”The same instruction, she claimed, applied to their subsequent meetings, although she suspected he was re-enacting love scenes from his film The End of the Affair after she watched it on DVD. (Some of his sex scenes with Julianne Moore were cut from that movie: the film’s producer Stephen Woolley said the censors felt “Ralph’s bottom was pumping too many times”.)
Sometimes Crisan refused to take his calls out of guilt, she said, but they continued to meet sporadically at his request. Once she found him “emotionally detached and cold. He said to me, ‘You know I can’t be anything to you’ ”. She believed he was cheating on her with someone else. His last call to her, she claimed, was on January 24. The commotion has caught Fiennes at the summit of his career, playing a genial diplomat shaken into action by the murder of his wife in an adaptation of John le Carré’s novel The Constant Gardener. It cements the rave status he achieved in the 1990s with a string of magnetic performances, notably in The English Patient. For half of Anthony Minghella’s 1996 movie, the actor was unrecognisable as a horrific burns victim, the doomed adulterer Count Laszlo de Almasy, tended by Juliette Binoche and recalling his passion for the married Kristin Scott Thomas. In addition to such Hollywood vehicles as Quiz Show, in which he gave one of his best performances as Charles van Doren, who connived at rigging a top-rating television game show, Fiennes continued to excel on the stage. He enjoys the perks of fame: he is the super-suave voice of a country squire in Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit and played Lord Voldemort in last year’s Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. For some, the rupture between Fiennes and Annis is a case of what comes around, goes around. Last week’s ruckus echoed his split in 1995 from his wife Alex Kingston. He broke the news to her on the set of Moll Flanders, the television drama in which she was starring. “He arrived all bright and breezy — then told me he was in love with Francesca Annis,” recalled Kingston, who had lived with Fiennes for 10 years before their four-year marriage. Devastated, she considered slitting her wrists. Annis, a mother of three, left Patrick Wiseman, a photographer with whom she had lived for 23 years.
Fiennes and Annis, a ravishingly beautiful actress who had captivated the public since playing Elizabeth Taylor’s handmaiden in Cleopatra at the age of 19, had fallen in love while appearing as Hamlet and his mother Gertrude at London’s Hackney Empire. One reviewer noted that “Gertrude seems unnaturally fond of her son” and it is ironic that the smitten pair embarked on what many regarded as an oedipal relationship. “If two people have a strong connection and a strong bond, that’s what’s important,” he declared. They set up home with one of Annis’s daughters in a block in Kensington. “We’re happy and the age difference really doesn’t matter,” the actress said. Fiennes’s own mother Jini, a painter and novelist who published under her maiden name Jennifer Lash, was a big influence in his life. She rode a scooter wearing a mixture of twinset and pearls with beatnik garb before marrying Mark Fiennes, a farmer turned photographer. Born in Suffolk on December 22, 1962, Fiennes was the eldest of six talented children. Of his siblings, Magnus is a composer, the twins Jacob and Joseph are a gamekeeper and actor (Shakespeare in Love) respectively, while Martha directed Fiennes in Onegin and Sophie makes documentaries. His second cousin is the explorer Sir Ranulph Fiennes.
It was Jini who told Fiennes the story of Hamlet when he was a “exuberant” eight-year-old and who encouraged him to paint. The family moved 15 times before he pursued his artistic ambition at Chelsea College of Art, where he lasted a year before changing his mind and walking into Rada to ask for an application form. When his mother died in 1993, Fiennes helped to bury her in a coffin painted electric blue and when he received his Bafta for Schindler’s List, he paid tribute to her as “more a friend than a mother”. As a bankable British romantic lead, Fiennes has revived a type threatened with extinction. He even brought redeemable qualities to his brutal Nazi in Schindler’s List and has spoken of the alluring qualities of “disaffected men who have some heart of darkness, which actually isn’t always there”. As if in response to complaints that his doomed-lover act was wearing thin, he made a disastrous attempt to broaden his image by starring as John Steed in The Avengers in 1998, yet pulled off a romantic comedy with Maid in Manhattan in 2002, starring alongside Jennifer Lopez.
But as the man who betrayed Francesca Annis, he is trapped in a role Hollywood reserves specially for Brits: the villain.
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Ich weis nicht ob die Sunday Times so eine Zeitung aller Bild ist, aber da wird ja wieder alles breitgetreten!!
