My mother was a writer. I think my love of the theatre comes from her and my approach to work from him. He loved using his hands and was very gifted at building shelves and things. He trained me in painting and decorating, how to replace a sash window and so on. But we do know that he was married to Doctor Who favorite Alex Kingston from to The two actors met while studying at London's Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and dated for around a decade before tying the knot.
His agent Simon Beresford told The Hollywood Reporter that year that Fiennes remains a British citizen, but has "gracefully accepted the honor bestowed on him by the Serbian people in gratitude and appreciation of the work he has done in Serbia over a number of years.
Long before he joined the Bond franchise as M, he was briefly in the running for the title role. I love the books and I always saw them in black and white, gritty, noirish and very dangerous. And probably very politically incorrect! The role he found the hardest to play was J-Lo's love interest Maid in Manhattan. A weird twilight panic. He has, however, become fodder for the tabloids. He ended his marriage with actress Alex Kingston after an affair with actress Francesca Annis.
Ten years later, he ended that relationship after a reported tryst with year-old Romanian singer Cornelia Crisan. We strive for accuracy and fairness. If you see something that doesn't look right, contact us! Subscribe to the Biography newsletter to receive stories about the people who shaped our world and the stories that shaped their lives. Ralph Lauren is an American clothing designer best known for his sportswear line Polo Ralph Lauren, the centerpiece of his fashion empire. Attorney, activist and politician Ralph Nader is an auto-safety reformer and consumer advocate.
He has run for president several times as a candidate for the Green Party. Alan Rickman is best known for portraying memorable villains in films like 'Die Hard' and the 'Harry Potter' film series.
It is very fun to listen to him talk in movies—and in person in London, as I did, for a few hours in late January. I say all this to help explain why Fiennes registers to many interested in his life and career as one of our ultimate cosmopolitans. He is, just to list some of his culture bona fides, one of the living actors most associated with Shakespeare.
He has said that he and his six siblings grew up listening to vinyl recordings of poetry recitations. He has often acted in films based on the acclaimed novels of major-prize-winning authors. He has said the talent he would most like to have is playing the violin. He is fluent in ballet now, too, since he's just directed a movie about the Soviet dancer Rudolf Nureyev.
He enjoys hopping on the Eurostar to Paris from his home in London. He enjoys short flights to European capitals. This cosmopolitanism seems to have sort of become the point about Ralph Fiennes in recent years. Wes Anderson may have been the first to recognize a new use for this caricature: that in the post-heartthrob Fiennes, a filmmaker could mine middle-life pathos, as well as levity and humor; that if a character were to possess an arch knowingness about the fact that he was being played by Ralph Fiennes, it might be really, really fun to watch.
The joke there was that Fiennes—the very high culture of his cells—could play the antithesis of so many counts and kings: an irritable East End gangster with a Shakespearean facility with fucking fuck fuck s. Maybe that was the pivot? Maybe that was when we felt the options expand. Regardless, there's been a slow shift, iterative at first, and then all at once wholly present, in a new series of roles for Fiennes over the past decade or so.
You get the Oscar-nominated talent and the self-awareness, too. Take Luca Guadagnino's A Bigger Splash , for example, where Fiennes plays a motor-mouthing cocktail of taste and devil-may-care that could be reduced to something like: Ralph Fiennes type—but with all of the shirt buttons unbuttoned.
Ralph Fiennes type—but with a Jagger falsetto and breezy linen. There's a scene in which Fiennes's Harry Hawkes leads his compatriots to a no-tourists dinner spot on a secluded hillside on an Italian island, doling out per favore s and grazie s as he gracefully inserts himself into the hospitable hands of the locals.
I remember thinking in the theater, or on the plane, or wherever: This. This is what you get when you strip off the uniform of haughty propriety, but still have all the knowingness —all the language and command and wisdom amassed from a lifetime of moving fluidly across European borders. The result is very funny and very cool. He'd spent the previous day—his one and only day off between the play and a new film shoot—reading books and responding to e-mails.
He'd been journaling when I first approached our table. Fiennes still had his beard from the play, but it would be gone by that evening. The fixtures of his face were plenty there, though. The prominent nose and brow. The sticky-outy canines. The eyes were so familiar. As was the voice. His voice sounded exactly like Ralph Fiennes. Sometimes actors make choices to pivot their careers.
Other times those choices—those theories about their work, the sort of I've just laid out above—are more arbitrary, connecting unrelated opportunities in an effort to make sense of them, the way we trace weird animals out of the stars. Fiennes has said that, at times in his career, he felt people presuming that he only did a certain kind of dramatic role.
And when Martin McDonagh approached me to be a kind of London gang boss. Which is not my obvious casting bracket. I told him I'd been wondering how active he was in the pursuit of that pivot, since it's difficult to know how much an actor's hands are on the wheel. And I think sometimes actors are absolutely going: I want to do this and this.
And other times it comes to you. All the stuff I've loved doing most has come to me. Sent to me. Fiennes is a voracious reader, and many of the films he's best known for have been adapted from the works of renowned authors. Michael Ondaatje. Graham Greene. Peter Carey. Shakespeare and Dickens. I asked him if there was any intentionality to those clusters, to working with material from notable novelists.
0コメント