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There are some stars who don't make it easy for you to love them. They marry unsuitable people. They give interviews defending their ex-girlfriends' coke habits. They're Scientologists. It's not that often that a celebrity can make you hide your affection just by playing characters that are horrible specimens of humanity, but such has been the lot of the Ralph Fiennes fan. Saying, for instance, as a person hypothetically might, that he's on your laminated list can get you looks like you just confessed a crush on Slobodan Milosevic; Fiennes just doesn't have a good reputation.
And yet, when one looks at his list of credits, one sees exactly how unfair and mistaken an impression that is. Granted, he's been Oscar-nominated twice: once for playing a Nazi officer (in Schindler's List), and once for playing a technical -- technical! -- Nazi collaborator (in The English Patient). And granted, if those are the two roles an actor is best known for, the odds are good that when he gets invited to voice a character in an animated movie, it's not to play a neurotic father clownfish; it's to play Rameses, the tyrant, in The Prince Of Egypt, in which capacity he hardly got to say "thank you" in Whale at all.
But his credits truly do tell us how hard Fiennes has been working to dislodge the erroneous impression from the public's collective cortex. Like, first of all, Schindler's List obliterated our impression of him as refined and elegant (as in A Dangerous Man: Lawrence After Arabia, which I tape-recorded off CBC when it aired there at like 1 in the morning when I was about nineteen, and watched often). So he followed List with Quiz Show, in which he played Charles Van Doren -- educated and patrician, but tempering those fine qualities with his decision to cheat on 21. And if we identified him too strongly with the sadism and brutality of List's Amon Goeth, he offered us Oscar Hopkins in Oscar and Lucinda -- a gentle, anxious, dorky Divinity student, who also happened to be a compulsive gambler. Choosing characters that were basically good proved how committed Fiennes was not to get typecast, but choosing characters who were simultaneously complicated in their basic goodness probably made them interesting to play; certainly they were interesting to watch. And after the grim dourness of List, it was a happy surprise to see that Fiennes could smile so nicely, at things other than corpses falling into mass graves, which apparently happened seldom in the '50s-era TV industry.
What if List had made us think Fiennes couldn't be sexy onscreen? Well, to correct that impression, we got the romantic (...fine, that's still a subject of heated controversy) Count Laszlo de Almásy in The English Patient, so fixated on rescuing his married lover that he sold out the Allied forces in order to make his way back to her in a cave in the desert where she'd probably died in his absence anyway, and...yeah, okay, put that way, it is kind of a treasonous screw job, no matter how apolitical you are. Fiennes was sexier still in The End of the Affair, though equally as disrespectful of his partner's marital vows and obligations; the sexiness of the whole enterprise was mitigated somewhat by the depressing hangdog aspect of the cuckold (Stephen Rea), and the tragedy of Fiennes's beloved (Julianne Moore) and the Coughing Fit Of Great Foreboding that alerts us to her imminent death.
When the new millennium dawned, and all his efforts were apparently for naught, and the public still thought of him as that psychotic creep sniping at concentration-camp inmates from the terrace of the beautiful summer home he's been quartered in (what, I can't notice two things at once?), Fiennes seems to have lost his mind a little and just given up. "You want to see me play nut cases?" he might have asked. "Fine. Take Spider and Red Dragon and choke on them." And we were like, "Wait! We didn't --" but he wasn't trying to hear that and was all, "You don't want to see me being romantic and sexy in a movie with a complex, layered plot and three-dimensional characters willing to break international law for their probably-already-dead girlfriends? Here's Maid in Manhattan. Watch it on Starz! the next time you're stuck home with the flu and see if you notice any of the frames where I'm openly sneering at J.Lo." And we were like, "No! We appreciate you and your multi-layered performances!" But it was too late; Fiennes stomped away and stayed stomped for the next three years -- stewing, we're guessing. Or saving up his Manhattan residuals so he could buy a really nice house. Or just enjoying life outside the company of anyone in hair extensions.
Whatever he was doing, the time away was apparently quite restorative for Fiennes: 2005 represents quite the career renaissance for him. Instead of scattering his multifarious type-defying roles across the span of a decade, he's super-concentrated them all into one year. He played the villain in another animated film, but a comedy this time (Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit), proving he could take even a role like that of a posh blowhard with a towering hairpiece and commit to it completely. He played the romantic lead in another adult love story (The Constant Gardener), but this time his politics weren't totalitarian (or totalitarian-collaborative). He plays another damaged exotic, as in The English Patient, only this one (The Blind Countess) finds him a white man in '30s-era Shanghai who hasn't had his ambitions as a nightclub impresario dampened by his blindness. (It sounds complicated, but playing a blind guy worked out pretty well for Al Pacino that time.) Most famously, Fiennes has fearlessly taken on the challenge of starring in the nightmares of millions of children the world over by embodying absolute evil as Lord Voldemort in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. The role allows him to be delightfully over-the-top and hammy in his refinement and evil-osity, which makes this role...kind of a 360 from Amon Goeth.
Dammit! Well, he's really trying, you guys! He wants to be counted among the best actors of his generation and not, Voldemort to the contrary, consigned to the Cave of Villains. Can't someone top up his fame so he doesn't pull something with all this effort?
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