What Ever Happened to Ralph Fiennes?

Toward the start of his new film The Constant Gardener, Ralph Fiennes, as Justin Quayle, a British diplomat stationed in Kenya, is told that his young wife Tessa may have been killed while on a research trip with another man. As the camera holds on him, searching for a reaction, Fiennes doesn’t conjure up a rage or a gasp. He doesn’t gush a stream of tears or obscenities. He moves hardly at all. Yet alert viewers will see his pale face turn a shade ashen. They will watch his spirit sink as he struggles to retain propriety. Somehow a symphony of grief, suspicion and copelessness plays lightly on his sharp, elegant features. “You can see what he’s thinking, on his face,” says Rachel Weisz, who plays Tessa with an ornery passion that complements Fiennes’ implosive delicacy. “It’s an incredible shot, almost a minute long, and you can see a thousand different thoughts cross his mind. There’s a transparency to him.” Indeed, an interior transparency. Subtly, he shows us an MRI of a decent man’s heart at the moment it breaks.

A Fiennes performance is a miniature device with intricate moving parts. Movie directors often want their actors to “go bigger.” Fiennes goes smaller–and inside. His onscreen speech is a mix of concealments and confidences, of whispers in a cave or under the covers. And he’s not speaking softly just so you will be startled when he explodes. In a crucial scene he’s less likely to shout than to stare or slouch–or sob, as he does, quietly but with naked intensity, in The Constant Gardener. It’s his way of inhabiting all sides of someone like Justin. “I love it,” he says, “when a film shows a character roundabout and through and through. A man may have wonderful qualities and also have weaknesses.” Fiennes’ strength is revealing the power, and the danger, that reticence masks.

That hint of feverish emotion behind a cool exterior made Fiennes a star as the silky Nazi sadist in Schindler’s List and the enigmatic lover in The English Patient. But those hits, both of which won Oscars for Best Picture, are, respectively, 12 and nine years old. Since then, he has used his wattage to choose parts that suit or stretch his range. He is less worried about his payday or the films’ potential grosses, although he can wince over those that failed. Of The Avengers, a high-profile flop, he rues “some spark not there” with co-star Uma Thurman and curses an inapt chapeau: “I looked crap in that bowler hat.”

Other roles–as the lover torn by scruples in the film of Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair, as a deranged Londoner in David Cronenberg’s Spider and as three generations of Hungarian Jews in Istvan Szabo’s Sunshine–won him kudos, but the films fizzled at the box office. His two commercial successes could be considered coattail rides: as Hannibal Lecter’s apprentice madman in Red Dragon and as Jennifer Lopez’s prince charming in Maid in Manhattan. Casual moviegoers may recall that his name has an exotic pronunciation, then wonder, What ever happened to Rafe Fines?

Three answers: He has been pretty busy, playing intellectual types like Carl Jung and Ibsen’s Brand onstage. He does not encourage the whole star thing. And, at 42, he’s back in style as film’s most winning lost soul. The Constant Gardener, an exhilarating take on John Le Carré’s novel, by Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles (City of God) and screenwriter Jeffrey Caine, is one of five Fiennes films to be released in 2005 (see box). He’s a decadent art historian in Chromophobia (still awaiting a U.S. distributor), an upper-class satire that involved three of the six Fiennes siblings: sister Martha wrote and directed; brother Magnus composed the music. (The brood also includes Joseph, who starred in Shakespeare in Love.)

Three of the films are art-house ornaments, but two have blockbuster eyes. He is the voice of a gun-crazy aristocrat in the animated comedy Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, due out in October. A month later, in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, he will be the villainous Voldemort–“a full-on, red-blooded baddie,” he says, happy to describe one of his roles without tiptoeing around the words aloof and tortured.

“I never use the word tortured,” he says defensively and decisively, as he sits in the tea room of a posh Manhattan hotel. “I use it in response to someone saying it to me, but I don’t ever …” That is one of many Fiennes statements that evaporate in mid-sentence, leaving tantalizing verbal contrails. An actor whose art is in precision wants always to say the right thing–if he must do interviews at all.

He acknowledges that his vocation, his pleasure, is to be seen and heard. “As an actor, a part of you expects to be looked at. A part of you wants to be looked at. But when I’m playing a part, in my imagined world, I feel I’m not me. I may be using bits of me, but I love the sense that I’m being someone else.” Yet while he’s disappearing, he’s also naked. “It seems to me a big enough statement about who you are to go onstage, where you’re totally exposed. Your body, your voice, your gestures–everything you do is up there. So why can’t you just leave it at that?”

Well, because acting is the pouring of a fictional spirit into an actual body. A star actor like Fiennes gradually becomes the sum of his roles–Amon Goeth in Schindler’s List, the Count in The English Patient, Hamlet and Coriolanus onstage–conflated with his public persona. As for the public part, Fiennes doesn’t give his fans much news to play with. He is divorced from actress Alex Kingston (ER) and has lived for a decade with actress Francesca Annis, 18 years his senior. He refuses to connect any dots between his roles and himself. And he rarely uses his fame as a bully pulpit; he marched against the Iraq invasion but anonymously, with a group of friends.

There are exceptions. As a UNICEF ambassador, he made trips to Uganda and Kyrgyzstan. After shooting The Constant Gardener in Kenya, he helped producer Simon Channing-Williams set up a fund to build a school near and clean up Lake Turkana, where the film’s climactic scene is set. But even though the novel deals with the exploitation of Africa by the governments and drug companies of the “civilized world,” Fiennes insists he was not looking to make a political film. “It was only when I saw the film in its first cut that I thought, ‘This is about Africa.'”

That roiling, starving continent at first seems a backdrop to familiar Le Carré chicanery. Justin has brought his bride Tessa, a fierce do-gooder, to Kenya, where he resumes his job in the embassy and she goes off crusading–to what end, Justin knows not. After her death, he must confront the forces that ended her life and are threatening his. That’s when he discovers how genial manners can conceal hearts of darkness.

As Fiennes tends to withhold, director Meirelles likes to probe and prod a subject from a dozen oblique angles. That could have made for a schizophrenic movie, but this time, opposites attract: the actor and the director make a smart pair. The result is a First World story seen through the acute eyes of a Third World auteur–a film of nuance and power, flawlessly acted and an adventure to watch, with the aftertaste of an aspirin laced with cyanide.

Will The Constant Gardener–or any of his other new films–put Fiennes on the A list? We don’t know. The English gentleman with subtle quests and quirks isn’t a type in Hollywood favor just now. Apparently, he doesn’t care. “I love being an actor,” he says.

And if the masses don’t go for his brand of tortured and aloof, they should consider this inside dish from Weisz: “He loves to dance. He’s very free on the dance floor, and he’s a great dance partner–because, as with his acting, he knows how to improvise.”

We suppose they danced a waltz?

“No, funk and electronica.”

Some things you can’t tell about Ralph Fiennes just by looking at him. –Reported by Belinda Luscombe/New York