A media frenzy surrounded Ralph Fiennes as he prepared to take to the Dublin stage in Faith Healer this week . . . and it wasn't just because the play's entire run had sold out. The Hollywood star talks to Michael Dwyer
Last Tuesday night's opening of Faith Healer at the Gate Theatre in Dublin was bound to be a media event. The production features the gifted stage and screen actor, Ralph Fiennes, in one of the most celebrated plays by Brian Friel, arguably Ireland's greatest living playwright. The invited audience was awash with high-profile directors, writers, actors and artists. And the production had set a new record for the Gate, as the first in the theatre's 78-year history to sell every seat before it opened.
When several stories relating to Fiennes's personal life and an alleged affair with a singer emerged last weekend, a media frenzy erupted. Then, just hours before the play opened, the lawyers of Francesca Annis, his partner for the past 11 years, issued a statement that "Ms Annis confirms that she and Mr Fiennes are to separate".
The couple had met when Fiennes played Hamlet at the Hackney Empire theatre in London in 1995 and Annis played his mother, Gertrude. Fiennes left his wife, ER star Alex Kingston, and Annis left her partner, photographer Patrick Wiseman, with whom she had three children.
Tuesday's statement was grist to the media mill. Just minutes before the play started, a photographer slipped inside the auditorium and crouched down to take pictures as soon as Fiennes walked on stage, until the Gate's deputy director, Marie Rooney, ejected him. At the interval, a reporter who did not have a ticket for the play approached members of the audience to confirm that Fiennes had gone on stage after all and to ask if his performance suggested any anxiety that might reflect on his personal life.
To those in the auditorium, it was evident from the outset that Fiennes was observing the long- established dictum that the show must go on, as he immersed himself in delivering the first of the two complex, emotionally draining monologues that open and close Friel's play.
The following afternoon, when we meet in a room at the Gate, Fiennes, who spent several years of his childhood in Ireland, is relaxed, animated and articulate as we talk about theatre and movies. Towards the end, I ask if there is anything he wants to say regarding the personal stories circulating about him. He responds by covering his face with both hands, establishing a barrier. His silence is eloquent. Clearly, he has no intention of discussing his private life in public.
Personal issues aside, he had more than enough to deal with the night before: the pressures and nerves of opening night for an actor, the anticipation triggered by his presence on the Gate stage, the challenge of starring in a Dublin production of a modern Irish classic, which, when staged at the Abbey in 1980, featured a revered performance from the late Donal McCann.
Unshaven and casually dressed in black shirt and dark trousers, Fiennes eagerly settles into talking about Faith Healer and his character, Frank Hardy, a troubled man who makes a living as he travels through Ireland, Scotland and Wales, offering hope and maybe even a cure. One of Frank's first lines is "I'd be tense before a performance", which, I suggest to Fiennes, is equally apt for any actor on opening night, or any night on stage.
"It's quite a good line to have," he says. "If you are tense, it's okay because you're admitting it."
It was not at all disconcerting, he says, that the author was in the audience on opening night. "Well, Brian has seen it a few times in rehearsal and the previews. He gave very good notes and little pointers to things in the text that we hadn't quite identified. He's been part of it all, and full of constructive and supportive things to say."
Fiennes expresses relief that he did not see McCann in the play, nor James Mason, who starred in the original 1979 Broadway production. The new production is directed by Jonathan Kent, with whom he has worked several times, in the title roles of Richard II, Coriolanus, and Hamlet (which won Fiennes the Tony Award in 1995).
He comes on stage at the beginning of Faith Healer and is there alone for half an hour. He leaves while his co-stars, Ingrid Craigie and Ian McDiarmid, deliver their monologues, and then, after more than an hour, he returns for the final monologue.
"It's weird," Fiennes says, "because I think I have all this time and that I could write letters or read. But you can't let it drop. I may read bits of things but I'm constantly listening. I have to keep myself wired. It's a long stretch, and the danger is that you start to relax - but you've got to keep ready, and I always feel the adrenaline bubbling up as I get towards the second entrance. It's great in this part to have the chance to come back and close it."
The monologue must be the most difficult form of acting, given that the actor has so many words to deliver while at the same time expressing the changing emotions of the character - and there isn't the safety net of having another actor on stage.
"I could easily have a bad night and, I guess, dry," Fiennes says. "But I've been looking at this text for quite a while now and I'm over the technical hurdle of knowing it. Then I spent the last two weeks finding the key gear changes so that I have a rough map of where different feelings, emotions and nuances come up. That will change, and I hope I play with it, but because the writing is so rich, the rhythms and the thought changes feel natural.
"It's extraordinary because when you've got it inside you, in the memory, it's a support. With writing that is less masterful, you would have to compensate or find things in the interpretation to keep it buoyant."
The faith healer in the play can be read as a metaphor for the playwright, or indeed, the actor, as it raises the question of whether Hardy's talent is a blessing or a curse.
"It's a strange existence of highs and lows and wondering if you can do it," Fiennes says of his profession. "If people applaud, it's great. Of course, you're very quick to sniff the pretend applause, and you read the reviews that can be less than good. You feel the desolation and there can be terrible days when you get off the stage and you feel the spirits have deserted you.
"As an actor you can be very controlling, but in the end you don't know what it's going to be. I find it quite addictive, the thing of not knowing. As I said, I know the lines and the shape, but on any different night with any different audience, you can't really control the subtle shifts of thoughts and feelings. Sometimes it runs through you and other times you're out of it and scrambling to make it work. It is unpredictable. It is chance, as Frank Hardy says."
I put it to Fiennes that he is in a position where he could easily work on four or five movies a year and never again have to go through the anxiety of live performance.
"I know," he says, smiling, "but I couldn't do that. I guess when theatre's not working and actors are having to struggle to keep something alive, that's not so good. But when you are connecting with the audience, I wouldn't swap it for anything. It's just amazing, being in the present moment with an audience. There is the risk factor, but it's also full of wonderful possibilities. We're talking about the fear now, but there's the other side, too, which is the relish of communicating and enacting something for an audience. It's thrilling."
The play goes on to address the fear of homecoming for an Irishman who has been away working in another country, as Frank Hardy returns to Ireland and a cataclysmic incident in Co Donegal.
"That's very strong here, isn't it?" Fiennes says. "I notice that in Australian friends, too. It reminds me of how you become 'other' if you are away from home and you absorb other culturesand other places. When I came back to England after three years of childhood here, I would be on the train going to school and there were boys who had been at primary school with me and they teased me mercilessly.
"They took against me for no reason. I had a slight Irish accent, but because I had been away, I had a kind of blithe confidence because I had been to different Irish schools and moved to umpteen different houses. It was a quite eccentric, unsettled lifestyle, but happy. I remember being very happy. We must have had a maturity and an openness because of that. And there was a more aggressive and, I would say, ungenerous attitude in the English schools when I went back."
Ralph Fiennes, who turned 43 a few days before Christmas, was born in Suffolk, the eldest of six children, to photographer Mark Fiennes and his novelist wife, Jennifer Lash. The family had spent two memorable rent-an-Irish-cottage holidays in Ireland, he says - one in Co Mayo and one in The Burren - before they moved here in 1973.
"We lived in west Cork for about a year and a half," he says. "My father had been practising as a photographer and I think he found it hard to make a living there. He had bought some plots of land and was planning to develop them, but it didn't really work.
"They had this idealistic plan of bringing the six of us up in this environment they loved and which was very different to England, but it didn't work out financially, so we moved to Kilkenny. I was 13 at the time.
"We rented a house while my father did up a townhouse in the centre of Kilkenny. I went to school at St Kieran's College. I had been a boarder for a couple of terms at Newtown School in Waterford, and then a day pupil at St Kieran's, bicycling into school every day."
After they returned to England, four of his five siblings went on to work in the arts: Martha as a director (for whom Ralph worked on two films, Onegin and Chromophobia), Magnus as a musician, Sophie as a film producer, and Joseph as an actor in his own right. Joseph's twin brother, Jacob, is a gamekeeper. Ralph graduated from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in 1985 and within two years was acting with the Royal Shakespeare Company.
In 1990 he made his television debut in the original series of Prime Suspect, and David Puttnam cast him as TE Lawrence in the TV film, A Dangerous Man: Lawrence After Arabia. He went directly to leading roles in cinema, as Heathcliff opposite Juliette Binoche in Wuthering Heights, and in Peter Greenaway's The Baby of Macon, before making his international breakthrough in Schindler's List (which earned him an Oscar nomination) and Quiz Show.
With the exception of the blip that was The Avengers (in which he played John Steed), a succession of notable roles followed, including The English Patient (which brought him a second Oscar nomination), The End of the Affair (for Neil Jordan), two lords in two huge hits, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were- rabbit, and two very different diplomats in The Constant Gardener and The White Countess. Written by Kazuo Ishiguro and featuring Fiennes as a blind diplomat in 1930s Shanghai, The White Countess was the last film from the team of producer Ismail Merchant, who died last May, and director James Ivory.
"Ismail was such a sweet, sweet man, and a very smart and thrifty producer," Fiennes says. "I adored him. He managed to get this film made in Shanghai, which was a hard thing to pull off. Their negotiating styles are very different from ours, and there was all this cultural and linguistic gymnastics going on."
Before starting rehearsals last month for Faith Healer, Fiennes finished shooting on Bernard and Doris, in which he plays another Irishman, Bernard Lafferty, a gay butler from Co Donegal who inherited a fortune from his employer, tobacco billionaire Doris Duke, played by Susan Sarandon. The screenplay is by an Irish writer, Hugh Costello.
"There was this incredible inter-dependency between these two very lonely people who found each other," Fiennes says. "Bernard was quite a character. There was a lot of very negative gossip about him. I'm sure he loved the big pay cheques and the expense accounts, and there were suggestions that he might have hastened her on her way by being privy to administering morphine to her. Our film certainly doesn't make him out to be this suspicious, weird psycho butler."
Meanwhile, his fine performance in The Constant Gardener has earned a Bafta Award nomination for best actor; the ceremony will take place in London tomorrow week, and he will undoubtedly find himself at the centre of more unwelcome media attention if he attends. And then there's another daunting opening night in mid-April, when Faith Healer goes to Broadway.
Faith Healer continues at the Gate until Apr 1. Although the run is sold out, the management says there is always the possibility of returns on the night