USA Weekend
25 February, 2001
By Stephanie Mansfield
Photo by Deborah Feingold

While teaching us to love Shakespeare, Joseph Fiennes amazingly converted sonnets into Hollywood buzz. So why did the "next Olivier" choose to turn down the heat and lie low in London - until now?

Behind the breathless Web sites ("No Ordinary Joe") complete with smoldering publicity stills, and "Tatler" magazine's naming him "one of the 200 Hottest Dates in the U.K.," resides an actor so reluctantly famous that he fled to a Buddhist retreat in Canada to escape the hype.

"Looking back, maybe I could have handled it better. I freaked a bit," 30-year-old Joseph Fiennes (pronounced "Fines") admits, recalling the heady days in 1998 when Shakespeare in Love and Elizabeth - back-to-back hits he starred in - garnered countless awards and lucrative salary offers. "It was so sudden. You realize the potency of film. You no longer have a private life."

Intensely guarded, Fiennes has since been regarded as the Gen X-ers' J.D. Salinger. He refuses invitations to glitzy events ("the last thing I want to do"), turned down a contract with a major studio, almost never speaks to the press and recently signed on for Christopher Marlowe's Edward II at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield, England, for £350 (about $500) a week. The money he's already earned from films has funded solitary rock-climbing holidays and has given him, he says with characteristic understatement, "a privileged security."

He's fond of soccer and spent time during Shakespeare in Love teaching co-star Gwyneth Paltrow his favorite soccer songs. All of which seems to suggest Fiennes needs Hollywood less than it needs him.

"He's not corrupt at all," says Jean-Jacques Annaud, Fiennes' director in the World War II epic Enemy at the Gates, opening March 16. Enemy - said to be the most expensive film ever produced in Europe, with a budget of about $85 million - took four months to shoot in Berlin. A grainy, taut thriller co-starring Jude Law and Ed Harris, it recalls a sniper duel in the last days of the German-Russian battle for Stalingrad. The movie could not only restore Fiennes' surrendered position as a high-end heartthrob, but may even earn him an Oscar nomination. He's also getting good buzz for next fall's Killing Me Softly", an erotic thriller with Heather Graham.

The actor says he agreed to take the Enemy at the Gates role of Danilov, a Soviet political officer, because it was "a peculiar challenge." That and the chance to work with Annaud, who directed Brad Pitt in Seven Years in Tibet and whom Fiennes clearly admires. "He knows how to fill that screen. He's a beautiful filmmaker."

The admiration is mutual. "It's so nice to direct such a pleasant, articulate, intelligent actor," says Annaud. As for Fiennes' finickiness over roles, the director adds, "He's unable to do something he doesn't like. He has enormous integrity. Already, at his age, he commands huge respect. He's a very pure man."

Soft-spoken, well-read and exceedingly polite, Fiennes knows his name and face would be more recognizable if he had parlayed the success of Shakespeare in Love into a megabucks action movie or a Sandra Bullock comedy. Did he make a mistake by walking away from Hollywood?

"I was naive," he says now, sipping a fruit drink in a Manhattan hotel room. He's slender and darkly handsome, in the manner of a young Oxford philosophy don, articulate and self-aware. "I know now one has to be part and parcel. You have to be involved in the game. You do have to participate in the selling of that film; it's not just about being in the film. But I didn't come to the game to sell a product. I came to be in the product. It's a fine line."

He crosses his arms and seems intent on choosing his words with care. "There is a marriage between art and commerce, and as an actor I realize that, especially in this country. To make a success of a film, you do have to participate in that."

But he is still fiercely private about his family (his older brother is English Patient actor Ralph Fiennes), his love life (he has been linked to singer Natalie Imbruglia, actress Catherine McCormack and supermodel Naomi Campbell) and his inner demons.

"We're so close to madness anyway. Most artists, you've got to be a little bit barking. There's an element in your DNA."

"In early interviews," he says, "I came away thinking I spoke about things that under any other circumstances I wouldn't give up. I felt cheated that I had to trade a part of myself. Part of that naiveté was believing you could let the work speak for itself."

And the notion that you're only as good as your last movie's gross is anathema to Fiennes, who spends more time on the London stage than on Burbank sound stages. "If you buy into the notion that you're one flop away from being over, then you're caught up in the machine," he says. "So there's an element of not wanting to participate in the neurosis of the business."

One of seven children, Fiennes is a fraternal twin. (His twin, Jake, is a gamekeeper in eastern England.) His father, Mark Fiennes, is a photographer; mother Jini Fiennes was a painter and writer whose pen name was Jennifer Lash. She died in 1993 of breast cancer. A great-uncle, Sir Ranulph Fiennes, was a celebrated explorer. It was an artistic, nomadic life for young Joseph. The family moved 14 times, he says, and each new school was an adventure. Sometimes he would fake accents. "If you didn't fit in as a character in one place, you could reinvent yourself. Strangely, it was probably some kind of training."

While affable and charming, he can be hard as nails, says his older sister Martha, a London advertising executive and movie producer. "No one can make this stubborn guy do anything."

Fiennes was always interested in acting. He worked for 18 months at the Young Vic Youth Theatre and attended the revered Guildhall School of Music and Drama on scholarship. Perhaps the most useful training, however, was his job as a dresser. "It gave me incredible insight," he says. The poetic justice was that all the pants I had to pick up I ended up working with [the owners]. And 50% of them didn't recognize me. I could describe their body odor, the state of their costume and their sweat patches, and yet they didn't recognize me." He smiles wickedly. "I would be sitting across from them in the rehearsal room looking at them, saying, 'You don't have a clue the secrets I know.' "

Now he also knows something of what it's like to be considered one of the finest actors of his generation. "If you're working in a creative field, you have to catch a moment of time, holding a mirror up to nature.

"If you're trying to do that, you have to be forever questioning. You have to be forever in the eye of the storm."