Yorkshire Post Magazine
March 10 - 17, 2001
By Lynda Murdin

The camera loves Joseph Fiennes, who emerged from the shadow of his brother Ralph to take Hollywood by storm. His latest film, about the Nazi siege of Stalingrad, opens this month. For now, he's in Yorkshire, as Lynda Murdin reports.

The sexily brooding image on theatre posters around Sheffield stops female shoppers in their tracks.

The attractive young man in the photograph is Joseph Fiennes, star of two critically-acclaimed movies in which Hollywood pointed a lens at English history. He played a drop-dead gorgeous Shakespeare opposite Gwyneth Paltrow in the Oscar-winning Shakespeare in Love and the dreamy-eyed Robert Dudley opposite Cate Blanchett in Elizabeth.

International stardom beckoned, this time with Soviet history in mind. Director Jean-Jacques Annaud signed him up with a clutch of other young Brit pack actors, including Jude Law, for a £60m-plus epic about love and death among the Russian defenders of Stalingrad in 1942, called Enemy at the Gates.

But here is Fiennes waiting to be interviewed in Sheffield about his role in Edward II at the Crucible Theatre. And, extraordinarily, it would be easy to walk past the man himself, if not his image, without a second glance. He's a nice enough but unremarkable looking figure, apart from those big, soulful eyes now coloured with caution. His charisma clearly must emerge in front of cameras and on stage. He's deeply serious, polite but slightly wary. We've been advised not to ask questions about his family, the other famous member of which is his filmstar brother Ralph Fiennes. Yet, as Joseph, 30, grows more friendly he does volunteer a fascinating familial fact - his grandfather, Maurice Fiennes, was involved in the Sheffield steel industry and so his father lived in the area in his youth during the 1940s.

"My father has recollections of being in the Lyceun Theatre next door with my aunt watching George Formby and Frankie Howerd."

On the whole, however, the play's very much the thing. The actor who played the Bard so deliciously was deep into preparations to take the title role in Edward II, written by Christopher Marlowe, whose relationship with Shakespeare is the subject of much debate. Directed by Michael Grandage, associate director of Sheffield Theatres, the new in-house production has just begun previewing before its official opening on Tuesday.

"I'm here because of the play," Joseph confirms in a soft, slow voice which contains a hint of America. "It's here in a wonderful theatre with a very special director. It's a play I've long wanted to do but on average it's done professionally only about every 10 or 12 years. Because it's done so rarely, I didn't want to miss the opportunity.

"You hear so clearly the voice of Marlowe in it, especially in Edward. I love the muscularity of the text. It has such a strong modern resonance. I think anything which is classical only survives and only is classical because it has that modern dynamic."

Yet it is not the obvious choice of role for somebody who could be the latest Hollywood heartthrob. A weak king, Edward II is infatuated with another man and met a violent end. "He is not attractive. He is petulant, he is arrogant," Joseph agrees. "He's right in-yer-face, he's unrelenting and passionate about his feelings for another man. He's denied that by the barons, by the realm, and in that denial they are denying his power as a king and so undermine his authority as God's anointed.

"And yet he does take it too far. He's a man who I feel is being liberated in recognising his sexual orientation. He's being released and part of that new-found freedom is ultimately a threat to those in the royal circle, a threat to society - as some people today find it threatening to recognise a homosexual marriage. In that respect, the play has great modern resonance and opens debate."

When Sir Ian McKellen - who himself memorably played Edward II some 30 years ago - first "came out," he said he was concerned he would no longer be thought convincing in straight parts. Does Joseph feel he can carry conviction as a gay?

"It's not a gay play. The themes are greater and more complex than that. I have no qualms about that. As an actor, I take on the fascination of other characters. That for me isn't an issue." Another intriguing aspect concerning the star of Shakespeare in Love now appearing in a work by Marlowe is that some scholars say Marlowe was Shakespeare. They conjecture that Marlowe wasn't actually murdered in a pub brawl in Deptford but secretly lived and assumed the name of Shakespeare. "A can of worms," is how Joseph, who spent three seasons with the Royal Shakespeare Company and appeared on the West End stage before catapulting to movie fame, describes that.

"It's partly fascinating, partly maddening. For every academic who can give you a persuasive argument about the person behind the pen, there's another one to cancel his theory out and present a fascinatione one about somebody else. The point is, we have his plays and, regardless of who wrote them, they are something we should treasure. We have the texts, that's what matters.

"Personally, I would say they couldn't be more diametrically opposed as writers. I certainly believe they knew each other and there was a rivalry between the two.... Shakespeare's genius is that he touches every base and it's pointless to try and close him down and his beliefs because they transcend that petty argument."

After successful movies, Joseph had lots of other film offers but had committed himself to appearing in a play at London's Royal Court - and that's what he did. He then went around the world on a six-month travelling break.

"I haven't turned my back on Hollywood. I've just done a film which is for MGM. It's called Killing Me Softly and I play a young mountain climber. Heather Graham is the other lead. It's first English-speaking film by a Chinese director called Chen Kaige."

But, currently having his "work cut out" with Edward II, Joseph says he has no particular ambitions for his future career.

"It sounds flippant and it's not meant to be - but I'm happy to pay the rent. I think it's foolhardy to have a plan. There's a Russian joke - 'How do you make God laugh? Tell him your plans.' So, taking that on board, I live in the present."