Stuttgarter Zeitung
"Sonntag Aktuell", page 12
Sunday, January 2, 2000
By Thomas Klingenmaier
Many thanks to Han for the translation!
All of his family are in the public eye to a certain extent. But Joseph Fiennes appears only rarely - and wishes the same could be said for Shakespeare. The hero of Shakespeare in Love would finally like to be able to perform the Bard's plays again without the audience murmuring the dialogue along with him.
Fame is a commodity that can soon lose its value. At Christmas Sharon Stone sent stylish watches to Hollywood's film critics, but none of them unbuckled the glittering watches or put them in their display cabinets - no, they unanimously returned the small enticements to corruptibility. And yet a few years ago, after Basic Instinct, those same critics were overjoyed to be able to call a coffee filter, obtained illegally from the diva's garbage can, their own. Now, however, Stone's latest film The Muse has come and gone from our cinema screens unnoticed. In 1999 the competition in the market place for square jaws and striking curves, for pouting lips and soulful eyes, the gleaming rows of teeth and warlike muscles, became a little fiercer.
In the stars' crazed scramble to grab our attention only one has succeeded this year in staying in our memories by his very absence, in getting himself noticed through his lack of films - Joseph Fiennes, who a year ago in Shakespeare in Love kept female cinemagoers at that point just between fainting and the heights of ecstasy. In him the slight and vulnerable build of sensitive big-city intellectuals combines with a daring and stubbly pirate or exotic type; the passion, veiled in secrecy, of an oriental prince is accompanied by the tangible chumminess of the former tearaway down the street.
According to all the rules of the entertainment industry we should have seen Britain's most sought after actor in a new star vehicle by Christmas at the latest - and a few cinema bosses will undoubtedly have hoped for two new Fiennes films. Born in 1970 and the younger brother of Ralph Fiennes, who became world famous in Schindler's List and The English Patient, Joseph pulled off the leap from theatre to cinema through a three-pronged attack. In the romantic comedy Martha, Meet Frank, Daniel and Laurence, in the bitter political history Elizabeth and in the charming revelation of genius Shakespeare in Love Joseph Fiennes played three lovers in a row, all of whom had greatly varying fates and fortunes.
Hollywood's producers like to give such hard working and, for the time being at least, indefatigable heartbreakers one slushy tearjerker after the other, to exhaust the market. The powers that be in the film industry, as is well known, are free of any hesitation or scruples that get in the way; they have the same patience as people who go fishing using hand-grenades. In Joseph Fiennes' case, however, they couldn't get anywhere with rushed "kiss-kiss" projects. The young star didn't go after cinema presence at any price, instead he waited for projects which he liked and which will be in the cinemas next year: the mafia comedy Rancid Aluminium and the Paul Schrader thriller Forever Mine. That wasn't the only disappointment that Fiennes provided for the conveyor-belt school of filmmaking. The lad was almost a double gift from the gods to the film industry - he's got a twin brother! To be able to replace an ill, disgruntled or otherwise impeded star with a genetic double - that would really be the producers' idea of an earthly paradise. Unfortunately for them, although it is true that sister Martha is a director and has just made a film with brother Ralph, sister Sophie's also an actress, brother Magnus a composer, father Mark a photographer and mother Jini, who died in 1993, was a novelist and painter, the twin brother Jacob, of all people, has become a gamekeeper and has no time for the film industry.
Mind you, there is a rumour among England's journalists that Joseph sometimes sends Jacob to his interviews, so serious is the person sitting opposite, so little is he prepared to go along with the media tittle-tattle and the teasing, PR-friendly anecdotes about his brotherly rivalry with Ralph.
But Joseph has no need for such place swapping; it is just that he is serious about his vocation. Also, he hasn't moved to Hollywood to be nearer to the meetings, consisting largely of hot air, about the latest mega projects - instead he continues to perform on the London stage.
And he has no plans to play on his success as Shakespeare on the screen. On the contrary, a ban on Shakespeare's plays lasting several years would suit him just fine. So that actors, he says, would one day again be able to deliver the Bard's great monologues without the first-row murmuring along word for word. But by the time Hamlet's broodings are forgotten like that even Sharon Stone's career might be back in full swing-and Joseph Fiennes doesn’t want to keep the boards waiting that long.
