Ralph Fiennes

Name: Ralph Fiennes

Born: 22 December 1962 (Age: 48)

Where: Ipswich, England

Height: 6'

Awards: Won 1 BAFTA, 2 Oscar and 4 Golden Globe Nominations

Ralph Fiennes is notoriously hard to pin down. He made his cinematic debut as a smouldering Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights and was Oscar-nominated for the war-torn love-story The English Patient, yet he is not really viewed as a romantic lead actor. He was famously terrifying as camp kommandant Amon Goeth in Schindler's List and deeply disturbing as serial killer The Tooth Fairy in Red Dragon, yet he's not considered a villain. He played an arch John Steed in The Avengers and fell for Jennifer Lopez's serving-girl in the rom-com Maid In Manhattan, yet is not seen as a comedian. The truth is, he's simply a superb character actor - any character, any situation.

And he always brings something extra to his roles, something that may have been in the script but is extremely difficult to understand and express. This is human complexity. Perhaps due to his genes, his itinerant childhood, his unusual family life, Fiennes seems to have a remarkably strong grasp of people's weaknesses, their idiosyncratic thought processes, their troubles. His heroes are always flawed - confused, angry, vacillating - and his villains are always vulnerable, wishing to walk the path of righteousness but fatally undermined by other, darker compulsions. Consequently a Fiennes performance, even in legendary duffer The Avengers, is always fascinating. He muddies the waters around him, makes us peer more closely at movements on the screen, opens us up for surprise. His success is not simply down to his looks or his natural charisma - though he has both in spades - but a mighty emotional intelligence and a hard-won access to feelings of loss, loneliness, alienation, perturbation of every sort. Fiennes is not always easy to watch, but still you cannot turn your eyes away. He's a brilliant actor, quite brilliant.

He was born Ralph Nathaniel Fiennes at East Anglia General Hospital, Ipswich on the 22nd of December, 1962. His father, Mark, son of an industrialist, was Eton-schooled but, after spells working on sheep stations in New Zealand and Australia, returned to England in the Fifties to undergo a training in agriculture and become a tenant farmer near Southwold in Suffolk. In 1962 he would marry Jennifer Lash, known as Jini, an author who the year before had published her first novel, The Burial. Jini, a child of the Raj, had until the age of six lived in India where her father was a colonial administrator. Her family was academic, cerebral and remote - her uncle Sebastian was a Benedictine monk and her brother Nicholas a priest who became a theology professor at Cambridge. Jini was more artistic. Rebellious at school, she was diagnosed as mentally unstable, even "hysterical", and left at 16.

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