A Merchant Ivory film, It's quite hard to finance this kind of film, so there's a sort of pressure to move through the day and get it done.
As an actor, there's a bit of you that's decided you want to be looked at and watched, but there's a paradoxical bit that wants to run away.
For most of the film I wore good-looking dentures but then he had developed this whole weird thing of putting in his grandmother's teeth which he wears to murder people and bites them.
Gardeners are good at nurturing, and they have a great quality of patience, they're tender. They have to be persistent.
He would enjoy people weeping and crying and begging for their lives before he killed them or strangled them. He would get aroused and ejaculate while he was killing him. It's very upsetting.
I admire the world of the books and the characters that she's created, but I'm not an addict of Harry Potter. I don't feel possessive about it.
I can't go and shoot people in the back of the head because It's a kids' movie, which is actually quite a good test because you haven't got the overt threat of a knife in the face.
I certainly gained a lot by reading about Shanghai.
I couldn't get as big as a bodybuilder. I tried to put on as much weight in the right places as I could. My weightlifting was impressive for me, but not for some of the guys I see down at the gym.
I did what I could to move the muscles in my back so the tattoo could sort of stretch out. I always wished I had more muscles that could crinkle up.
I don't feel particularly comfortable about actors using whatever power they may have to push their beliefs, unless they're extremely well informed.
I don't plan a career. That doesn't work for me. I just have to go with my gut.
I got to read some writings by serial killers, and they got inside my head. They were quite disturbing. I read disturbing stuff about that very detached way of manipulating people to do things.
I had to really be clear about what having a cleft palette does and if you had it badly fixed, you would have your hard palette brought together but would have no teeth.
I hadn't done many magical, fantastical children's films. When I saw pictures they drew, the look, that's when I really took the bait. I couldn't describe it. It's really cool.
I have a lot of stuff I want to talk about and offer up. It would be odd not to have ideas about something.
I like to keep fit, but I never lift very heavy weights.
I respond to a part just intuitively when I read a script.
I think a bit of me on the Harry Potter set is like a kid sort of entering into the fantasy set when You're young.
I veer away from trying to understand why I act. I just know I need to do it.
I very rarely have had a complete sort of confrontation. I just think you've got to have a very true collaboration.
I was grateful to have two weeks to shoot this one scene in Harry Potter. It's a big, big scene, but they have to deliver. And they have high expectations.
I was only interested in my scene, and I had to go through thousands and thousands of other scenes. I got my scene and I read it many, many, many, many, many times. That was my research.
I went out to Mount Kilimanjaro, which I thought was very beautiful, but there were a lot of people there.
I'm not very good at confrontation.
I'm sure acting is a deeply neurotic thing to do.
In the best material, you always should be able to somehow make a case for a story to be transposed to any other time.
In the studio system, things are expected of a film. By the first, second, third act, there's a generic language that comes out of the more commercial system.
It was just two energies between two people, you can't prescribe that.
Kenya doesn't have much of an infrastructure for hosting a film of this scale. Our producer decided that for the film to really work it had to be in Kenya.
Kenya doesn't have much of an infrastructure for hosting a film.
Little moments can have a feeling and a texture that is very real.
Most films are rooted in a book or a comic strip, but I don't go out there saying I want to do adaptations.
My mother was quite anarchic and yet she had quite a moral code about personal responsibility. She was constantly stimulating her children's imaginations.
One of the things that binds us as a family is a shared sense of humor.
The film depends on the audience's belief in this relationship.
The hype for this particular Harry Potter film-I don't really feel it. I don't have a fan's investment in the books myself.
The sets were fantastic. The Harry Potter sets are brilliant. You do get transported for a second.
There are those moments when you shake someone's hand, have a conversation with someone, and suddenly your all bound together because you share your humanity in one simple moment.
There's a challenge to playing these fantasy figures because they are fantasy figures. You have to enter into this sort of imaginative world of the writer.
There's a lot of people who feel there's a tabloid journalist who had it coming.
There's no sanitation and no running water, but the spirit of the people, their enthusiasm, their joy-the thing I carried away with me was a sense of human contact.
There's only one day to shoot one scene, you don't get a second chance. You've got to say, This is what I feel. Could I try this?
We'd all like to believe that perhaps people could stop killing each other.
When she was younger, my mother was quite committed to Roman Catholicism. But she got disillusioned with it and moved closer to something like Buddhist beliefs near the end of her life.
When you get to over 40 and people are killing each other still around the world and blowing each other up, it gets a bit sort of depressing.
When you go to areas that have poverty of that level, you're ready to feel shocked and some degree of shame, coming in as a rich westerner.
Within the process of filming, unexpected situations occur.
You feel yourself working to show something. I've learned to distrust that feeling.
You have to just dive over the edge. You haven't got time to mess about.
You want people who at best are very different. That works because if everything was always the same, it would get boring.
You want to have a critical success and you want people to go see it. It's disappointing if something's well reviewed and no one goes to see it.
You're meant to be playing the distillation of evil, which can be anything.
It's 'Rafe', actually.
When children were introduced to Lord Voldemort, they looked suitably terrified. Which gave me great gratification.
As an actor, a part of you expects to be looked at. A part of you wants to be looked at. But when I'm playing a part, in my imagined world, I feel I'm not me. I may be using bits of me, but I love the sense that I'm being someone else.
Awards are like applause, and every actor likes to hear applause.
The process of making a film is a mad lottery. Whenever you get the feeling that you're making something special, you have to quickly squash it because you are so often proved wrong.
I think it's a badge of honor to have a real flop on your resume" - about The Avenger
I tried not to play Voldemort over the top, and then I realized there's no other way.
The people I consider successful are so because of how they handle their responsibilities to other people, how they approach the future, people who have a full sense of the value of their life and what they want to do with it. I call people successful not because they have money or their business is doing well but because, as human beings, they have a fully developed sense of being alive and engaged in a lifetime task of collaboration with other human beings -- their mothers and fathers, their family, their friends, their loved ones, the friends who are dying, the friends who are being born. Success.. is all about being able to extend love to people... not in a big, capital letter sense but in the everyday. Little by little, task by task, gesture by gesture, word by word.
Name pronounced "Rafe Fine".
Ranked #34 in Empire (UK) magazine's "The Top 100 Movie Stars of All Time" list. [October 1997]
Of the roughly one dozen actors to play "Hamlet" on Broadway, he is the first to win a Tony Award for doing so, in the 1995 Almeida Theatre production directed by Jonathan Kent.
Brother of Martha Fiennes and Joseph Fiennes.
Chosen by Empire magazine as one of the 100 Sexiest Stars in film history (#33). [1995]
On 3 March 2001, he received the William Shakespeare Award from the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington DC. Past recipients include Mel Gibson, Patrick Stewart, Lynn Redgrave, Kenneth Branagh and Kevin Kline.
His uncle, Nicholas Lash, is a former priest and Cambridge theology professor, and his great-uncle, Dom Patrick Moore, is a Benedictine monk.
Partner Francesca Annis. [1995 - 2006]
Gained several pounds of muscle for his role in Red Dragon (2002).
His performance as Amon Goeth from his film Schindler's List (1993) was ranked #15 on the American Film Institute's Villains list in their compilation of the 100 years of The Greatest Screen Heroes and Villains.
Is the oldest of 6 children - younger siblings; Martha Fiennes (b. 1964), Magnus Hubert Fiennes (b. 1965), Sophia Victoria Fiennes (b. 1967) and Jacob Mark Fiennes & Joseph Fiennes (fraternal twins) (b. 27 May 1970). He also has a foster brother, Michael Emery (b. 31 Dec 1952) who has been with the family since he was 11.
A Member of the RADA Council.
He and his The End of the Affair (1999) co- star Julianne Moore have acted in separate Hannibal Lecter films: he in Red Dragon (2002) and she in Hannibal (2001).
His tattoo in Red Dragon (2002) took eight hours to apply.
Appears in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005) and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2007) with Gary Oldman. Both of them have played villains in the Hannibal Lecter films: Fiennes played Francis Dolarhyde in Red Dragon (2002), and Oldman played Mason Verger in Hannibal (2001).
4th cousin of Lord Saye & Sele, owner of Broughton Castle, which appears in Shakespeare in Love (1998) as Viola's house.
8th cousin to HRH The Prince of Wales.
Fiennes was reluctant to take the role of Lord Volemort in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005). In a television interview on AMC's "Sunday Morning Shootout" (2003) (November 20, 2005), he claimed to have been unimpressed with the previous three Harry Potter films. Fiennes was apparently nonplussed at the idea of appearing in the fourth film of a series and stated that he had "never bought into [the] world" of Harry Potter. Family members urged him to take the role while other friends counseled against it. He eventually changed his mind after Goblet of Fire director Mike Newell showed Fiennes preproduction conceptions of what the character of Voldemort might look like: "The little kid in me that likes to dress up and be bad went 'Yeah! I want to do it!'".
He was considered for the role of Robert Langdon in The Da Vinci Code (2006). Tom Hanks was cast instead.
Appeared in two Best Picture winners from the 1990s: Schindler's List (1993) and The English Patient (1996). The only other actor to do this was Richard Harris, who appeared in Unforgiven (1992) and Gladiator (2000) (The year 2000 was still part of the twentieth century, so it was technically part of the 1990s as well). Both Fiennes and Harris appear in the Harry Potter films.
Broke up with Francesca Annis [February 7, 2006].
Has appeared in two Best Picture winners (Schindler's List (1993) and The English Patient (1996)), and a Best Animated Feature winner (Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005)).
He and his brother, Joseph Fiennes, have both worked with Cate Blanchett (Oscar and Lucinda (1997) and Elizabeth (1998)), Rachel Weisz (The Constant Gardener (2005) and Enemy at the Gates (2001)) and Liv Tyler (Onegin (1999) and Stealing Beauty (1996)).
When he noticed that children watching the filming were scared of him as "Voldemort" in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005), he knew he had the character right.
His performance as "Amon Goeth" in Schindler's List (1993) is ranked #61 on Premiere Magazine's 100 Greatest Performances of All Time (2006).
He turned down the lead role in The Saint (1997).
Filmed his role as Lord Voldemort in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005) in only two days.
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