The late Anthony Minghella described our cover star, Ralph Fiennes, as a ‘held, slightly unknowable person’. Though I’ve long admired his work, I got to know him a little bit better when we met to talk about The Invisible Woman, his unforgettable account of Dickens’s secret life with his mistress Ellen Ternan.
Fiennes both stars and directs, which he terms a ‘brilliant, scary’ feeling. It’s a strategy that has produced some great American films (last year’s Argo, directed by Ben Affleck, or Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby, or Robert Redford’s Quiz Show), but it’s a particular pleasure to celebrate a Rada-trained, homegrown talent taking on Hollywood on his own exacting terms.
Fiennes’s love of literature goes back to his childhood, when he was told Shakespeare’s plots by his mother.
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