Hayley Atwell and Keira Knightley in "The Duchess." Nick Wall/Paramount Vantage
"It was an amazingly powerful thing to see these people who really believed in the place of art, the place of theater in particular, in making a stand against something" by Keira Knightley.
On the bed in Ralph Fiennes' hotel room is a script for Sophocles' "Oedipus." Fiennes, who is about to star as the king of Thebes on the London stage, is learning his lines between promoting his new movie, "The Duchess," at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Many prominent screen actors with theater backgrounds give lip service to returning to the stage. But Fiennes is one of the few who actually do it. In the past five years, he's been in six plays on both sides of the Atlantic. He has the distinction of having won a Tony award for his "Hamlet" and Spike TV's Scream Award for most vile villain for playing Lord Voldemort in "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix."
With Paul Newman retired, Fiennes inherits the mantle of deepest blue eyes in the business. He's dressed formally for the early hour in a black suit and white shirt without a tie. In a voice so soft you have to lean over to catch all his words, he talks about his love of theater and why movies are no substitute.
"I wanted to become an actor because of the theater," Fiennes says, taking a small sip of water. "It's where all the great writers are. To have to go through the process of filmmaking all the time would drive me crazy. Part of it is the waiting around, and then everything is shot out of sequence."
The movie he just finished, "The Reader," based on Bernhard Schlink's best-selling novel, "had so many problems I won't bother you with them. It took ages to finish. Important scenes often were squished to the end of the day."
One of the assignments was to do his own version of Velasquez's famous painting called "Las Meninas." He did a crude replica of the little girl and two dwarves in the foreground.
"I broke them down like they were sitting on a theater set," he says. "Suddenly I got very excited about the world of theater. I thought maybe I should do theater design. But what I was really responding to was the bit of me that wanted to act. I had acted at school and had really enjoyed it. I felt confident about it. Suddenly, I made a decision that was what I wanted to do.
Theater is the one love that's endured.
The Duchess (PG-13) opens Friday at Bay Area theaters.
To see a trailer for "The Duchess, " go to www.theduchessmovie. com.
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