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. Consider him one of the lucky ones. It should be a national scandal that Michael Gove is presiding over plans which will in practice, I fear, see English Literature become a GCSE subject taken up by only the very brightest of students. Even more damaging is the pernicious idea that literature and drama are not serious considerations. Writers are passionate about this issue because irrespective of background, whether they were a model student or a teenage tearaway, they will be able to tell you the moment that a work of literature changed, or in some cases even saved, their life. So consider it Spectator Life’s Christmas wish that Michael Gove, like the bear in the ad we won’t mention, wakes up to something truly magical: to the extraordinary power of the arts in education, and the importance of the imagination.
Happy holidays.
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