RALPH FIENNES AND 1993

1993 was Ralph Fiennes' "breakout year." He had a major role in Peter Greenaway's film "The Baby of Mâcon" with Julia Ormond, and, later that year, he became known internationally for portraying the brutal Nazi concentration camp commandant Amon Göth in Steven Spielberg's "Schindler's List." For this, he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. Though he did not win the Oscar, but did win the Best Supporting Actor BAFTA Award for the role. His portrayal of Göth also saw him listed at number 15 on the AFI's list of the top 50 film villains.

Fiennes later stated that playing the role had a profoundly disturbing effect on him: "Evil is cumulative. It happens. People believe that they've got to do a job, they've got to take on an ideology, that they've got a life to lead; they've got to survive, a job to do, it's every day inch by inch, little compromises, little ways of telling yourself this is how you should lead your life and suddenly then these things can happen. I mean, I could make a judgment myself privately, this is a terrible, evil, horrific man. But the job was to portray the man, the human being. There’s a sort of banality, that everydayness, that I think was important. And it was in the screenplay. In fact, one of the first scenes with Oskar Schindler, with Liam Neeson, was a scene where I'm saying, 'You don't understand how hard it is, I have to order so many-so many meters of barbed wire and so many fencing posts and I have to get so many people from A to B.' And, you know, he's sort of letting off steam about the difficulties of the job."

Fiennes put on 28 pounds to play the role. He watched historic newsreels and talked to Holocaust survivors who knew Göth. In portraying him, Fiennes said, "I got close to his pain. Inside him is a fractured, miserable human being. I feel split about him, sorry for him. He's like some dirty, battered doll I was given and that I came to feel peculiarly attached to."

Spielberg on Fiennes' audition: "I saw sexual evil. It is all about subtlety: there were moments of kindness that would move across his eyes and then instantly run cold."

When survivor Mila Pfefferberg was introduced to Fiennes on the set, she began shaking uncontrollably, as he reminded her too much of the real Göth...