The British actor and his Swiss wife, Maria Dolores Dieguez, welcomed a daughter Monday, their first child together, People reports.

Fiennes played the Bard of Avon himself opposite Gwyneth Paltrow in Shakespeare in Love and currently stars in ABC’s FlashForward.

He swapped vows with Dieguez, a model and former Miss Switzerland finalist, last summer in Tuscany after almost three years of dating.

Hollywood heart-throb Joseph Fiennes will be taking part in a question and answer session at this year’s Latitude festival.

The sold-out weekend festival, which takes place near Southwold, starts on Thursday, July 17, with The British Academy of Film and Television Arts opening the event the on The Lake Stage with a late-night screening of E A Dupont’s silent film Moulin Rouge, with live music accompaniment from The Matrix Ensemble.

Source: Evening News 24

2,000 Feet Away, the debut drama by Anthony Weigh, which stars Joseph Fiennes, Ian Hart and Phyllis Logan, has extended its run at the Bush until 19 July.

The extra week of performances has been added due to popular demand, and extra tickets have been made available for all forthcoming performances.

Source: Official London Theater

Still best remembered for playing the frilly-shirted Bard in Shakespeare In Love, Joseph Fiennes plays Lenny, a taciturn hard nut who joins Brian Cox’s gang to bust out of prison in low-budget British thriller The Escapist, which is released this week. The 37-year-old can also be seen in the flesh in Anthony Weigh’s 2,000 Feet Away at London’s Bush Theatre.

What attracted you to the tough-man role in The Escapist?
I just thought the whole episode with him getting involved in a gruesome, gruelling fight to attain one tiny bit of equipment to help their escape – which was a diamond set in the tooth of a Celtic warrior named Two Ton – was fantastic.

How was it shooting that fight scene?
It took four hours to shoot. On a big-budget movie that would have been four days, so we were up against it. The adrenaline gets hold of you, you’ve got 100 or so inmates screaming in an echoing room and you’ve got to be aware you’re not going to knock each other out. I got a warning when I clocked my elbow into the other guy’s mouth and nearly took his tooth out. I kept seeing him checking it every day to see if it was still in place.

Was shooting in a prison a surreal experience?
It’s the same prison they used in The Italian Job. It’s other-worldly. It’s also got a very sad heritage. It’s where a lot of Irish revolutionaries were incarcerated. It’s full of desperate, unhappy ghosts. I wandered off once but came back pretty quick. I felt more comfortable with Two Ton taking punches at me than I did wandering the corridors.

Have you been offered any more tough-guy parts following The Escapist?
I haven’t seen any angry, skinhead cons coming my way yet but there’s time. I want to collect a mixed bag of characters that will hopefully challenge the perceptions of directors and producers who have only ever seen Shakespeare In Love.

Has it been hard breaking away from that frilly-shirted image?
I come from a theatre background where there are no restrictions. With films, if you’re successful in one area, it’s like: ‘Let’s not change anything.’ It’s been a challenge. I feel like I’m now getting a mixed bag, which is all I want.

Has it taken longer than you expected?
I was 26 when I did Shakespeare and now I’m coming up to 38 so, invariably, the parts are going to change. I played the Romeos in my 20s and now there’s been this crossover, where I’m playing more twisted characters. I love all the darker roles I’m playing now.

How important is theatre to you?
Theatre is the actor’s medium and it’s f*****g hard. They say the camera never lies – I think it lies like nothing else. It’s theatre that doesn’t lie. You get on stage and there’s no way out. It’s so much about the audience and how they react, whereas sometimes the only feedback you get on a film is when the grip says to you: ‘Oh, that was nice.’

Do you go to the theatre much?
Not as much as I should do because I’ve been travelling. The last thing I saw was Kevin Spacey and Jeff Goldblum in Speed-The-Plow.

Is there any sibling rivalry between you and Ralph?
No, there isn’t. That’s probably because there are seven of us and I’m the youngest and he’s the eldest. There’s competitiveness among one’s peers but not when there’s that big an age difference.

Where have you been recently?
I just went to Thailand for the first time, which was interesting. I spent a few weeks travelling around the country. I love to explore territories that I haven’t been to before. It’s all about discovery and Thailand’s a great place to explore, both within and outside of yourself. I don’t want to hang around until it’s too late and I can’t get on a plane. There’s a lot to see and a lot to do.

Are you as sporty as you used to be?
I haven’t rock-climbed for a bit but I have been skiing a lot. Whether it’s physical or mental, I like anything that’s a little bit stressful.

Source: Metro

Why won’t Joseph Fiennes make life easy for himself? As he prepares to star in an explosive play about paedophilia, he tells Phil Hoad why he’s glad he turned his back on Hollywood

Joseph Fiennes claims he doesn’t remember the look on Harvey Weinstein’s face when he turned down a five-picture deal with Miramax in the late 90s in order to do more theatre. He does, however, remember his reasoning. “I could see it in the piles of scripts: I’m not going to get the roles I want, but how do I challenge that? I wanted freedom.”

Shakespeare in Love, the film that gave Fiennes instant promotion to Hollywood’s premier league, is now almost 10 years old, and he still has his freedom; this week he returns to the stage in a new play, 2,000 Feet Away. Hunched over a coffee table in a rehearsal room in south London, he stares at a script covered in turquoise highlights, running rapidly through his lines in a heavy midwest accent. Fiennes, who has just turned 38 – receding slightly but with heartthrob credentials otherwise intact – apologises for being preoccupied, and then ploughs on.

Fiennes is three weeks into rehearsals. The play is a cracking debut by Australian writer Anthony Weigh. Ambiguous yet incendiary, it takes its title from the distance, under Iowa law, that sex offenders are required to maintain from places where children congregate. “It’s a play about fear, and how you want to sort something out, and you try to drive it away,” says Fiennes. “But it comes back to bite you twice as hard.”

Fiennes plays a town sherriff in Eldon, Iowa. Forced to move a neighbour away from a nearby school, he escorts him to a motel outside town, which is a holding pen for local sex offenders. But the poison spills through the community. “People who wouldn’t ordinarily think about [paedophilia] do,” says Fiennes. “The prime example of someone whose mind is twisted is the 12-year-old girl [who in the play lives opposite the motel], who has 27 pictures of sex offenders on her wall instead of Bambi. She becomes a Lolita. The soul you want to protect becomes tainted by this feeding of information.”

2,000 Feet Away is being staged in the tiny Bush Theatre in west London – at 80 seats, it is the smallest venue Fiennes has performed in – but the subject matter means it has the potential to be explosive. And this may be just what Fiennes needs. While he may have voluntarily stepped away from Hollywood, he has since lowered his stock with duds such as Rancid Aluminium and the execrable Killing Me Softly. His recent screen roles have been more challenging – he played a paedophile in 2006′s Running With Scissors; Mandela’s prison guard in Goodbye Bafana; Martin Luther in 2003′s Luther. His next screen role is as the glowering muscle in The Escapist, a grimy, evocative prison-break thriller from first-time director Robert Hyatt¹.

“There’s definitely a nice range opening up,” Fiennes says. “In your early 20s, you get the Romeo scripts, and you do a film that pops in a wonderful way, and that changes everything. But you get more scripts based on that, because film is about money. Why be a forward, if you’re a goalie? For me, going from Shakespeare to Running With Scissors is my fight to say: I can play [other] positions.”

Fiennes may have eluded typecasting, but he has struggled to find another role that has captured the imagination in the way Shakespeare did. He talks about theatre as his lifeblood: he worked as a dresser at the National Theatre for four years in his late teens, and did an apprenticeship at the Young Vic. In recent years, he has played the tubercular artist in John Osborne and Anthony Creighton’s Epitaph for George Dillon, Berowne in the National’s Love’s Labour’s Lost, and the lead in Marlowe’s Edward II at the Sheffield Crucible in 2001.

Fiennes is typically exact on the differences between stage and screen acting. For instance, the extra possibilities offered by the close-up: “Cinema’s interesting when it’s here [he mimes a camera near his face] and you say something, but you mean something else. The syntax of films is what’s not said, but on stage a character’s language informs you about their DNA.” He could be describing his own strengths and weaknesses. He doesn’t have the febrile screen charisma of his brother Ralph; he is a more immediate, strident performer, more coloured by the theatre.

Fiennes’ mother was Jennifer Lash, a writer who overcame her own abusive childhood to create a loving, peripatetic, artistic home for her six children; their father was the photographer Mark Fiennes. Ralph is the eldest, and Joseph, with his twin Jacob, the youngest. The family lived between homes in London, Wiltshire and Ireland, but Fiennes says the constant moving didn’t bother him. “You make it work. It’s a survival technique in the schoolyard – making new friends.” “Energy” is a word that crops up a lot in Fiennes’s conversation, and in his case it doesn’t just sound like actor-speak. For him, acting really does mean being physically out there: in the otherwise muted Goodbye Bafana, the film comes alive when he stick-fights a feisty Mandela. He took up rock-climbing after playing a mountaineer in Killing Me Softly, and half-killed himself trying to surf 15ft waves in Australia while filming The Great Raid in 2002. He ripped his lip off in a brutal wipe-out, requiring a graft from his earlobe to reconstruct it – the reason he’s now rarely clean-shaven in photographs.

So you can’t say Fiennes isn’t up for new experiences. Last December he filmed his directorial debut in Russia, The Spirit, a nine-minute short by a new writer. He says he has long been fascinated with feral kids, from Romulus and Remus to Mowgli, and was looking for someone to flesh out a script on the subject. “So I said, ‘Hey, you wanna cut your teeth?’ And he came back and wrote something completely different,” he laughs. “But it kinda worked, and it was The Spirit.”

Fiennes only had a week to cast, scout locations and find an interpreter. “It was: OK, Joe, go – it was a baptism of fire. It was exhausting and fun.” He found himself on set in the forest four hours’ drive from Moscow every day, trying to cram in scenes before sunset at 3pm, “and when the sun goes down in Russia, it really goes down”.

If The Spirit doesn’t quite reach the Tarkovsky benchmark Fiennes aspired to, the film has plenty of atmosphere. He has since shot two shorts for the US Campaign for Burma, and smiles when I ask him if he’s preparing more: “I think I am, yeah. Watch this space.”

Talking about directing is the only time Fiennes lets his guard down, and puts his Rada-esque mannerisms aside. Art, in its many guises, has pride of place on the family crest, after all, even if Fiennes finds it hard to say why. “I’m still finding out – and it’s a lifelong experience. Just after I pop my clogs, come back to me on that one. Right now, I’m at the centre of it, and it’s not a bad place to be.”

2,000 Feet Away is at the Bush, London W12 (020- 7610 4224), until July 12. Watch Joseph Fiennes’ films at youtube.com/user/uscampaignforburma

¹ That would be Rupert Wyatt, and not Robert Hyatt.

Source: The Guardian

The evening will also feature a private concert by Alanis Morissette, who will preview some selections from her new album “Flavors of Entanglement.”  In addition, a range of celebrities from the varied worlds of film, athletics, environmental activism, and literature will be present, including Kevin Spacey, Nadia Comaneci, Boris Becker, David de Rothschild, and Paulo Coelho.

Source: Via Luxe

According to British newspaper The Herald, the UK government will promote a road safety campaign which will focus on tired drivers. It advises, as an emergency measure, drinking two cups of coffee or a high-caffeine drink and having a rest for 10-15 minutes to allow the caffeine to kick in. It also includes a hard-hitting radio advert featuring Joe himself, online advertising on journey-planning websites, partnership marketing and messaging at service station washrooms, forecourts and petrol pumps.

And don’t forget: drive safe.