Joseph Fiennes

Info

Full Name: Joseph Fiennes
Date of birth: May 27, 1970 (56 years old)
Location: Salisbury, Wiltshire
Country: UK

Joseph Fiennes has been active for 28 years, participating in 18 movies that average a 6.7/10 score.

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Biography

In 1998 he had two films out that ended up competing against each other for the best picture Oscar. In one he played Robert Dudley, the man Elizabeth I couldn't have. In the other he played William Shakespeare. Joseph Fiennes was 28 and looked set to run the place.

What he has done since is something else, and it has lasted much longer: he became the actor you call when a piece of British history needs playing. Shakespeare, Martin Luther, Mandela's jailer, a Roman tribune, the England manager.

He was born in Salisbury, Wiltshire, in May 1970, and has an identical twin brother, Jacob, who works in conservation. There are six siblings in all, among them the actor Ralph Fiennes, eight years older, and the director Sophie Fiennes.

His father Mark was a photographer who had been a farmer; his mother, Jennifer Lash, wrote novels. The family moved constantly between England and Ireland and had little money, whatever the full surname, Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes, might suggest. His mother died of cancer in 1993, the year he left drama school.

The family amounts to a small industry on its own: Ralph acts, Martha and Sophie direct, their brother Magnus writes music, and the next generation is already in it. The explorer Sir Ranulph Fiennes is a distant cousin on the same old English line. Joseph is the second actor in the house, and he has spent thirty years being asked about the first one.

Guildhall, the West End and the RSC

He trained for three years at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and graduated in 1993. He made his West End debut that same year in 'The Woman in Black' and followed it with 'A Month in the Country' opposite Helen Mirren.

Two seasons at the Royal Shakespeare Company followed, in 1996 and 1997, where he played Jesus in 'Son of Man' and appeared in 'Troilus and Cressida'. His first film came in 1996, Bernardo Bertolucci's 'Stealing Beauty', with Liv Tyler in the lead.

1998

In Shekhar Kapur's 'Elizabeth' he is the Earl of Leicester, the man Cate Blanchett loves and cannot marry.

A few months later came John Madden's 'Shakespeare in Love', with him as a broke, blocked Shakespeare in his twenties who falls for the woman disguising herself as a man to get on stage. Gwyneth Paltrow played her, with Judi Dench, Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush around them.

The film won seven Oscars including best picture, beating 'Saving Private Ryan'. He got a BAFTA nomination and a Screen Actors Guild award for the ensemble, though he was one of the few people in it the Academy overlooked.

Luther, Bassanio and twenty years of work

The years after that split between history and thrillers of wildly varying quality. He was the political commissar in 'Enemy at the Gates' (2001), the third point of a triangle with Jude Law and Rachel Weisz at Stalingrad, and the lead in 'Killing Me Softly' (2002), which went badly wrong.

In 2003 he put on the habit to play Martin Luther in 'Luther', a German co-production about the monk who broke the Church in half, and the following year he was Bassanio in Michael Radford's 'The Merchant of Venice', with Al Pacino as Shylock.

The most interesting thing he did in that period is 'Goodbye Bafana' (2007) for Bille August, as James Gregory, the Afrikaner prison officer who guarded Nelson Mandela for twenty years and slowly changed his mind, with Dennis Haysbert as Mandela.

Plenty followed: 'Running With Scissors' (2006), 'The Escapist' (2008), 'The Red Baron' (2008), the villain of 'Hercules' (2014) opposite Dwayne Johnson, the outback drama 'Strangerland' (2015) with Nicole Kidman, and the Roman tribune investigating the resurrection in 'Risen' (2016).

More recently he was the well dressed villain in 'The Mother' (2023), the Netflix action film with Jennifer Lopez.

He has never left the stage either. In 2002 he played Iago in an 'Othello' in the West End, and in 2009 he was Cyrano de Bergerac at Chichester, nose and verse included. It's where he trained, and where he has gone back whenever film had little to offer.

Commander Waterford

Television has given him his most watched parts. He led the second season of 'American Horror Story', 'Asylum' (2012), as the monsignor running a Catholic institution for Ryan Murphy, alongside Jessica Lange and Sarah Paulson. Before that he had fronted 'FlashForward' (2009) and 'Camelot' (2011), neither of which reached a second season.

The part that redefined him was Commander Fred Waterford in 'The Handmaid's Tale', from 2017 across four seasons. Waterford is one of the architects of Gilead and also a weak, vain man jealous of his own wife, and Fiennes played him without a shred of self pity, opposite Elisabeth Moss and Yvonne Strahovski. It brought an Emmy nomination in 2018, and the character was killed off at the end of the fourth season in 2021.

In the middle of all that came the misstep he is still asked about. In January 2017 Sky pulled, before broadcast, the episode of 'Urban Myths' in which he, a white actor, played Michael Jackson. The criticism was enormous, starting with Jackson's daughter. Years later, in 2023, he said it had been the wrong decision and a bad mistake, that he had asked the broadcaster to drop it, and that the right call was made.

Read through his filmography and the amount of religion in it is striking. He started out playing Jesus at the RSC, played the man who broke with Rome in 'Luther', the monsignor in 'Asylum' and the Roman officer hunting for the body of Christ in 'Risen'. Casting directors clearly saw something in him that suited a man wrestling with faith.

He has filled the gaps with smaller things too: 'Man to Man' (2005), 'The Darwin Awards' (2006) and 'The Games Maker' (2014). In 2003 he voiced Proteus, the prince who stakes his life on a friend, in the DreamWorks animation 'Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas', with Brad Pitt as Sinbad.

Southgate, Sherlock and a house in Mallorca

In 2023 he went back to the theatre for the biggest stage success of his career. In James Graham's 'Dear England' at the National Theatre he played Gareth Southgate, the manager who tried to change English football's culture from inside the dressing room. He was nominated for an Olivier, the play transferred to the West End, and in May 2026 the BBC broadcast a four part adaptation with him repeating the role, alongside Jodie Whittaker and Jason Watkins.

In November 2025 the BBC also showed 'Prisoner 951', four episodes about the nearly six years the British Iranian charity worker Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe spent imprisoned in Iran. He plays Richard Ratcliffe, the husband who went on hunger strike outside the Foreign Office, with Narges Rashidi as her.

Then in March 2026 Prime Video launched 'Young Sherlock', with him as Silas Holmes, the detective's father. The son is played by his nephew Hero Fiennes Tiffin, the son of his sister Martha. It's the first time the two have worked together.

His private life has had one foot in Spain for years. In August 2009 he married the photographer and model María Dolores Diéguez, of Galician descent and raised in Switzerland, in a Catholic ceremony in Tuscany, having met her at an Italian festival. They have two daughters, born in 2010 and 2011, and the family has divided its time between Mallorca, where she keeps a studio in Palma and where one of the girls was born, and London.

A British paper once called him the go-to actor for English cultural history. Looking at what he has done since, that was not far off.