And this time it’s goodbye to lovelorn swains: I play an Irish lawyer who tries

And this time, it’s goodbye to lovelorn swains: “I play an Irish lawyer who tries to save his best friend’s business from the taxman. Halfway through you realise he’s not the sort of lawyer you want handling your books.” Does he like playing the baddie? “Oh yes,” he says, then thinks for a moment before adding, “although I see him as completely sane”.After that Fiennes is heading for the first time to Hollywood for a Paul Schrader movie and another bad guy: “I’m very excited about it. It’s a piece he wrote in the 1970s which he hasn’t updated so it’s very much of its time. My character is an all-American kid who changes identity and comes back to wreak revenge and to get the girl.

But he’s all scarred and she obviously will find him quite horrific. There’s lots of prosthetics and nastiness – a revenge tragedy.”Fiennes is adamant that the lure of Hollywood won’t keep him in America He will come back to London – and the theatre. “I like language, and in film language is diluted by the visuals and the music. Theatre is what I was trained for.” Is he tempted now to take on a Shakespearian role? He shuddered visibly “No. I couldn’t bear to walk onstage knowing that half the audience knew the play better than me and were mumbling it along with me I’d rather do a production no one’s ever seen. I think Shakespeare should be given a rest.”‘Shakespeare in Love’ (15) is released nationwide on 29 January..

Whatever impact the advent of the millennium is calculated to have on us all, the ongoing countdown has already exposed the depths of British cultural parochialism. Just the other week the critic John Carey presented his list of the century’s 50 best books, a list which contrived to exclude Proust, Faulkner, Rilke, Kafka, Celine, Valery, Borges, Brecht and Wallace Stevens but found room for Edward Thomas, Stevie Smith and (wait for it) Clive James, a name few of us dreamt was destined to ring down the ages. Brian Sewell, on the other hand, listing what have been, in his view, the century’s ten worst artworks, gave pride (or shame) of place to such forgettable duds as Picasso, Matisse and Duchamp. Actually, reading these lists is like being transported back to the last fin de siecle.

It’s almost as though, for Carey and Sewell, modernism, the defining movement of our century’s cultural life, was a bad dream from which we will wake in the year 2000; almost as though, paradoxically, the 20th century, the century they’re supposed to be chronicling and celebrating, never happened at all. These are Victorian values with a vengeance!
We’d be less than human if we too weren’t tempted to seize the opportunity for some millennial spring-cleaning: that, after all, is what landmark dates are for Our approach, though, will be a little different. From today until the end of the year, The Guillotine will profile 50 leading luminaries of 20th-century culture who, we believe, are unlikely to survive far into the 21st: in short, 50 artists whose relevance for our own century has been undeniable but whose sensibilities will prove either too fragile or too closely linked to the tastes and affects of the last hundred years to mean much to future generations.Though the list, like all such, will be anchored in personal taste (not just my own, since other critics will be invited to contribute), we’ll endeavour to be objective too. However the selection strikes the reader – as shrewd or eccentric, sensible or mischievous – it will reflect our sincere, considered opinions as to the ultimate assessment of posterity. An Anglo-centric bias is probably inevitable, and a dialogue with readers will naturally be welcome.There will be just two guiding principles: first, the artists in question must be dead. This rule was adopted not merely as an elementary courtesy to the living but because, until death has had its last word, miracles are always possible. To have judged Verdi’s achievement without taking into account the late, grandiose flowering of his genius in Otello and Falstaff, would have been to accord him a significantly less illustrious niche in the pantheon than the one he’s finally come to occupy.

On a more lowly level, the American film director Robert Rossen ended a stolidly unspectacular career with two masterpieces for which nothing in his earlier work had prepared us – The Hustler and the luminously beautiful Lilith. Second, we shall ignore those figures – Norman Douglas, R C Sherriff, Christopher Wood, Hilaire Belloc, etc – whose star is already definitively in the descendant. The game surely isn’t worth playing unless there subsists an element of doubt, no matter how minuscule. Sometimes even posterity finds itself out on a limb.1: Terence RattiganTerence Rattigan is a major figure only to those who genuinely, unironically, think of Noel Coward as “The Master” rather than as a dandified petit-maitre.