The Sun reports that Alex Kingston is returning to ER for the very final episode, shooting early 2009. Alex Kingston was famously fired from the series for that peculiarly feminine sin - becoming old. Not even old, just less young. Alex's eight series' body of work as Elizabeth Corday in ER, at reportedly $150,000 per episode, was in itself a living example of one of my favourite George Herbert quotes, "Living well is the best revenge." After a bitter and difficult marriage to Ralph Fiennes, for my money she deserved every dollar.
Why should I care? Well, Ralph and Alex happened to live in the flat above mine in the then rather risqu̩ East Dulwich, and proximity being what it is, we became friends. They were then struggling actors with the RSC, evenly matched in typical thespian penury. I fed them and got lots of free tickets. It was a perfect arrangement. I witnessed Ralph's supersonic rise to fame, memorably including a slightly drunken supper when the phone rang and one of us, among the invited rabble answered it, giggling loudly Рit's Steven Speilberg, Ralph, for you. Yeh right, we all collapsed. But, of course, it was. And the call was the approach that was to lead to Ralph's astonishing performance as Amon Goeth in Schindler's List.
I held loud parties in those days, with French windows wide open to rather a lavish garden at the back and a balcony with beautiful wrought iron that had escaped, due to its location at the back of the house, requisitioning for the War Effort. Ralph used to appear, in indigo silk dressing-gown, remonstrating in a Noel Coward way, about the noise. It was entirely reasonable and didn't seem to dent our friendship. When not engaged in learning lines, or preparing for a new role, he was an enthusiastic dinner guest and danced with the rest of us to UB40 before slumping into an armchair and falling quietly asleep. Always serious. Always self-conscious, many found him difficult. But he was charming to me (and of course then meltingly handsome) and we used to find a quiet corner to discuss literature and occasionally philosophy.
Everyone adored Alex. She was always more beautiful in real life than in front of the camera and generosity shone from her in a completely winning way. Alex, you felt, could not but be herself. I was lucky enough to go to their wedding in Suffolk – and another old friend, Joelle Dupont, was tasked with taking the photos. Which she did rather badly, by missing out half the important people. There were droves of unmistakable members of Ralph's illustrious Twisleton Fiennes clan including a towering uncle in Greek Orthodox robes and resplendent beard. I remember standing in the buffet lunch queue behind Ben Kingsley. No-one talked to him, so I did. Fame can be an isolating attribute. The two went away in a pink Cadillac – a kind of premonition of the Hollywood lives they would both individually build for themselves. But even then the marriage was creaking and it creaked badly before they finally broke apart in the uncomfortable glare of the press.
Later, when Ralph was filming the Kathryn Bigelow cult classic, Strange Days, I went to stay with him in his own movie set in the Hollywood Hills. We'd arrived late at LAX and wound our way through the warm and fragrant night from the urban smog below in our vast, cream convertible Chrysler le Baron. Ralph was waiting at the gates to his house, dressed memorably in wafty white, and waved us through the sleek and minimalist house to a terrace where champagne lay chilling next to some delicate sushi, with a technicolour, widescreen view over Los Angeles which took one's breath away. It was my first visit to the States, and I will never forget the sheer thrill of it. Somewhere David Hockney talks about his first experience of America being like breathing oxygen for the first time - and that's how I felt. High and energised. Ralph was an attentive host, considering his weird daily schedule that required a nocturnal existence - Strange Days being filmed exclusively at night. He was then newly acquiring the behaviour of a Hollywood A Lister: a masseuse arrived daily; the hazlenut-roast coffee was delivered; he would nonchalantly slip from a towelling robe (as we slurped morning coffee by the pool) naked into the water. We went on-set and met co-stars Angela Bassett and Juliette Lewis, like giggling schoolgirls.
Many years later I was in LA on business and called Alex on the offchance. Alex, husband Florian and I growled away in their 4x4 from my hotel in Beverley Hills to a classic diner where we had huge calorific breakfasts. I still have the photos. And the love handles.
Now Ralph and Alex are both appearing in costume dramas – Alex as Mrs Bennett in Lost in Austen and Ralph as the cruel William Cavendish, Duke of Devonshire, in The Duchess. In real life, Ralph is famously restrained, private. Of course it doesn't always work: that Qantas air stewardess was never going to stay stum about their short-lived liaison at 35,000 feet. But mainly Ralph's life is his own. Alex has always been more open with the press - talking of her struggles to have a baby, for example. Her daughter, Salome, was born a month after my first son, Louis. They never met (and never will, because unfortunately Louis died last year from a brain tumour) but it remains a diurnal connection.
All this from a brief news story in The Sun: what would we do without our red-tops?
