Joseph Fiennes

Joseph Fiennes plays the young Shakespeare in Shakespeare in Love. Philip Kemp, writing for the British Film Institute, counts the playing the film's chief pleasure and says the fit between him and Gwyneth Paltrow leaves one grateful that the first casting idea, Julia Roberts opposite Daniel Day-Lewis, fell through. Writing in the same archive on Rancid Aluminium, from 2000, Danny Leigh calls his Irish accent an imitation assembled out of clichés and says the delivery leaves much of the film unintelligible. Those two pages are the only ones in the archive to carry his name; there is none for Elizabeth, a film he appears in.