Along the way, he's also done his share of populist dross (Maid in Manhattan, anyone?). None of this makes any difference. Fiennes is forever identified with arthouse yearning (The English Patient), damage (Quiz Show) or agonised betrayal (Coriolanus), and the silent pain that follows. Even as an amiably evil Nazi in Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List, his most critically garlanded role, he managed to give Amon Goeth a whiff of the tragically fallen.

In Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel, however, he is not only hilarious but gives arguably the best performance of his gold-plated career.

As Monsieur Gustave, the concierge at a vast middle-European spa hotel where wealthy ladies come between the wars to salve indeterminate illnesses, Fiennes positively effervesces with wit; all that classical training is brought to bear on the precise timing of Anderson's comically theatrical dialogue.

Anderson wrote the part with him in mind, says Fiennes. ''Gustave is a bit like an actor. I worked in a hotel many years ago and there is a definite sense of backstage, where the hotel staff work and eat and change their clothes, and then they go through into the hotel lobby or lounge or whatever and you're on show.''

Tailor-made as it was, however, the role had to be altered to fit. ''Precisely the level at which to play it was something that had to be worked out. When you read it, you wondered, well, where could this go? Is it meant to be quite big and broad, or camp or what? So a lot of the early discussions were to find out where it should be.''

Every Wes Anderson film is an elaborate construction within a vivid imaginary world - the postcard India of The Darjeeling Limited, the fictitious island off New England in Moonrise Kingdom, and the middle-European fantasy of The Grand Budapest Hotel - heightened with elaborately artificial sets planned down, in this instance, to the last cream cake. The script is just as precise; Fiennes says he soon realised Anderson wanted the particular rhythms he had heard in his head as he wrote.

''He always wanted it to be quite simple, quite natural, but then he had a great sense of his own kind of comic timing, so it was an ongoing dialogue, really,'' he says. ''Once or twice I gave voice to a feeling of 'Not much room to move here, Wes', but often I could see that he was building something very finely conceived, and if one kicked against it, that would be the negative thing.''

Anderson is used to actors insisting on giving him conflicting readings, however; he says Bill Murray, who has appeared in all seven of Anderson's films, never delivers the same line twice the same way.

Anderson is well-known for working repeatedly with the same actors, some of them old University of Texas friends such as Owen Wilson, as well as a regular crew. On set, cast and crew stay in the same hotel and eat together every night rather than dispersing to different hotels and flats. For Grand Budapest, they all stayed in the small German town of Gorlitz on the Polish border.

''The best experiences I've had as an actor have always been being part of a company or an ensemble. The worst experiences, or the least satisfying, I should say, have been when the actors were in their trailers and no one talks to each other,'' says Fiennes. ''Ahead of this, I was worried, I didn't know what it would be like but, actually, I loved it. And I could see why actors came back, because Wes creates this sort of family atmosphere.''

Fiennes recently directed, and starred, in his own film, The Invisible Woman, about another anguished man, Charles Dickens, in middle-age, besotted and betraying his wife with a young woman. ''I like being behind the camera, but it was also good after shooting an Invisible Woman not to have to worry,'' he says. ''I like having the problems. But it was great to go on the set with someone who is very much in control of their world and has such a strong sense of what they want to do. I loved it.''