THE REAL INDIANA JONES with a dash of Bond

Sir Ranulph Fiennes has been named ‘the world’s greatest living explorer’ by the Guinness Book of Records and not many would argue, but the modest man himself told Jo Roberts there are even greater heroes in the valiant family line.

The 70-year-old adventurer Sir Ranulph Fiennes has led such an extraordinary existence that it’s barely surprising he was a nearmiss for the upper echelons of the military and even for a Hollywood A-lister. “That I failed my A-levels had a big bearing on what I ended up doing. If I had got my A-levels then I would’ve been like my dad,” says Sir Ranulph, who likes to be called Ran. He is referring to Lieutenant-Colonel Sir Ranulph Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes, commander of the Royal Scots Greys regiment, who died of wounds shortly before Ran was born. He adds: “But, unlike in his day, you had to have A-levels to go to Sandhurst [the British Army training centre for officers] so I did the best I could in the Army for eight years but then I had to do something else.” His ‘best’ included becoming the youngest Captain in the British Army, a spell in the SAS, and a bravery medal for fighting Marxist terrorists in Oman. It was when he left the Army his brush with movie fame occurred. “The postman arrived with a letter from the William Morris talent agency. They were searching for a James Bond. George Lazenby was Bond at the time but but he’d tried to charge too much, so Broccoli [‘Cubby’ Broccoli, the film’s producer] wanted to find a Bond-type who could be trained to act,” he remembers. Following two weeks of auditions in London, Ran made it down to the last six but the part was destined for Roger Moore. Besides, eight years in the British Army had only heightened his natural inclination towards more extreme pastimes. “If soldiers are very welltrained to be aggressive with the enemy and then the enemy never turns up they need some diversion, some energysapping activities which they call ‘adventure training’, so I’d learned a lot,” he says. Ran and his childhood sweetheart Ginnie, who would become his wife, shared a sense of adventure and set their sights on expeditions funded by sponsorship. How much would Ran credit Ginnie – who died of cancer in 2004 – with influencing his work? “I would think 80% – she was the driving force.” Among their huge achievements together was discovering the Lost City of Ubar on the Yemeni border in 1992, ahead of international rivals. “We did eight expeditions together over 26 years into the ‘empty quarter’ in Arabia, the biggest sand desert in the world. We would’ve hated it if anyone else had found it first, but after 26 years we deserved some luck!” Another early joint project, which Ginnie oversaw from the UK, saw Ran lead the first hovercraft expedition up the Nile, in which he was imprisoned for a period as a suspected Israeli commando. Other perils included deadly bugs in the river and burns, which left another member of the expedition in hospital. What kept Ran and Ginnie going? “We realised that it was our big chance of getting going in this business.” It is Ran’s record-breaking cold-climate expeditions – such as being the first to reach both Poles, first to cross the Antarctic and Arctic Ocean, and first to circumnavigate the world along its polar axis – for which he is most famed. In 2009, aged 65, he became the oldest person to climb Mount Everest. Last year he was forced to pull out of his first attempt to cross Antarctica during the southern winter by frostbite, caused by the prestages of type 2 diabetes. He says: “It wasn’t even that cold by expedition standards when I got my frostbite. I’d taken my mitts off to fiddle with the ski strap, and to my amazement one went totally white while the other one behaved in a completely normal manner.” But he hasn’t been one to let set-backs stop him – in 2003, three months after a heart attack, coma and double bypass, Ran achieved the first 7x7x7, or seven marathons in seven consecutive days on all seven continents. Yet modest Ran – who married Louise Millington following Ginnie’s death, with whom he has an eight-year-old daughter, Elizabeth – does not easily accept the title ‘world’s greatest living explorer’. Brushing it off somewhat, he says: “Well the Guinness Book of Records said that in 1984, but they might have changed their mind by now.”

Picture: John Cleare In the harsh elements of the Antarctic