Though twice nominated previously, Ralph Fiennes isn't among the Oscar nominees at this year's 79th annual Academy Awards.

However,the star of "The English Patient" and "The Constant Gardener" has been keeping busy. An airline attendant says she and Mr. Fiennes, 44, became intimate last month aboard a flight from Australia to Bombay:

"Ralph is gorgeous and the chemistry between us was amazing. What woman wouldn't want to make love with him? This sort of attraction happens to people all the time. It's just not usually with a Hollywood star at 35,000 feet."

Lisa Robertson, 38, was fired this month by Qantas Airways after telling her torrid tale to British tabloids. And Miss Robertson's description of her toilet tryst with Mr. Fiennes as "making love"
drew a rebuke from Janice Shaw Crouse of Concerned Women for America:

Often a term which is wonderfully appropriate when applied to one situation is stripped of its true meaning when applied inappropriately. Exhibit A would be the frequent false usage of the expression "make love." I can't think of a more egregious example of this than the stewardess admitting that she and the Academy-Award nominated actor, a man she had never met before, engaged in sexual intercourse in the first-class toilet at 35,000 feet. She is quoted as saying, "It's true. We did make love on the plane that night. At first I denied it because I was so desperate to keep my job ... "

The true character of their tawdry, pathetic affair was made clear further in her account when she described her subsequent stay overnight in his hotel room as ending at 7 a.m. the next morning with him saying, "I'm going to have to kick you out now." And then, she quotes him as saying in a sincere, gentle voice (being the consummate actor that he is), "I really like you."

Is this what passes for "making love" with post-modern women?

Mrs. Crouse's concern for calling things by their right names would perhaps have been appreciated by the late Richard Weaver, whose
seminal "Ideas Have Consequences" (1948) was one of the founding works of the modern conservative movement. A professor of rhetoric, Weaver observed that "if words no longer correspond to objective realities, it seems no great wrong to take liberties with words."

Mr. Fiennes, it seems, has taken liberties with more than words, and his womanizing ways have earned him a new sobriquet from the The Scotsman: "The constant philanderer."

-- Robert Stacy McCain, assistant national editor, The Washington Times