‘He can be intimidating, though he doesn’t realise how much. But there are precious few people whose judgement you trust, and he is one of them. I do argue with him; we don’t always agree. He has pretty tough standards, but he’s a very good listener. He takes you seriously, you feel encouraged.’
‘Actors are always being judged on their physical qualities, which makes them very vulnerable,’ says Stephen Poliakoff. ‘And Alan has big vulnerabilities.’
‘This business gives you the impression you have to be a pretty boy and be successful before you’re thirty in order to succeed,’ says Royal Shakespeare Company head Adrian Noble. ‘Alan Rickman was never a pretty boy and was not successful before he was thirty.
‘He never courted success, but his success now gives people hope in a society that adores youth in a rather sickening and dangerous fashion. It’s very good news for those who are not the prettiest people in the world. It gives people hope, that Alan was a play-reader at a tiny Fringe theatre like the Bush and all those other things, before he became famous.
‘He has a good mug: that big nose. You need a big nose and big hands to be a good actor: look at Michael Gambon. And in the Green Room, Alan is always surrounded by women.’
Ah, yes. One can’t get away from the women in the Alan Rickman Factor. When he played a licentious Caesar in Peter Barnes’ 1983 radio play Actors, Rickman received more ardent letters from teenaged girls than for any of his other roles.
However, it was the Vicomte de Valmont that first made his name on both sides of the Atlantic, establishing that all-important, crowd-pleasing quality of sexual danger.
Lindsay Duncan, his co-conspirator in Les Liaisons Dangereuses, said wryly to Allison Pearson in the Independent on Sunday in 1992: ‘A lot of people left the theatre wanting to have sex, and most of them wanted to have it with Alan Rickman.’ Of all the original RSC cast in Howard Davies’ famous, much-travelled production, Rickman is the only one to have made it on the world stage. He was nominated for a Tony award, as was Lindsay; and it rankled heavily with Rickman when he lost the role in the 1988 film version Dangerous Liaisons to the younger (and balder but heavily bewigged) John Malkovich.
Instead, the real turning-point for Rickman came when he was offered the role of the German terrorist leader Hans Gruber in the Hollywood big-budget thriller, Die Hard. Alan’s frightening degree of menace, allied to a fastidious humour, marked out a major stylist who outshone the film’s star, Bruce Willis. Rickman became an international name overnight as a result of his first-ever movie, since when he has conducted a dangerous flirtation with screen villainy.
He could see himself falling into the trap of being typecast and deliberately changed pace with a performance of tremendous warmth and sensitivity as the mischievous returning spirit of Juliet Stevenson’s dead lover in Anthony Minghella’s 1991 low-budget hit, Truly Madly Deeply.
It became Britain’s answer to Ghost. And Rickman’s wry, doomed romanticism in the role eventually led to his casting as Colonel Brandon in the highly successful, Oscar-winning Sense And Sensibility.
Truly Madly Deeply offered the closest insights yet into the real Rickman, capturing that quality of benign bossiness which those who know him find both endearing and exasperating. Close friends confirm that he is indeed the character he plays in the movie. It established Rickman and Stevenson as one of the great screen partnerships, building on a friendship that began at the RSC in the company of Ruby Wax.
With her irregular but arresting looks, the jolie-laide Juliet could almost be Rickman’s twin. They are brother and sister in socialism, yet brigadier’s daughter Stevenson is a left-winger from the right side of the tracks. It says much for Rickman’s panache, however, that he always seems just as classy as she.
Rickman’s next feature film was Close My Eyes, the story of an incestuous affair between a brother and a sister in which Alan took an uncharacteristically passive role as the heroine’s cuckolded husband. Nevertheless, he still stole the show with an unforgettable combination of silent rage and vulnerability.
He returned to Hollywood to add another rogue to his gallery, the Sheriff of Nottingham, in 1991’s Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves. Rickman says he tried to make him ‘certifiable and funny’, in which enterprise he wildly succeeded. So hilariously flamboyant was he that the film’s star Kevin Costner reputedly played the villain in the editing-suite and chopped a number of Rickman’s scenes to try to correct the inbalance between lead and support. This was the role that established Rickman’s ‘dark and dirty’ attraction for millions of otherwise respectable females. Rickman’s occasional flashes of camp only add to the intrigue of his personality.
Blanche Marvin, whose Hollywood producer daughter Niki acted in repertory theatre with Alan at Leicester back in 1975, describes Rickman as ‘. . . a very male man. So many men in the theatre are bisexual or homosexual, but Alan is intensely masculine’.
That feral charm and mesmeric hold over an audience marked him out for his role as Rasputin, an offer that had been hanging around in his life for a long time. His casting as the deranged monk with the malign influence over the last Tsarina of Russia once again attests to Alan Rickman’s unique alchemy.
‘He has very strange looks, not necessarily what you would cast as the romantic lead,’ admits Carlton TV’s Jonathan Powell, one of the first to spot his screen potential. He looks like a magus, which is why he has often been suggested for Shakespeare’s capricious magician Prospero: a complex, tormented man whose nature is divided between the malign and the benign.
People talk of his so-called cold smoulder; his sharp features give him an alien look, despite the lush and passionate lips. At one stage, Steven Spielberg had him in mind to play the timelord Dr Who on American TV, but Rickman didn’t want to be locked into a long-running series. He keeps his options wide open. Those spiky looks, however, plague him. He hates being judged on his appearance, arguing that an actor is a blank canvas on whom one ought to be able to paint a portrait of anyone. He himself is a living contradiction of that.
He is the most individual of performers, quite unique and inimitable. No one can clone Alan Rickman; no one approaches his qualities. He is instantly recognisable, and there is a piece of himself up there on the screen every time.
There is always an extra dimension to his characterisation that creates a mythic quality; like all the cinema greats, he has a very strong sense of self. Rickman has long fought an inferiority complex: once upon a time, he seemed like a misunderstood misfit from a classic fairy-tale, an ugly duckling who has been transformed into an attractive man by the flukes of an extraordinary career. He was not easily marketable; and he was in despair at ever achieving lasting success. It was twenty years a-coming.
As with all the best character actors, it took him time to grow into his face and learn his strengths. More than anything, maturity made a major star of Alan Rickman. The toy-boy syndrome among ladies of a certain age is much exaggerated. Grown women tend not to fall for pretty youths as a rule; they appreciate character and experience in a man.
‘In many ways, he’s a European actor,’ observes director Jules Wright. And there is a French expression that sums up the paradoxical appeal of life’s jolies-laides: ‘I like a little vinegar in my salad.’
Most assuredly, Alan Rickman is the astringent vinegar in the salad.
1. THE FAUSTIAN GIFT
‘HE DOES HAVE this power and charisma,’ says playwright Stephen Davis, one of Rickman’s oldest friends. Alan, Rima and sometimes their friend Ruby Wax spend weekends with Stephen’s family in Gloucestershire, a county where, according to Davis, the British class system is in its death throes. ‘In Die Hard and Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves, he was acting the cosmos off the screen and Hollywood was opening a five-lane highway to him.
‘The thing about actors is that they have a tremendous effect on people: Alan does in particular. He has an extra effect which he is aware of, but which he isn’t always planning. He has a huge sexu
al charisma, but in real life he doesn’t aim for that effect at all. This is what makes his personality so complex. It’s a bit Faustian, cutting both ways.
‘When you talk to him, you feel there are a lot of notional audiences in his mind. You never catch him off-guard. He always knows his lines. It’s a very actorly quality. It’s like being the friend of some of the characters he plays.
‘He is enigmatic, not least with his friends. Really, I should write a play about him. He’s an important figure in the lives of all his friends, but one could do without the stardom bit. It would do him good to be less written about. When close friends become stars . . . All of us are leveraged on the amount of attention we get. And Alan can be contradictory, moody.
‘When he has problems, he broods. He was doing an extraordinary number of mundane tasks at the bottom of my garden once, digging and so on, while he brooded about something. If I had something on my mind, I would have told the entire village about it. But he internalises things while presenting this equanimity to the world. Ian Richardson shares that quality a little, too.
‘Alan dominates rehearsal rooms and productions: he’s very critical, and he thinks very hard. There’s a stormy element in self-absorption that becomes very critical. It’s hard working with successful people. Alan is not necessarily the kind of actor I ought to want to work with, because he defends the role of the actor. Actors have an illusory power in society, but they don’t write their own lines. They are ventriloquists’ dummies.
‘I don’t really understand the impulse to act. You are disappearing into another person, and yet you are exposing yourself. In a way, actors don’t really exist.
‘By that, I don’t mean that Alan is artificial – far from it,’ Davis adds hurriedly. ‘He has one of the most positive and strong presences I’ve ever met. But he doesn’t really empathise with people who are off-balance: it’s as if he’s working from a script.’
Alan Rickman’s ‘script’ began in 1946 with a busy New Year in the modest London suburb of Acton, then in the county of Middlesex. On 12 February, the local newspaper carried the story that a woman had hanged herself with a ventilator cord. A weapons amnesty for wartime firearms had also been announced: unlicensed pistols brought home as souvenirs by Forces personnel were to be presented to Acton Police Station by 31 March to avoid prosecution. The only other direct reminder of the recent world-wide conflict was a chilling report in the 1 March issue of the Ealing And Acton Gazette on a talk that a girl survivor of a concentration camp had given to the Acton Business And Professional Women’s Club. ‘You do not know what a man is unless you see him with absolute power,’ this pale, quietly-spoken wraith told the assorted good ladies in their tailored business suits, cut from wartime utility cloth. ‘If he has absolute power and is kind, then he is a real man.’
Couples were dancing to the sound of the Carroll Gibbons Blue Room Orchestra at Ealing Town Hall, and those who stayed at home grumbled that coal was rationed to 34 hundredweight for twelve months. Thieves had broken into a solicitor’s house and stolen three suits plus a copy of Archibald’s Criminal Pleading; and two builders were charged with an armed robbery of two Maltese seamen.
In the weepie Tomorrow Is Forever at the East Acton Savoy Cinema, Orson Welles (of all people) was listed dead in the war but returned home with a new face to find his ‘widow’, Claudette Colbert, had married again. Not that the romantics among picture-goers were completely ignored by the programme for the week beginning 18 February. Roy Rogers and Trigger – the horse that could do everything except wear a cowboy costume – shared top billing and a capacious nosebag in Don’t Fence Me In.
Prominent ‘Keep Death Off The Roads’ advertisements in the Gazette issued dire warnings about motorcar accidents, giving the impression that west London was full of road-hogs. And on 21 February, Alan Sidney Patrick Rickman was born at home at 24, Lynton Road, Acton . . . the second son for painter and decorator Bernard Rickman and his wife Margaret Doreen Rose, née Bartlett.
Their first boy, David Bernard John, had been born during the last year of the war while his father was working as an aircraft fitter.
The family had rented a flat in an imposing red-brick Edwardian semi-detached house in a central Acton backwater, just one street away from the railway line. Alan’s Irish father and Welsh mother belonged to what was once proudly known as the respectable working classes, steady workers with lower middle-class aspirations. Number 24 was a multi-occupied house: other rooms on the premises were rented by an elderly lady, Hester Messenbird, and by a married couple, Rupert and Violet Oliver. The Rickmans were always staunch Labour voters who put the red posters up in the window as soon as an election was announced.
Alan has always felt influenced by a prominent radical Rickman from an earlier age: Thomas Paine’s friend and biographer Thomas ‘Clio’ Rickman (1761–1834) who was a bookseller and reformer. He was the son of Quakers and was apprenticed with a doctor uncle to study the medical profession. At seventeen, he met the freethinker Thomas Paine who worked as an exciseman in Rickman’s birthplace of Lewes, Sussex. They both joined the Headstrong Club, which met at the White Hart Inn. Rickman’s precocious taste for poetry and history earned him the sobriquet ‘Clio’, which became one of his pen names. Disowned by the Sussex Friends because of his friendship with Paine and his early marriage to a non-Quaker, he left Lewes and became a bookseller in London: first in Leadenhall Street and, later, at Upper Marylebone Street.
Paine completed the second part of The Rights Of Man while lodging at Rickman’s house. The two friends formed a circle of reformers with such eminent names as Mary Wollstonecraft and Home Tooke; Rickman sketched them all in his biography The Life Of Paine, published in 1819. Frequently in hiding as a result of selling Paine’s seditious books, he fled to Paris several times. The friends finally parted at Le Havre on 1 September 1802, when Paine sailed to America.
A satirist from the age of fifteen and a composer of republican songs, Rickman’s pieces often appeared in such weekly journals as The Black Dwarf whose title was revived by the counter-culture of the 60s. He died on 15 February 1834, and received a Quaker burial at Bunhill Fields. There is no evidence that Alan’s family are direct descendants, but Thomas Rickman’s reputation ‘resonated’ (to use a favourite expression of Alan’s) down the years and made Alan a searching, well-read child acutely aware of a radical world elsewhere. No one would ever be able to claim ‘Forever Acton’ as his epitaph.
The working classes made him, but it was The Ruling Class that revolutionised Alan Rickman. He melodramatically told his old friend Peter Barnes that the latter’s first hit play, later filmed in 1972 with Peter O’Toole as a mad aristocrat, had ‘changed his life’.
The Ruling Class was premièred in Nottingham in 1968 and quickly transferred to the West End, opening at London’s Piccadilly Theatre. It was one of those rotten-state-of-the-nation plays that proved uncannily prophetic, with a peer of the realm accidentally killing himself by auto-erotic strangulation in the first scene. With its great leaps of logic, this flamboyant attack upon the British class system was also hugely, and ambitiously, entertaining. Peter aimed to create ‘a comic theatre . . . of opposites, where everything is simultaneously tragic and ridiculous’. Since he and Tom Stoppard both began writing plays around the same time, it is debatable who influenced whom. Both are great showmen, vaudevillians with serious things to say.
Nearly three decades later, the Tory MP Stephen Milligan was found dead in similar circumstances; only then was the pleasurable purpose of this bizarre and dangerous practice duly explained to a bemused general public by the sexperts of the popular Press. But Barnes’ anti-Establishment audacity, at a time when few dared acknowledge the fact that hanged men get hard-ons, had deeply impressed the young Rickman in 1968. After all, it was only three years since capital punishment for murder had been abolished; although death by hanging has remained on the statute-books for piracy and, as critics of the late Princess Diana’s former lover,
James Hewitt, love to keep pointing out, for treason.
Bernard and Margaret Rickman were to have two more children. Alan’s younger brother, Michael Keith, arrived 21 months after Alan on 21 November 1947. The only daughter. Sheila, was born on 15 February 1950.
Alan was later to describe himself as a ‘dreamy’ child, wrapped up in his own little world as he scribbled and doodled. David and Michael, too, had artistic leanings, with the same beautiful handwriting. ‘Alan is a very talented water-colourist. He has this elegant, flowing, effortless calligraphy,’ says Stephen Davis.
He was the clever, petted one of the family, the future scholarship child, although Alan the egalitarian took pains to emphasise in a Guardian interview with Susie Mackenzie in 1998 that his parents had no favourites and treated them all equally. His slow way of speaking meant that he received more attention: his parents had to listen carefully to his every word. Alan was particularly fond of his father Bernard. Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuits, famously said: ‘Give me the boy at the age of seven and I will give you the man.’ Alan’s confident masculinity and self-contained air of assurance were shaped by that early closeness with the saintly-sounding Bernard.
When Alan was only eight and the youngest, Sheila, was just four, their father died of cancer. Alan subsequently talked of ‘the devastating sense of grief’ in the household; they were rehoused by the council and moved to an Acton estate to the west of Wormwood Scrubs Prison, where his mother struggled to bring up four children on her own by working for the Post Office.
She married again briefly, but it lasted only three years. Clearly Bernard had been the love of her life, although Alan recalled the relationship between his Methodist Welsh mother and his Irish Catholic father had often been volatile: the clash of cultures would sometimes end in sounds of banging doors and weeping behind them. But, despite their lack of money and their cramped surroundings, the little family of six were happy.
Alan Rickman Page 3