‘He was very striking-looking at Leicester, but I can’t say that I thought he stood out fantastically, because I had a wonderful company of extroverts . . . people like the director Jude Kelly and Victoria Wood’s husband, Geoff Durham.
‘But Alan was a wonderful company member, supportive of everything that happened. He mucked in with simple chores, a very prized quality that is quite often in short supply. He was very focused, intellectually very advanced, so he was able to get to the heart of a problem very quickly. He did street work with children, too.
‘It was a very democratic company – even the cleaner had a casting vote for the programme. But after a while, I decided to abandon that because I thought being a dictator was good for the drama.’
A picture of Alan in a group shot for Guys And Dolls, directed by Robin Midgley and Robert Mandell, shows a Guy in long blond hair with designer stubble, flared trousers and plimsolls. Attitude is already his middle name. He’s easily the most self-possessed of the bunch as he stares hard, almost challengingly, at the camera in a ‘You lookin’ at me?’ kind of way. Another tough-guy role followed as Asher, one of Joseph’s bad brothers in the Lloyd-Webber/Rice musical Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.
It was in 1976, when he joined the Sheffield Crucible, that Alan Rickman met an amusing mouth-almighty from Chicago called Ruby Wax. They shared a flat. He argued with her about the central-heating levels and all kinds of other domestic niggles; but she consistently made him laugh. She was not your average repertory company player; she didn’t really seem to be a jobbing actress, because the personality was too big to play anyone but herself.
It was Rickman who persuaded her to start writing comedy. And thus was forged a lifelong friendship . . . most of Alan’s friendships are lifelong. Ruby, forever playing the stage American, reckons that Rickman gave her a class that she might otherwise never have had (oh, come now). For his part, he admired her ‘recklessness and daring’. In truth, she knocked a few of his corners off.
Alan needs funny friends to lift him out of the glooms; and the playwright Peter Barnes became another when Alan was cast in Peter’s new version of Ben Jonson’s The Devil Is An Ass for Birmingham Rep. Indeed, it’s not too fanciful to see Peter, fifteen years his senior, as another surrogate father; he is certainly completely frank about Alan in the manner of a fond but plain-speaking parent.
‘I have done eleven shows with him,’ says Peter. ‘We have been friends since 1976 and I’ve worked with him more than anyone else. 1976 was the first play, my adaptation of The Devil Is An Ass. He had a beautiful voice for the poetry and read it exquisitely. He told me, “I saw The Ruling Class on TV and it changed my life.” So I said to Stuart Burge, the director of The Devil Is An Ass, “Well, we’ve got to have HIM.”
‘Alan has a humour of his own,’ insists Barnes. ‘He brings a great talent to comedy. The thing is that he’s terribly, depressingly gloomy in rehearsal like other great actors of comedy – one thinks of Tony Hancock.
‘Joy is not a word that springs to mind of him in the rehearsal room. He’s a bit of a misery-guts. I want to enjoy art, want other people to enjoy it. I said to him, “You bring the rainclouds with you and it rains for the next four weeks.” I have to be careful it doesn’t spread; that’s up to the director. But it springs from the best of motives: he’s never satisfied and wants to get it right. Doesn’t alter the fact that it’s there. But Alan can laugh at himself,’ adds Peter. ‘When we were working together on the revue The Devil Himself, I said to him, “I hope we are going to have a lot of laughs, dancing and singing, with this one, but is that really you, Alan?” He burst out laughing at my image of him going around with a raincloud over his head; I remember it vividly.
‘He’s very “Keep Death Off The Roads”. I find his gloom very funny – it’s “Eeyoreish” and endearing. People feel affectionate towards his “Eeyoreish” personality, because they wonder what great tragedy lies behind it. He seems to have some private demons.
‘One goes through various stages with friends, blowing hot and cold, but one of the reasons I like Alan is that he has a very good heart under that curmudgeonly exterior. When Stuart Burge, who was one of my favourite directors, died at the beginning of 2002, Alan phoned me up and said he would like to go to the funeral,’ says Barnes, who wrote the 84-year-old Burge’s obituary in the Guardian. ‘It was very touching when Alan came, and it’s one of the reasons I hope I will always be his friend. There are certain lOUs you pick up in your life and you should always honour them. Stuart was the one who really got Alan into London from the provinces with my version of The Devil Is An Ass, because it went to Edinburgh and then to the National; that was Alan’s first exposure to the West End. I think it was very good of him to remember what Stuart had done for him; I think it shows a very strong loyalty which I place very high as a virtue. He has integrity. Some like to think they did it all on their own, but Alan doesn’t make that mistake.
‘Most actors have a feminine side. He manages to be feline without being camp, and does it very well. He designed the posters for my play Antonio in which he starred at the Nottingham Playhouse. I joked about the photograph of him as Antonio: “There you are, camping it up.” But in fact he’s not camp at all.’
It’s rather difficult to credit that, what with Alan’s eyes ringed in kohl, his hair bleached and permed and that pout in place. He looks like a decadent thirtysomething cherub suffering from orgy-fatigue.
‘The vanity of an actor is endearing,’ observes Peter. ‘Alan doesn’t really like being recognised, but he doesn’t like not being recognised either. If they aren’t recognised, they don’t exist. It reminds me of a story about Al Pacino who took great pains not to be recognised – and then complained when he wasn’t.’
It was in that hectic year of 1977 that Alan and Rima, still an item after twelve years, decided to move in together.
Although he was doing the dreary rounds of theatrical digs in the provinces, they wanted to show their commitment to each other. So they rented a small, first-floor flat in a three-storey white Victorian terrace on the edge of upmarket Holland Park. It was a quiet, private haven just minutes away from the gridlock of the Shepherd’s Bush roundabout, a major west London intersection. Alan was to stay there for the next twelve years.
‘With actors, you are buying their personality so you do want to know a bit about their private life. With a writer, it’s usually only the writing that people are interested in. There were hundreds of girls waiting for Alan at the stage door when he was doing my version of the Japanese play Tango At The End Of Winter in the West End. One of the fans recognised me as the adapter one night and asked for my autograph – but only one,’ says Peter with a mixture of regret and relief.
Another old friend from those days is the director, Adrian Noble, who first met Alan in 1976 when Alan and Ruby joined the Bristol Old Vic, where Adrian was an associate director. ‘He was in almost the first play I ever directed, back in 1976: Brecht’s Man Is Man. I stayed with him on a few occasions in an old town house that he shared with Ruby.
‘Then he came to Birmingham and did Ubu Rex. He played the multi-murderess Ma Ubu, Mrs Ubu, alongside Harold Innocent. Alan was a hoot. There’s a side to him that’s a real grotesque, and it was first seen as Ma Ubu. I still have a photograph of Alan as Ma, sitting on the toilet and soliloquising with a wig on. Though he doesn’t normally like wigs.’
In Bristol, Alan found himself playing next door to Thin Lizzy, and later confessed in a Guardian interview with Heather Lawton in 1986 to being ‘knocked out by their high-octane excitement. I’m not trying to be a rock group, but there’s got to be a version of that excitement – otherwise theatre is a waste of time.’
Rickman’s association with Peter Barnes was auspicious from the start (Tango At The End Of Winter is, indeed, their only flop). Barnes’ version of The Devil Is An Ass earned excellent reviews when it travelled to the Edinburgh Festival and the National Theatre.
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p; Alan embarked on yet another drag role as Wittipol, the lovestruck gallant who disguises himself as a flirtatious Spanish noblewoman. The Daily Telegraph wrote from Edinburgh of the ‘Superb effrontery by Alan Rickman’, while Alan’s Latymer Upper contemporary Robert Cushman’s succinct Observer review said it all: ‘Alan Rickman speaks breathtaking verse while in drag.’ Well, he’d been to the right school for it.
In the Glasgow Herald, Christopher Small thought he looked like ‘Lady Ottoline Morrell’ – something of a mixed compliment, unless you’re a tiresome Bloomsbury groupie.
‘Alan Rickman is handsome, graceful and inventively funny as Wittipol and a couple of ladies!’ noted another writer in the Observer of 8 May, while John Barber in the Daily Telegraph admired ‘Mr Rickman’s capital scene when, disguised as a Spanish lady, he imposes himself on society and reels off a wonderful recipe for painting the face.’
‘Alan Rickman caresses Anna Calder-Marshall with the most honeyed, erotic words imaginable,’ wrote the Sunday Telegraph in a ferment of lather. A photograph in the Coventry Telegraph proves that Alan looked more like Charley’s Aunt than a Spanish lady, although the Guardian kindly compared him with Fenella Fielding.
The previous year, Alan had also played Sherlock Holmes for Birmingham Rep, still looking like an overpromoted schoolboy under the deerstalker. ‘Although looking a little young for the part, he catches just the right combination of fin de siècle cynicism and scientific curiosity,’ opined the Birmingham Post.
The Sunday Mercury was almost orgasmic over this new discovery: ‘Holmes is played with superb coolness and languid authority by Alan Rickman in a performance which interweaves touches of melodrama with masterpieces of understatement in such an absorbing and funny fashion that it dazzles the audience. Others on stage therefore look grey and we have the odd phenomenon of a one-man show with a cast of more than 20.’
Castle Bromwich News also rhapsodised: ‘The play is worth seeing for Alan Rickman’s superb tongue-in-cheek portrayal.’ But the Express & Star was vitriolic: ‘Alan Rickman’s Sherlock Holmes behaves like a supercilious prefect, whose deductions are one-upmanships more than shrewd observations. His most common expression is a smirk, which one longs for David Suchet’s bald domed Moriarty to wipe off his face.’ (Temper, temper!)
Yet Redbrick, the Birmingham University paper, knew a man who could wear a deerstalker when it saw one: ‘Alan Rickman’s brilliantly funny performance as Holmes . . . rightly dominates the stage and keeps the subtle humour flowing.’
All of which was most encouraging, so he took the logical next step up and auditioned for the Royal Shakespeare Company at a time when, as Adrian Noble recalls, ‘. . . it was an odd year, a fantastically competitive one’.
In 1978, Alan joined the RSC, and Ruby went too for a series of small roles that she was later to describe as ‘chief wench’. It was a period in his life that was to prove disastrous for his development and very nearly led to him leaving the profession for good. Alan Rickman does not thrive on gladiatorial combat against other actors; an uncompetitive soul, he withdraws broodily into his shell instead. That passive aggression comes out when he retreats into his citadel as if he were playing life as a game of Chinese chess.
In 1994 he told his former Leicester colleague Jude Kelly at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in front of an audience of 750: ‘I was miscast very quickly in national companies. I was unhappy very quickly and I ran very quickly! Within four years of leaving drama school, I ran away from the Royal Shakespeare Company and found the Bush Theatre and Richard Wilson, a wonderful theatre director who taught me stuff I needed to know.
‘You go to places like Stratford and learn how to bark in front of 1,500 people. You’re taught that talking to people on stage isn’t very valuable and that what you should do is shout. I met Richard Wilson and he was my saviour.’
It was at the RSC that Alan first met Juliet Stevenson. She has since become such an inseparable friend and collaborator that the playwright Stephen Davis mischievously calls Rickman and Stevenson ‘the Lunts of our day’ after the rather grand Broadway actors Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, famously despised by anti-hero Holden Caulfield in The Catcher In The Rye.
‘Alan was always rather intimidating,’ Juliet told GQ magazine in 1992. ‘We first met when Ruby and I were playing Shape One and Shape Two in The Tempest with plastic bags over our heads.
‘I was quite frightened of him, but he was very kind and sort of picked me up in a non-sexual way. He had a talent for collecting people and encouraging them.’
He went there with what he called ‘a burning idealism’ and was inevitably disappointed. One RSC director told James Delingpole in the Daily Telegraph in 1991: ‘When he first came to Stratford, it was terribly embarrassing. There was one season when he was so awful that we had a directors’ meeting and we asked each other, “What are we going to do with him?” Then he just grew up and suddenly everyone wanted this wonderful new leading man.’
Clifford Williams, his director for a notoriously jinxed production of The Tempest in which Alan played the rather forgettable part of Miranda’s suitor Ferdinand, remembers all the problems with a polite shudder.
The lasers broke down on the first night and Sheridan Fitzgerald, who played Miranda, cut her nose very badly on a piece of jutting scenery. The stage looked like an abattoir as a result.
‘Alan was difficult in rehearsal; he even found difficulties in lifting logs,’ admits Clifford. ‘But there were problems with the production. We got on well, though.
‘Mind you, I also thought I got on very well with Michael Hordern, who played Prospero. Then I went into Smiths to buy his autobiography and in it he had referred to me as “that boring man” – it was such a shock.
‘I recall distinctly that Alan was very meticulous, anxious to rehearse everything inordinately. We ran out of time. I got rather impatient at the time, I must admit. He had terrific charisma, slouched about and had this deep slurred voice. He was always examining things. He questioned rather more than the part of Ferdinand warranted, frankly.
‘This was the 1970s, yet he wasn’t at all the hippie type. He was a contradiction in terms: extremely acute and questioning, and sometimes appeared almost antagonistic.
‘But physically he was very relaxed, almost louche, slouching, with a slurred voice. He was an odd paradox. He struck me as a rather modern actor, by which I mean he questioned, he was his own man. He was not quite part of some RSC tradition.
‘I think he was of the Jonathan Miller school: not keen on projecting. In the RSC’s Royal Shakespeare Theatre at Stratford-upon-Avon, you have to push it out. It’s not an intimate theatre. Eventually he was extremely good, though the production wasn’t. I’m afraid it wasn’t,’ allows Clifford, ‘the cat’s whiskers. And Alan seemed to lack energy in rehearsal. But I couldn’t be unaffectionate about him, though I certainly could about some other actors whom I won’t mention.
‘I think he was being deliberately laid-back: he wanted not to get too quickly involved in things, he was trying to pace himself. But you realised he was not relaxed at all. Yet he struck me as always totally sincere. I never felt he was playing tricks to conceal anything, as some do.
‘He would make an extremely good Prospero now – he has the weight and the clarity,’ adds Clifford.
‘I remember him as always hitching up his jeans with his sweater hanging down over it, standing with hands on hips and looking out front and saying, “Weeeelll . . .” He was rather reserved. I have a feeling that he wished he wasn’t there – he was not entirely happy. There was something in the environment of the RSC that didn’t suit him. He was a bit in check, holding back. He certainly behaved in a professional way, but he was a bit stiff.
‘He was uncertain, insecure. It’s a sine qua non of their profession. Actors are dealing with their emotions, so perhaps they tend to get worked up more. They are cast on their physical appearance, no matter how one tries to avoid it. So they don’t always get to play
the parts they feel are within them. It’s the Fat Hamlet syndrome.’
Peter Barnes offers another insight into that production: ‘I remember him and David Suchet laying into the director of The Tempest in David’s narrow-boat. Alan asked me for tips for stage business for Ferdinand, and I suggested picking up a really big log in the fuel-gathering scene. Clifford Williams cut it out. So I then suggested going to the other extreme to make a point and fastidiously picking up a tiny twig!
‘Most theatre directors are arrogant and incompetent,’ adds Peter, who has directed many of his plays himself. ‘Over 50 per cent of the plays are directed by the actors. The arrogance and ignorance of directors is astonishing. Most of them come from the universities. Alan doesn’t like directors either; he’s diplomatic, but underneath he’s as venomous as I am.’
Sheridan Fitzgerald left the acting profession to become a theatrical agent and has never regretted it. She traces her disenchantment to that season with Alan at the RSC and vividly remembers their unhappiness at playing such mismatched lovers.
‘I didn’t enjoy the role of Miranda, but I would never be a Juliet, either. That natural innocence is not me . . . I’m something of a practical beast. I went off to do a bit of TV afterwards, but I wanted to grow up. You have to remain a child for ever as an actor. It’s a very victim position to be in. As an agent, I can grow old at my own pace.
‘Acting is very vocational. I didn’t have that vocation, and at first I wondered whether Alan did either. He was miscast the first time round at the RSC. I thought the place was like a boarding-school. I looked at him, and thought. “THAT’S my Ferdinand??!” He just wasn’t a romantic young leading man.
‘You can do Ferdinand if you come on looking like a dish. Alan, bless him, did not look like a dish.
‘At first he looks quite evil’ (and with Sheridan, this is meant as a compliment). ‘So there he was, looking evil, and Miranda is supposed to be a complete innocent. Frankly I felt that his Ferdinand and my Miranda were heading for a shotgun wedding.
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