‘It was a jinxed production: Clifford Williams had a motorbike accident shortly after we opened. And then an actress called Susannah Bishop tore an Achilles tendon, so Juliet Stevenson had to step in.
‘A lot of egoes were crashing around in that production. Ian Charleson was sulking because he was trying to play the sprite Ariel as a political figure.
‘Alan announced he didn’t like playing young lovers. He tried to bring out the humour instead, and I developed my gallows-humour as a result,’ says Sheridan with a wry laugh. ‘I was never part of the wining, dining, clubbing set at the RSC that he seemed to be part of. He immediately took to Ruby Wax and Juliet Stevenson – I thought they could easily play brother and sister, or husband and wife. I was not part of Ruby’s circle: they would punt down the river, do anything that was fun and vibrant.
‘In fact, there was something slightly withdrawn about Alan. He was not part of the bridge-game clique. I had the impression that the girls were cheering him up and he was appreciating their qualities, especially Ruby. No one could see what she was doing at the RSC. So it was an almost charmed circle.
‘Ian Charleson was another friend, they had the same political perspective,’ adds Sheridan of the actor who went on to make his name in the Oscar-winning film Chariots Of Fire but later died, tragically young, of an AIDS-related illness. ‘The common denominator with Ruby, Juliet, Alan, Ian and also Fiona Shaw is that they were all risk-takers. I remember when Juliet took over from Susannah at short notice. She was playing a part in the masque, and suddenly we realised she had something.
‘That drawling university articulation in Alan’s speech was not unfriendly, but I would never have guessed that he came from the working classes. I can’t imagine him as a juvenile in rep. There was always a certain amount of maturity in him. I could never imagine him as a silly young man.
‘He certainly had the capacity to be brilliant, but he was totally miscast as Ferdinand. He would have been a very funny Trinculo instead. Bless him, he tried. I think he knew he was miscast, but I think he felt he still had to try.
‘And of course you have to learn to shout with the RSC. With Ciss Berry (Cicely Berry, the famous voice coach), you put five inches on your rib-cage.
‘Alan’s voice goes with his body-language – slow-moving. The arrogance that says, “I will not be hurried . . .” There’s an impression of arrogance. I found that arrogance quite threatening, but I remember his moments of gentleness too. His drawling voice and languid body seem contemptuous, but you eventually find that he isn’t.
‘It could have been a defence mechanism. Actors have to put on so many shells . . . if they’re allowed to keep their clothes on, that is. One of the first questions I ask new clients these days is, “Now how do you feel about nudity?”
‘But Alan realised I was unhappy at the RSC, and we would go off together to try to make things work out. His whole voice changed then; he lost the actor’s drawl and he became far more friendly.
‘He had a lot of wit about him. He was into intelligent conversation, a wicked sense of fun. I came more and more to the idea of Alan really liking women: he likes their minds, and he had a big female coterie around him. He admires women’s minds; so many men just want you for your body. He recognises talent; and he has a soft side. It’s enormously flattering to Rima that he’s interested in women’s minds, because he’s so witty and dry.
‘It was mentioned that he had a steady girlfriend, but it was never overloaded into the conversation. It was just understood that he was spoken for. But none of the other men came into the Green Room or the dressing-room for long chats in the way that he would. There was this appeal about Alan. He would flirt, but in a non-threatening way. In an enormously flattering way. His moral code, his fidelity to Rima, is a grown-up side to him; so many actors remain children.
‘He drew a very wide range of women around him – Carmen Du Sautoy, Jane Lapotaire, all very different. He brought a little bit of flamboyant gayness to the role of Boyet in Love’s Labours Lost, but he was absolutely not gay himself.
‘He’s one of those very masculine men who never ever felt the need to prove his manliness and who is completely relaxed with women as a result. Some men feel like sex objects as well these days, and young actors are always mentioning their girlfriends to me just to make sure no one assumes they’re gay.
‘Alan doesn’t flannel himself and flatter himself, even with all those female chests heaving out in his wake and all their grey cells fluttering out to meet his. I don’t think I appreciated him enough at the time, and I don’t think you can blame those who cast us. Both Alan and I were perfectionists; and we knew we were cheating at Ferdinand and Miranda.
‘Had Alan been my first director, I might have been terrified of him because of the superficial first impression, especially if I had known of his hyper-intelligence. But he’s a good ’un,’ concludes Sheridan, ‘despite the initial appearance.
‘I did realise he was unhappy too, but he had the intelligence to get out of the RSC then. I was just so wrapped up in my own vulnerability. He’s definitely a survivor. As an agent, I would have loved his initial attitude that an actor can and should be able to play anyone. We have something in common in that I used to try to make good boring girls interesting, while he has humanised villains.
‘Michael Hordern was playing Prospero in our production of The Tempest, and even he was unhappy. He had difficulty in learning the lines. Everyone seemed to have their own ideas of how to play the role and no one would compromise. And the laser lighting went out of the window.
‘On the first night, the blow from the scenery knocked me out . . . I came to as the lights went up. It was like Moby Dick . . . blood all over the place. The computer lighting broke down, so I lost my guiding light. And the dry-ice machines were slightly leaking. I stumbled off and Makeup gave me a false nose to cover the bleeding.
‘Alan was great when I came back on stage like Cyrano de Bergerac. He would mutter through his teeth, “You are pumping blood again”, and turn me round so the audience couldn’t see.
‘He was very good at thinking on his toes and being sympathetic; a crisis seemed to bring out the best in him.
‘I really laughed at his card when he was leaving: it said “Alloa”, because it was from Hawaii, and he wrote underneath, “Goodbyeee”. If I had been less vulnerable at the time, I think we would have become great friends.’
Needless to say, the critics had some fun with The Tempest’s opening-night problems, in some cases almost forgetting to review the play itself.
B. A. Young in the Financial Times was quite kind: ‘Apart from an occasional habit of slurring two or three words together at the start of a speech, Alan Rickman is a personable, if not exactly magnetic Ferdinand . . . Miranda is a brighter girl than we sometimes see, as Sheridan Fitzgerald plays her.’ He even found Michael Hordern’s ‘down-to-earth’ Prospero ‘vivid and uncommon’.
But the Daily Telegraph’s John Barber found ‘Alan Rickman’s Ferdinand a gawky oddity’, while Irving Wardle in The Times didn’t mention him at all. ‘Michael Hordern was able to leave a lasting impression, but little else did,’ said the Leicester Graphic, which mustered a wonderfully unflattering cartoon of Rickman, Fitzgerald and Hordern trying to make themselves heard above the sound and fury of an out-of-control storm. Milton Shulman in the London Evening Standard, however, found Rickman and Fitzgerald ‘suitably star-crossed as young lovers’ . . . perhaps he was impressed by Alan’s tender ministrations in the First Aid department.
After a frustrating season of small roles, Rickman left the RSC in 1979 to strike out on his own. Away from the big companies, he hoped to rediscover his talent before it was too late.
He found it with the help of another late starter, the actor and director Richard Wilson, at a tiny experimental theatre over an unpretentious Irish pub in London’s Shepherd’s Bush. It was back to the future as he started all over again, earning a pittance at the age of 33.
4. ‘THE WICKEDEST MAN IN BRITAIN’
‘ALAN IS INTERESTING because of the the very long wait he had for recognition,’ says the playwright Stephen Poliakoff. ‘Not until Obadiah Slope did he become known.’
Ah, yes: Obadiah Slope, the Victorian uber-creep whose devious, cringing sexuality made him a cross between Dickens’ Uriah Heep and Mervyn Peake’s Steerpike. One felt almost furtive about fancying such a snake-in-the-grass; but millions of female TV viewers most certainly did. And because there is always a connecting thread running through everything Rickman does, his characterisation of Slope was to lead on to one of his most famous roles in the film versions of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books.
‘We all envied him that glorious part,’ Nigel Hawthorne told me about Slope, ‘but he was so absolutely right for it, and did it with such huge relish, that there was no doubt in anybody’s mind that he was going to make a tremendous impact.
‘This of course happened. And then it seemed peculiar, to me at any rate, who was enviously watching the acclamation given to Alan, that he turned down so many projects which were offered to him as not being the right step for him to take.
‘It seemed to me almost as though he was squandering his opportunities by not taking them when they were presented . . . and perhaps leaving things too late.’
Even as Rickman escaped from the RSC in 1979 to do the rounds of the rep theatre companies once again, he was on the brink of becoming a well-known face on British television.
His first foray into TV occurred in 1978 as Tybalt, Prince of Cats, in a television production of Romeo And Juliet that the BBC has long since wiped from the archives.
But his TV career really started in 1979 when he was specially written into a very erotic BBC serialisation of Émile Zola’s Thérèse Raquin, starring Kate Nelligan and Brian Cox.
‘In our production of Thérèse Raquin, we needed to give her lover, Laurent, a friend to talk to in his scenes away from her . . . so Vidal had to be created,’ says its producer Jonathan Powell, who went on to become Head of Drama at Carlton Television. ‘The director Simon Langton cast Alan as Vidal. What struck us was that Alan brought a whole interior life to this made-up character. It was obvious you were in the presence of a major actor.’
‘It was almost the first thing that Alan had done on TV,’ says Simon Langton. ‘My first impression of him was a laconic drawl, which is his trademark. At first I thought he was a little too contemporary for Vidal.
‘But he had such a physical presence – a natural, unflustered approach. A man of the world. Plus he was humorous, which was very important.
‘Thérèse Raquin is one of the first sexy novels ever written. It’s very much the darker side of sex and illicit love, and we had to manifest that in every way. I don’t like it on TV as a rule: you impose an anxiety on your audience,’ says Simon, a veteran of Upstairs Downstairs and The Duchess Of Duke Street who went on to direct such acclaimed, award-winning series as Smiley’s People and Mother Love.
In 1995, Simon had a huge popular hit with Andrew Davies’ racy BBC1 adaptation of Pride And Prejudice. Although he thinks that now he probably couldn’t get away with many of the sadomasochistic sex scenes in Thérèse Raquin in a politically correct climate that fights shy of sexual violence between men and women (although not, cynics would say, in a same-sex scenario), his dramatisation of Jane Austen’s most popular novel famously plunged Colin Firth’s Mr Darcy into a lake in order to cool his pent-up desires for Lizzie Bennet. You can always say it with symbolism.
‘Since Vidal was an artist, we used a well-known artist’s studio in Chelsea. We booked the girl who played the artist’s model. She had to cross from one side of the room to the other and sit down as if about to pose. In the rushes, everyone was watching this naked girl: but the boom operator and the sound recordist were caught on frame, crouching in the corner. No one had noticed them at first because everyone was looking at the girl. It was quite funny.
‘The shooting took two weeks. Alan’s hair was cut in a fourteenth-century pageboy style. He wouldn’t wear a wig. He had this marvellous, aquiline Roman nose and looked very haughty.
‘He didn’t have a scintilla of nerves with this naked model. Jonathan Powell said, “He’s going places” and swore by him. And he did have a magnetism. He wasn’t at all nervous, although it was only his second TV.
‘It was all done in a rush, because we were behind schedule. We had to cut corners; but he was terribly unfazed by the pressure and sailed through it, whereas other people would get rattled. Most of it was done on tape: it was very fevered filming.
‘Vidal’s worldly-wise smile desperately worried Laurent, who had just killed Camille. You wondered just how much Vidal knew about his friend; there was always an enigmatic quality about him. Alan was very self-composed; you didn’t have to guide him much. There was no agonising over motivation: he sees things quite clearly and directly. He doesn’t go in for bullshit or any equivocation. He’s no luvvie.’
The story of Thérèse is the story of a strong-willed, fiercely repressed, highly sexed woman who is stifled in a loveless marriage to Kenneth Cranham’s pallid Camille, living with his elderly mother (played by the late, great Mona Washbourne). Kate Nelligan has a lethal inertia as Thérése, just waiting to be awakened.
When she meets Brian Cox’s moustachioed, ox-like Laurent, he becomes her lover behind the back of his best friend Camille. He’s a rebel who appeals to her brooding nature; and his Bohemian friends, such as Vidal, have an earthy, worldly attitude towards women and sex.
Rickman’s Vidal is a flamboyant fop who bluntly asks Laurent why he hasn’t been to bed with Thérése yet. In the fashion of the time, he has a luxuriant moustache and beard and wears a neckcloth. He has the worst haircut in living history: it looks as if he spent the night in curlers. He also wears an unfortunate fringe, which has the effect of making him look like Eric Idle from Monty Python. Somehow he carries it off.
Laurent eventually drags Thérése down for burly sex on the carpet; it’s all very animalistic and sexy and uninhibited for dear old ‘Auntie Beeb’. They have sex games on the bed, when she prowls around on all fours in her frilly drawers and pretends to be a wild animal. These fleshly pursuits are brutally contrasted with the naked, decomposing corpses on the slabs at the morgue: on-lookers, including very young children, gaze morbidly at this almost pornographic display.
‘She always comes early in case there’s anything else I want,’ says Rickman airily at Vidal’s studio, gesturing at his naked model. ‘Would you like her?’ he asks Laurent. ‘She won’t cost much and she’s as clean as a whistle.’ Laurent is certainly attracted to her, but his yearning for Thérèse makes him turn down the offer.
Laurent and Thérèse conspire to drown Camille in a lake on a day’s outing and manage to pass it off as an accident. His mother’s circle of friends, never once suspecting foul play, eventually make a match between the widowed Thérèse and her late husband’s best friend. But Camille’s ghost comes between the lovers; and Thérèse is going mad with guilt.
Meanwhile Vidal has become rich and famous, with a fashionable salon. Laurent goes back to visit him, telling him he has set up in a studio to learn to paint like Vidal. He asks him for a second opinion. Rickman screws up his already hooded eyes and looks inscrutably at the daubs, still keeping us guessing about whether the ever-cool Vidal suspects the sweating Laurent of murder. Laurent is drawing tormented portraits of some skill and feeling, he says. But, remarks Vidal critically, he always uses the same model . . .
That is the last we see of Vidal, who has served his purpose. Cynic that he is, at least he was open about his desires. Thérèse, whom sex has imprisoned rather than liberated, has become a hard-faced, painted street tart. ‘I’m as tired of life as you are,’ she says to Laurent, offering to go to the police. The lovers, now bound together in hate, confront each other. They drink Prussic acid in a death pact as Camille’s mother watches, paralysed, with the accusing eyes of
her murdered son.
The role of Obadiah Slope in the BBC’s Barchester Chronicles was still three years away. But the Thérèse Raquin team of Simon Langton and Jonathan Powell cast Rickman again in Smiley’s People, the 1981 sequel to John Le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. If you blink, you’ll miss his one appearance behind a desk. But even as a receptionist at London’s Savoy Hotel in a scene with Alec Guinness as George Smiley, he still made an impact.
‘The little parts always meant something in Smiley’s People,’ remembers Powell. ‘The doormen etc. always had a personality. And of course people came along just to have a scene with Alec. Those who wouldn’t normally do a part consisting of two lines did it in order to act with Alec. I had seen Alan as Trigorin in The Seagull, and remembered him from Thérèse Raquin. So all that decided it.’
Alan played Mr Brownlow, an upright young functionary with a luxuriant, almost military moustache. (I have a theory that he stowed it away in an envelope afterwards to recycle it for the part of Jamie in Truly Madly Deeply.) He joked with Smiley, a regular visitor whom he knew of old. Brownlow kept a shopping bag in the hotel safe for him, jesting that he hoped the carrier-bag wasn’t ticking. Not exactly a part with a neon arrow over it, but another of those high-quality productions that Rickman prized above all else.
Which was why he dived back so quickly into theatre after leaving the RSC. Firstly, Nottingham Playhouse, then the Glasgow Citizens’ Theatre and, afterwards, the Sheffield Crucible.
Peter James, now the head of the London drama school LAMDA, cast him when directing Stephen Poliakoff’s The Summer Party at the Sheffield Crucible in 1980.
They had worked together before when James cast him as Jaques in As You Like It at Sheffield in 1977, with Ruby Wax in one of her many early ‘wench’ roles as Audrey. ‘Jaques was absolutely where he lived,’ says Peter. ‘That quality of stillness that allowed him to be as aloof as you hope Jaques to be. He was brilliant, mature beyond his years.’ He was 31 by then.
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