‘Of course he was virtually unknown to television audiences. He brought that repressed ambition to the role . . . but it was perfectly judged. It did reveal that he had the makings of a very great actor. It was very clever and perceptive of him to fear being typecast as a Uriah Heep thereafter.
‘He’s very parsimonious with what he will do, which is a pity for all of us. He says he won’t do television now. He’s a particularly special, very unique talent.’
Initially Nigel Hawthorne looked set to be the star of The Barchester Chronicles with the showy role of the harumphing, irascible Archdeacon Grantly, a part he played with a whirligig impatience. Everything changed, however, when Rickman made his entrance and caught the imagination.
‘He has a lovely sardonic warm personality; ladies find him very sexy. He’s a very straight guy, very unpretentious. I’m also a socialist, though I don’t put myself on the line like he does,’ Hawthorne told me.
‘He’s a dreadful giggler, which is a very endearing side to him. He’s very warm, nice and enormously generous, a trait that’s not always considered to be very common in theatrical circles. But theatre people are very supportive of one another. He’s much more a theatre person than I am: you are constantly under scrutiny.
‘He had an extraordinary presence as Slope. I didn’t, however, agree with the way he said Slope’s last line as if he were cursing like Malvolio: “May you both live for ever!” I always thought it would have been better if he had said it simply.
‘Something like Slope sets up a situation you have wanted for a long time; and when it comes, it’s not as easy as you think it is,’ added Nigel, who found himself in the same position after becoming a great success on both sides of the Atlantic in the role of George III.
‘You have to be very wary. You have suddenly been elevated into a commercial position. You have to ask yourself whether this is the right move. Alan wanted to stick out for better . . . he’s got that integrity, a very sophisticated attitude that doesn’t succumb to flattery. He’s able to be aloof.
‘But I couldn’t believe at first that he would turn down so many roles some of us would give our eye-teeth for,’ adds Nigel. ‘I understand it now, though: you have to act with conviction.’
Our first glimpse of Slope is of the back of Alan’s head: his greased-back hair, worn slightly longer over the collar than the allowable vanity of a bishop’s chaplain strictly permits. When he treats us to a full-frontal of his face, Alan is frowning as usual.
Slope’s first bid for power comes when he usurps the canon-in-residence’s sermon in the cathedral by telling the bishop and his wife – Slope’s patroness, Mrs Proudie – that the canon has been frivolously residing on the banks of Lake Como for the last twelve years instead of attending to his duties.
What gives Slope a unique advantage with the ladies is that he is the youngest man in the episcopal circle. His contempt for the bishop, Dr Proudie, is thinly veiled. A serpent in a provincial Eden, he hisses slightly during his maiden sermon at Barchester as he lifts his eyes up in false piety.
Alan’s portrayal of Slope is infinitely smoother than Trollope’s description, which is pretty damning. The original Slope’s lank hair was ‘of a dull pale reddish hue . . . formed into three straight lumpy masses . . . and cemented with much grease . . . his face . . . is not unlike beef . . . of a bad quality. His forehead . . . is unpleasantly shining. His mouth is large, though his lips are thin and bloodless . . . big, prominent, pale brown eyes . . . his nose . . . possess(es) a spongy, porous appearance . . . formed out of a red coloured cork. A cold clammy perspiration always exudes from him.’
That is the description of a Dickensian grotesque without any real appeal to women, for all his appalling pretensions. Alan’s Slope is a consummate ladies’ man, pursuing a protracted and very believable flirtation with Susan Hampshire’s Signora Neroni. She, however, is sharp enough to see through him and plays an elaborate game with him as he ‘slobbers’ (in Trollope’s words) over her hand. Alan even manages to make the kissing of her fingers an unusually bold and intimate gesture.
The audience is left to wonder about the exact nature of the intense relationship between Slope and the apparently invalid Signora. He bestows a lot of lingering looks upon her as she reclines on her couch, and she jousts with Mrs Proudie for his attention. He also infuriates the short-fused Archdeacon Grantly, who vows to his wife: ‘I shall destroy him.’
‘What were you doing with that painted Jezebel?’ demands Geraldine McEwan’s grande dame of a Mrs Proudie, all organ-stop eyes and shuddering consonants. For Slope has more effect on women than on men. That’s his weakness, as Trollope points out: he should have cultivated the men for greater advancement. But he has a vanity, cleverly suggested by Alan’s feline performance, that instinctively gravitates towards the distaff side.
He is, in fact, horribly attractive, with his boyish, sensual lips, almond-shaped eyes and sly, sideways glances. The bishop is weak and dithery, easily manipulated by the infernal alliance of his wife and Slope. Of course, Slope turns out to be a brandy snob – a sure sign of his great aspirations – when he declines an impoverished man’s offer of some Marsala. Those piously downcast eyelids shoot up as if yanked by a hoist when told that the young widow he has been sniffing round is a woman of wealthy means. Slope slithers from one (im)moral position to another, forever changing his allegiance.
It is a delight to see how the fickle, flirtatious Slope has aroused even Mrs Proudie. ‘Your behaviour with women . . .’ she enunciates with awful majesty, almost unable to utter the unspeakable. ‘At my party, your conduct with that Italian woman was inexcusable.’
In another telling piece of body language that Rickman has patented, Slope puts his face very close to other people’s when he wishes to be intimidating. It’s rather like one animal facing down another. He’s a surprisingly physical performer, but elegantly controlled and tremendously instinctual.
In his serpentine way, Slope becomes the viper nestling at the bishop’s bosom. He makes ‘love’ to Signora Neroni, declaring his passion. Slope bares his teeth amorously at her, another animalistic gesture, but he’s a moral coward and she calls his bluff in a scene of unusual sexual intensity. Poor Slope looks vexed and pouts sulkily, with Rickman finding the vulnerabilities in even this slimy creature.
The ghastly man schemes to become the Dean of Barchester, but the bishop outmanoeuvres him. His only hope, thereafter, is the rich young widow, whom he treats with very unclerical passion. ‘Beautiful woman, you cannot pretend to be ignorant that I adore you,’ is his declaration. She slaps him hard for his presumption and he falls backwards upon the lawn with a look of such genuine surprise that, for a moment, one feels a pang of pity for Slope.
Not that Rickman sentimentalises him one jot; but, absorbed by his ambitions, he has no idea what other people really feel about him. For all his scheming, he’s a hopeless innocent.
Signora Neroni, tiring of his machinations, finally humiliates Slope in public. ‘I find your behaviour abominable!’ he snaps and bangs the door behind him. ‘Ambition is so tedious,’ she says to her tittering friends by way of explanation.
Slope, now really nettled, is finally carpeted by the Proudies. The bishop makes it clear that he should seek some other preferment. There is an exchange of unseemly insults between Slope and Mrs Proudie; he has lost all caution and becomes a snarling animal. She suggests he become the curate at Puddingdale. ‘PUDD-ingdale?’ growls Slope, with Alan disdainfully emphasising the ludicrous sound of the first syllable. Obviously not an option for someone like him.
‘May you both live for ever!’ he snaps, after putting his shark-like face close to the bishop’s in his usual intimidatory way. This is, in fact, the voice of the author’s own ending, put into Slope’s mouth instead by the adaptor Alan Plater.
It was a bravura performance of great subtlety and detail. And yet, as he defiantly told the London Evening Standard in 1983, Rickman crudely based the character on hi
s favourite political hate-figures.
‘You look in vain for any redeeming qualities in Slope,’ said Rickman. ‘Trollope himself grudgingly admits that the man has courage. And that’s about it, really. He doesn’t know fear at all.
‘Although Trollope was ostensibly writing about the Church, I think he was actually talking about politicians. My performance as Slope was modelled on various members of the Government.
‘If you just glanced at Norman Tebbit via Michael Heseltine and wiped a bit of Mrs Thatcher over the two of them, I think you might end up with something resembling Slope.’
This was the first political gauntlet that Rickman had thrown down; and there were to be more. Though he gives few interviews and guards the sanctity of his private life as if he were the custodian of the Crown Jewels, he does at least seize the opportunity to make his left-wing politics abundantly clear to the meanest intellect. But he’s too imaginative a performer not to have revelled in the excesses of the character. Slope was a monster, and certainly a wicked Tory one, but he was scandalously enjoyable company. ‘Playing Slope was like a wonderful holiday,’ he admitted. ‘It was such a rich character that you could just take a great big dive into it.
‘I could see the potential danger that, after playing it, I’d never be offered any other sort of part. But in the end, it was too good to say no. There’s one part which comes along and opens a door. Antony Sher was working brilliantly for years before he did The History Man – and zappo! It’s the same with Bernard Hill playing Yosser Hughes in Boys From The Blackstuff.’
Slope opened not so much a door as a Pandora’s Box. And thus began Alan Rickman’s lifelong Faustian contract with the devil, playing the kind of deliciously evil character of whom he fundamentally disapproved. You could call it therapy, or just magnificently ironic fun. Maybe it’s an exorcism. They’re all raging sexpots into the bargain; he has never played, indeed, could never play, the kind of person who is dead from the neck down. He is a very physical being.
‘I was rather surprised by the Obadiah Slope effect,’ says RSC Artistic Director Adrian Noble, trying not to sound missish. ‘I had an opening night in Tunbridge Wells that year for the opera Don Giovanni. Alan and Rima came down for it. There was a real frisson about him, especially among women of a certain age, and it was all because of Obadiah Slope.
‘Rima was always fantastically philosophical about it; she found the female attention funny. I don’t want to be sexist about it, but his Slope was fantastically charming and believable. There was a real sexual tension with Alan: he did keep you constantly wondering whether Slope does sleep with some of the women he flirts with, such as the Signora.
‘As a result, it was the most extraordinary evening. All those Tunbridge Wells ladies definitely wanted to be misled by Alan Rickman.’
5. ‘I WANT WOMEN’
IN NOVEMBER 1983, Alan Rickman embarked upon his first nude scene with all the surface aplomb that one would have expected of him. He and Tracey Ullman were the leads in Snoo Wilson’s marijuana play The Grass Widow in a Royal Court production by Max Stafford-Clark, a skilful director no more noticeably encumbered by inhibition than Snoo himself. All these years later, this dangerously funny play can now be seen as a precursor to Sexy Beast, the gangster film that begins with Ray Winstone lying in a heat haze next to a pool. Except that Winstone (the wuss) wore swimming trunks. Rickman opened the play by sunbathing in dark glasses and nothing else, delivering the first of many jolts to a startled audience. Later on in the same scene, his character Dennis clambered up on the roof of a house and perched there buck-naked except – as Snoo’s stage directions helpfully pointed out – for his binoculars. Such completely matter-of-fact nudity, quite without the coyness that creates prurience, sent out a very efficient signal that anything was possible in a play which administered such early shocks.
‘Alan was a perfect Dennis; he understood the humour,’ recalls Snoo. ‘And there’s a quality of fastidiousness in Dennis’s character which is very Alan. He did the nudity very well: there was no trouble at all, no stuff about wanting towels and so on. It makes a good stage picture to begin with nudity; people say if you are a leading actor you should be in full shot early on so that people can establish an idea of your character. So the character was completely starkers to begin with. And Alan was very much a pin-up anyway; there was already a bit of a buzz about him.’
Yet that cool which Snoo remembers was just a front: the only way Rickman could get through the nude scene was to pretend it wasn’t happening to him. Years later, in Antony and Cleopatra, he was to envy Helen Mirren’s ability to seem completely unaware of the audience – even when she went topless in the death scene.
‘One casting director spent years arguing Alan’s case, because a heterosexual director had said, “He’s not sexy”,’ says the writer and director Stephen Poliakoff. ‘Alan flowered when he got confident.’
Fellow playwright Stephen Davis has an interesting perspective on Rickman’s fatal attractiveness for women.
‘He is incredibly aware of his sexual charisma professionally. He has hordes of women writing to him, and there is evidence that it gets in the way. He wants to avoid being cast for it. He’s not an exploitative person. In his private life, he’s not in the remotest a sexual predator. He’s incredibly vexed by this image.
‘He has a matinée idol hold over the audience. But he has enormous self-control in his life – unnervingly so – and he’s tried never to play a role where his sexual charisma is the ticket money.’
Somehow the roles of the Vicomte de Valmont, the Sheriff of Nottingham, Mesmer and Rasputin have slipped through the barbed-wire. Snoo Wilson is keen for Alan to play that uninhibited occultist Aleister Crowley, the self-styled Great Beast and ‘the wickedest man alive’, in a film Snoo says he has spent ‘a lifetime’ trying to get off the ground. Rickman has already agreed to lend his name to the project. Can we have Satanism without the sex? I think not. It would be such a waste.
Sylvia Plath caused a sensation with the posthumously-published poem ‘Daddy’ when she claimed that women craved the discipline of the fascist iron heel. The piece was a complex and belated response to the early death of her father, a German entomologist who had died when she was eight. With its incantatory rhythms, this was a dark and disturbing fantasy about the tyrannical power of a male parent with the prerogative of punishment. She breaks taboo after taboo, mocking the marriage vow as an incitement to violence and identifying herself with a Jew on the way to a Nazi death-camp. Despite its obvious ironies, the poem remains so controversial that I was refused permission by Plath’s literary estate to quote from two stanzas.
This incestuous work was addressed to Hitler as a father figure. Plath was exorcising the fascist impulse, but the daring sentiments were still seen as an appalling lapse of taste and she would never have got away with voicing those uncomfortably sharp insights today. Even as they endorsed the attack on an aggressive male sex, feminists deplored the wallow in morbidity that accused the entire female sex of masochism.
Plath had caused an even bigger sensation when she killed herself by putting her head in the gas-oven. Her death was an accident, the last in several suicide-bids that were never intended to be successful. The man downstairs, who was due to knock on her door at a regular time, went to sleep because of the soporific effect of the escaping gas. And a returning home-help got caught in a traffic-jam. For all her rhetorics, Sylvia wasn’t quite the masochist she made herself out to be. Her words, however, continued to resonate.
Certain roles do tap into disturbing undercurrents in the psychic electricity and turn some people on like a light-switch. There was to be nothing kinkier, or indeed funnier, on screen than Alan Rickman’s black watered-silk costume as the Sheriff of Nottingham in the 1991 film Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves. It was straight out of a domination-master’s wardrobe at a suburban S & M party.
The tone was playful, not intended to be taken seriously, although Rickman was to throw hi
mself with his customary gusto into the part. This became the performance that turned him into a worldwide sex-symbol.
A Peter Barnes TV play was to have an important influence in shaping the Sheriff, although Rickman was not among the cast. A Hand Witch Of The Second Stage, transmitted on BBC TV in 1989 as part of Barnes’ Spirit Of Man trilogy on the pursuit of faith, God and the devil, set a medieval witch-trial in an underground torture-chamber. It was full of Peter’s usual comic-grotesque conceits, with much savage humour. It was the black-clad torturer, who talked lasciviously about ‘having my old master in the tight clamps’, who was to prove an inspiration for the demented Sheriff, since Peter Barnes played a vital role behind the scenes of that film.
Alan Rickman’s wonderfully suggestive drawl alone seems to wire some of his fans up to the National Grid.
‘There are two piles of letters in his flat: one that he answers and one that he throws away,’ says Rickman’s old teacher, Ted Stead. ‘Some letters are absolutely obscene: there’s talk of him being in leathers, and so on.
‘One woman was actually following him around. She sat in the front row of a play he was in and brought her son or nephew around to the stage door to ask for acting advice. He spent a few minutes with her and the boy, talking to them. He then got this abusive letter from her, saying he hadn’t spent enough time with them. She sat down in the front row again for another performance of the same play, and he told me, “I don’t know what to do.”’ Although Peter Barnes has been badgered by the occasional over-zealous fan, he remains grateful for a writer’s relative anonymity; as he points out, ‘Actors get the worst of it because they get the very sick people.’
‘His sexual charisma doesn’t do anything for me,’ quips Stephen Davis. ‘I think he’s rather embarrassed by all the letters. He has a very puritanical attitude towards the triviality of his profession. Look at how many people are destroyed by success; you’d think people would be more likely to be destroyed by failure. He doesn’t like the notion of stardom, but he’s fallen into it four-square because he has the gift of projecting his personality.’
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