Alan Rickman

by Maureen Paton

  Rickman saw him as an ‘extremist . . . he might be in real danger of losing control. He’s condemned to wander forever, endlessly trying to relocate some innocence, endlessly disappointed. Therein lie both his vulnerability and his arrogance . . . you are left with an image of complete aloneness . . .

  ‘In some ways, it is a lonely part to play,’ he concluded, recalling how he and Ruby Wax as Audrey had jazzed things up at Peter James’ suggestion eight years previously at the Sheffield Crucible.

  In a modern-dress production, they had sung ‘Shake it up, Shakespeare baby’ while eleven hundred people rocked with laughter. So much for the critics.

  Light relief from Jaques’ intensity came with another Peter Barnes radio play, an adaptation of Thomas Middleton’s satire A Trick To Catch The Old One. Rickman played another shameless scamp, a Leicestershire gentleman called Theodorus Witgood who is constantly strapped for cash. Since his estate is under the control of his penny-pinching uncle Pecunius Lucre, he hatches a plot to gull him.

  Rickman is a wonderfully Gothic combination of silken hypocrisy and pantomime villainy in the role. ‘INN-keeperrr . . . ! I have been searching town for you,’ he utters shudderingly, fastidiously attacking each consonant as if spitting out cherry stones. Though the late Sid James need not stir uneasily in his grave at the thought of the competition, Rickman also unleashes one of his hearty and dirty belly-laughs again. So much for his laid-back image; once again, radio released him.

  Alan has a working-class insecurity that has never left him, compounded by the usual doubts and fears that always assail the late starter. He’s a great one for endless agonising in long, dark nights of the soul.

  ‘In fact, he’s a bit too concerned with what the world will perceive,’ says Stephen Poliakoff. ‘That’s a drawback for actors even more than writers. He’s very concerned with whether something is the right step.

  ‘Nevertheless, Les Liaisons was pure luck for Alan,’ he adds.

  Poliakoff had lunched the year before with Daniel Massey, who told him that Christopher Hampton was dramatising the book for the RSC. Was Massey ever considered for the role? Howard Davies swears until his fax machine is puce in the face that Alan was his first and only choice; but it’s tempting to speculate on Massey playing Valmont as a macaroni dandy in powder and high heels, in which case we would have lost one of the great sexual animals of theatrical history.

  Christopher Hampton, however, insists: ‘It was my idea to cast Alan. In fact, it was my wife’s idea. She has a very good eye for casting. She had seen Alan in Barchester Chronicles and Snoo Wilson’s play, then I saw him in The Seagull at the Royal Court. I suggested him to Howard Davies. The RSC was thinking of asking him to play Jaques anyway.

  ‘It was a great boost to all our careers – Alan, Howard Davies and myself. All of us were at the same stage, same level and about the same age.’

  The way Hampton tells it, Les Liaisons was the dark horse that crept up on the RSC and took it completely by surprise.

  ‘Something remarkable was brewing. Howard and I felt like a subversive cell and the actors did, too. We were opening against Terry Hands’ main-stage production of Othello with Ben Kingsley. The RSC thought of Les Liaisons as filling up its quota: it was the last play of the 1985 season in The Other Place. We were left on our own quite a lot.

  ‘I can’t tell you how dubious everyone was. Even Howard was dubious about directing it. It was a project we cooked up; I got him to commission me. The RSC had dramatised Les Liaisons in the 60s and called it The Art Of Love. It was a complete flop then. John Barton directed it, and Judi Dench and Alan Howard were the stars. It was a black polo-neck job, reading from the script.

  ‘I suggested Juliet Stevenson as La Presidente de Tourvel for our version, and Howard suggested Lindsay Duncan as the Marquise de Merteuil.

  ‘I first met Alan in rehearsals for Les Liaisons. I knew of him because we had various mutual friends, like Anna Massey. He comes from an unusual background, with very clear ideas and images – he’s an artist like Tony Sher. Some actors are clotheshorses.

  ‘Alan’s voice suggests darkness; and it’s expressive, not all on one note. There’s a lot of variation. When he played the Trigorin role in The Seagull, it was the voice of a much older, more experienced man.’

  Of Rickman’s notoriously pernickety approach, Hampton admits: ‘Alan was interventionist about costume. He was adamant that he wouldn’t shave his beard, though an eighteenth-century aristocrat with a beard was of course unheard of. He wouldn’t wear a wig either, so he had to sit in his curlers every night to get enough – what do hairdressers call it? – body in his hair.’

  A backstage Valmont in curlers was quite a sacrifice to his dignity, yet Rickman’s artistic instinct was impeccable. The result of all this carefully created ‘naturalism’ was a primitive, satyric, rough-trade Valmont, with the stubble and the long frock-coat of a (sexual) highwayman.

  For all his elegance, there was something of the wolfish Captain Macheath from The Beggar’s Opera about him. He even wore his boots on the bed in one scene as he discusses tactics with Merteuil. Rickman refused to play Valmont in the tights and high heels of the period, partly because he didn’t want to make him a fop, and partly because Rickman has large, slightly bandy calves.

  It was that sense of a werewolf in aristocrat’s clothing that John Malkovich also picked up on for his performance as Valmont in Stephen Frears’ film version of Hampton’s play, although I also felt that Malkovich modelled himself on Mick Jagger . . . with a touch of the Japanese percussionist, Stomu Yamashta.

  Alan later told Jane Edwardes from Time Out magazine: ‘I always wanted the play to have the same effect as the book, and I knew I had to seduce 200 people in the audience as well as the women in the play. The quality of stillness and silence was a measure of how far we had succeeded.’

  ‘There was an electric atmosphere at the first night at The Other Place,’ remembers Hampton. ‘The audience were on three sides: it was like being in the same room as the actors. The RSC have been touring it ever since. I said to them in 1995, please don’t do it any more. Adrian Noble acknowledged that. It’s been done all over the world. It’s only last year that it’s been released to the repertory theatres.

  ‘Valmont’s one moral act brings the whole house of cards tumbling down. He’s in love with this Tourvel woman, the one decent instinct that destroys the whole business.

  ‘I don’t think you could play that part and be unaffected by it; but you never know with actors.

  ‘Alan really conveyed Baudelaire’s burning-ice description: he was very, very cold in the part, but also very disturbed. He was oiling that subterranean energy; it was palpable. I was tremendously impressed by the simmering violence.

  ‘He was absolutely besieged by fan-letters. A typical letter would be from a grown woman, not a schoolgirl, and it would read: “I’m a feminist but I don’t understand how you can have this effect on me.”

  ‘I’m not very good at answering those sorts of letter myself . . . though I didn’t get nearly so many as he did,’ adds Christopher modestly.

  ‘Pressures had to be applied on the RSC, or it would have disappeared from the repertoire. You never saw Trevor Nunn or Terry Hands: they were so remote. It was just the pressures of running this huge company. They were certainly quite distant figures. At least we were left on our own and not interfered with, but I felt we were an unscheduled success and inconvenient for them. Most of my dealings were with Genista Mackintosh: I remember screaming at her, saying “You must do this or that”.

  ‘We were never really acknowledged by the RSC as a success,’ Hampton feels. ‘It was a terrific hit, yet to keep it alive in the repertoire, an inordinate amount of hustling went on. Alan was very active in all that, fiercely loyal.

  ‘There were 23 performances in Stratford, 22 in London and then it was withdrawn from the repertoire. It was out of the repertory for three months, and there was a battle to get it on again. The
RSC was opposed to a West End transfer, I believe. And I always felt they refused to approve the selling of the film rights. All we could think of was that there was this rage, because the RSC’s Camille had been a flop. Frank Gero was finally allowed to do it in the West End. Alan was worried about the space in the West End and had a wheeze about the Almeida. He had a lot to do with the final choice of the Ambassadors.

  ‘Then there were problems with the Broadway transfer. There was a lot of pressure from America to get an American company. Howard and I had a tremendous lot of argument about that. Jimmy Nederlander finally agreed to let the original RSC company go over. They were allowed 20 weeks by American Equity rules, and the play wasn’t allowed to continue after that.

  ‘Alan was very militant about that and attacked the Schubert Organisation’s Gerald Schoenfeld about Les Liaisons’ sell-out business. There was talk of Glenn Close taking over from Lindsay Duncan as the Marquise de Merteuil, but Gerry Schoenfeld uttered the immortal words: “Glenn Close means nothing on Broadway.” This was just before Fatal Attraction was about to open . . .’

  Glenn Close, of course, played Merteuil opposite John Malkovich’s Valmont in the Hampton/Frears film version, Dangerous Liaisons. Close subsequently enjoyed great Broadway success as that other legendary vampire, Norma Desmond, in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Sunset Boulevard.

  ‘I don’t think anyone came close to Alan’s performance as Valmont; and I don’t think that Juliet Stevenson has ever given a better performance than she did as Tourvel, either,’ says Hampton. ‘Alan did it for six months in the West End and five months on Broadway. I think it was murderously difficult for him to adapt from the intimate Ambassadors to the Music Box on Broadway. I remember finding him in tears in his dressing-room from the enormous strain of the project in that big theatre. We only had three or four previews, but he was wonderful. Wretched Frank Rich of The New York Times insisted on going to an early preview. The night he came, Lindsay Duncan caught a panel in her dress on a nail and had to play a scene with her back to the wall. Howard insisted on turning off the air-conditioning because it was making a noise. So the audience was perspiring in the heat. When I saw a drip of perspiration on the tip of Jackie Kennedy’s nose, I thought, “We’ve overdone it”.

  ‘But Alan really flowered in New York; and in this play, it’s the man that does all the work. But although he and Lindsay were nominated, we got shut out of the Tonys – August Wilson’s Fences won everything.’

  Then came the greatest disappointment of Alan Rickman’s career. Having made the role of Valmont his own, he was passed over for the film version. The story of how the screen role slipped through his fingers is yet another illustration of how timing means everything in this rackety business.

  ‘We were able to use Glenn Close for the film version, and I slightly backed into casting John Malkovich,’ says Hampton. ‘The thing is that there was a tremendous battle over the film rights. I took a lower offer from the production company Lorimar in order to retain more control. I said we should rethink the whole thing and start again; and I said I thought we should have Alan Rickman. Lorimar said “Start again”. Alan had made Die Hard by that stage, but it hadn’t been released . . . and of course no one knew it would make such a huge difference to his career. And Lorimar wanted someone with a profile. The director Stephen Frears came on board at a late stage, and he was keen to do it with American actors.

  ‘Another factor was the rival film Valmont, so we had to move with tremendous speed. I had seen Malkovich in the play Burn This. I know Alan was very, very upset over it,’ admits Hampton, ‘but it didn’t affect our friendship. We were in New York one evening, on our way to the theatre. Alan had told me that people kept coming up to him in the street and saying, “It’s terrible you didn’t get to play Valmont on film, I don’t know what to say to you.” As we left the play, a woman came up to him and said “It’s terrible you didn’t get to play Valmont on film . . .” Alan just pointed at me and said “Ask him!” I think it was a very hurtful thing for Alan, but it’s rare that a British actor could ever reprise a role in America; I think only Nigel Hawthorne has managed it with The Madness of King George. And I just didn’t have the clout. But Alan’s performance was unmatchable.’

  Inevitably, playing an evil intriguer night after night had a terrible effect on Rickman’s psyche. After a lifelong commitment to socialism, he belatedly joined the Labour Party in 1987 as if to distance himself from this degenerate aristocrat. Valmont was not a pantomine villain; that would have been easy to live with. It was his Byzantine intelligence, his insidious understanding of human nature and finally his moral despair that made the part so depressing for someone with such staunch principles. What made it even worse was that Rima had become a Labour councillor in 1986 for St Charles Ward in the Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. There’s still a large element of puritanical working-class asceticism, the old Methodist hair-shirt tradition, in the Labour Party, as if you have to renounce all sins of the flesh – apart from eating mushy peas – in order to be taken seriously. With one or two exceptions – ‘Gorgeous’ George Galloway springs to mind – the Tories have always had the best sex scandals. As Rima embarked on a political career with a public profile for the first time in her work as an educationalist, her long-time boyfriend was seducing women on stage every night and finding himself buried under snowfalls of fan-mail. Of course, Rima appreciated the subtle joke and took it in her stride; but the contrast still made Alan uncomfortable. No wonder Valmont nearly gave him a breakdown. Those tears that Christopher Hampton saw had been just the beginning. ‘It stopped being a play in a way, and became an event – especially on Broadway,’ he told Sean French in GQ magazine in 1991.

  ‘People came with such high expectations that a mountain had to be climbed every night. You are up there manipulating the audience in the way Valmont manipulates the characters. And when you’re playing someone as self-destructive as that, night after night, it can’t help but get to you to some extent. The body doesn’t always know when it’s lying. You know from the neck up, but you send the rest of you actually through it.’

  The following year, he told the same magazine: ‘You are really brushing evil with a part like that, you’re looking into an abyss and finding very dark parts of yourself. Valmont is one of the most complicated and self-destructive human beings you would ever wish – or probably not wish – to play.

  ‘Playing him for two and a half hours for two solid years eight times a week brings you very close to the edge. Never again. Never ever again. By the end of it, I needed a rest home or a change of career.’

  He also told the Guardian: ‘It’s a part that ate you alive.’ There’s a story that he gave Howard Davies a hard time during rehearsals for Les Liaisons; but I’m inclined to think that it was more likely to have been the other way round. ‘Howard is very cold and self-contained,’ says Poliakoff.

  Nevertheless, losing the film role to Malkovich was still an incredibly depressing experience for Alan. ‘He became very withdrawn and broody, though he never said a word. You felt terribly sorry for him,’ says a friend.

  ‘It would be untrue to say he wasn’t put out,’ says Stephen Poliakoff judiciously. ‘In 1989 I bumped into him on the street in Notting Hill; I had just seen Die Hard. He told me he had not gone to see Dangerous Liaisons; and out of solidarity, I hadn’t either.’ Stephen Davis goes further: ‘He was terribly hurt.’

  ‘I prefer Alan infinitely,’ says loyal friend Theresa Hickey. ‘Malkovich is this self-obsessed guy in Kung Fu slippers, whereas Alan is genuinely interested in people. He’s very generous-spirited. And he’s so filmic: he would have made a wonderful Valmont on screen.’

  For Alan, stage fright was the ever-present malignant monkey on his shoulder. In 1992, he told GQ that he had to ‘struggle to find the character every time I walk on stage’. And the pressures of playing the vampiric Valmont, who must instantly dominate, only added to that.

  Christopher Hampton’s excitabl
e view of how Les Liaisons Dangereuses had to fight for long-term survival against an intransigent, bureaucratic Royal Shakespeare Company makes a colourful story which is, of course, completely refuted by the RSC.

  Adrian Noble, at that time associate RSC director, does admit that there was a problem with the transfer of Les Liaisons Dangereuses to the West End.

  ‘The context of that year was that it was a truncated season. Trevor Nunn wanted to open Les Miserables and also Nicholas Nickleby in London in the Christmas of 1985, so all Stratford shows were cut short. The cast in a repertory system are cross-cast across different productions. The year we did Les Liaisons, Alan, Fiona Shaw and Juliet Stevenson were all in As You Like It as well. To free up all that cast – and Lindsay Duncan was also doing The Merry Wives Of Windsor – you have to wait for the shows to end in the repertoire, otherwise productions would be asset-stripped of their actors. Actors do prefer rep rather than doing the same thing eight times a week. So yes, there was a problem with the Les Liaisons transfer to the West End: endless problems with hoicking actors out of the rep. I don’t know if Ben Kingsley, the star of Othello, was hacked off or not by all the attention Les Liaisons was getting. That’s all speculation.

  ‘As for the film rights, the RSC is always diligent about protecting the film rights of any production. We strike as good, and as hard, a bargain as we can.’

  When I contacted the RSC’s General Manager, David Brierley, he elaborated on that complicated transition to screen and the RSC’s alleged delay. ‘When we enter into a contract with a writer, part of the contract is to do with potential film rights.

  ‘We negotiate a share of the sale of film rights that goes back to the original stage-producing company, which also gets consultation rights. Christopher’s agent, the late Peggy Ramsay, was the best agent ever for ferociously protecting her authors. She did the deal and didn’t consult the RSC. She was in a hurry because of the competing film Valmont, so it was a bit of a race to the tape. Plus Christopher’s rights to be producer of the movie were also part of the deal.