Alan Rickman

by Maureen Paton

  Which was more than another unfortunate female in the cast did. Hurled across a desk by one of the other terrorists, her strapless party frock fell down and she ended up topless. But at least Alan Rickman’s dabs weren’t on her.

  Nevertheless, Die Hard is still a simple-minded, xenophobic, Neanderthal film, which carries the subliminal message that workaholic feminists – i.e. career women – rot the social fabric of America. Until a cowboy comes to the rescue.

  Rickman was there to add the gloss of class. ‘All sorts of people asked me why I wanted to be in a film like Die Hard,’ Alan told the Guardian in 1989, revealing a lot about the high-minded circles he moves in. ‘I thought it could turn out to be a fabulous film, something like the best ride at the fun-fair. That’s why.’ He is certainly a thrills addict who loves the most death-defying fairground rides (as his Mesmer co-star Simon McBurney was later to testify).

  For all his lordly insouciance in this alien culture, gloomy old Rickman was still convinced he was going to be sacked the first week.

  ‘The first shot I did, and this is significant, was one where I had to produce an American accent. If I hadn’t produced an acceptable accent, I’m sure I would have been got rid of. I mean, when a film’s costing $30 million, no one’s got time to waste.

  ‘On the other hand, once they’ve decided you’re all right, they’ll make sure they’ve got it all in the can before they do the shot where they might kill you. The very last shot I did in the film was one where I was dropped from 40 feet.

  ‘I’d certainly never picked up a machine-gun or even a hand-gun before. And we lost a lot of takes because I had a habit of flinching as they went off.’ In fact you can catch him flinching in one split-second of fear as he fired a shot; and neither was his elusive American-German accent all that hot. They must have decided they just liked his voice anyway. But the tongue-in-cheek humour of the film was right up Rickman’s boulevard; he and Willis got together with various scriptwriters to add jokes and ideas as the production got underway.

  ‘When I met Willis, my immediate comment was that they’re such cartoon-like characters that it would be much more interesting if they could make each other laugh. There was no emotional development to chart with my character, so it needed something extra. That came as the script was rewritten. In fact the script was rewritten so much that I could hardly say we filmed the script I agreed to do.’

  The result of making it, he says, ‘was endlessly surprising and endlessly enjoyable’. His name is the second to be credited, followed by Alexander Godunov and then Bonnie Bedelia. Very much a boys’ picture.

  We first see Rickman’s character Hans Gruber emerging from a group of terrorists who seem to have fallen off the back of a lorry. They walk mob-handed out of the truck. Suddenly, this crowd parts like the Red Sea and he emerges from its centre. This is a cinematographer’s cliché, but Rickman carries it off well, conveying just enough nerves under the professional cool to suggest a human time-bomb who might explode prematurely.

  (Gruber was an inspired choice. There is a rumour that Hitler’s family name was Schicklgruber, since his grandfather Johann Georg Hiedler married a peasant girl from Lower Austria whose name was Maria Anna Schicklgruber. Five years before, she had given birth to an illegitimate child.

  According to the accepted tradition, the father of the baby was in fact Hiedler himself. But he never bothered to legitimise the boy, who continued to be known by his mother’s maiden name of Schicklgruber until he was nearly 40 and who was brought up by his father’s brother. The latter later took steps to legitimise him and asked the parish priest to cross out the word ‘illegitimate’ in the register, putting Hiedler’s name down as the father.

  Yet twelve years before Hitler was born, his father had started calling himself Hitler. Little Adolf was never known by any other name until political opponents discovered the old scandal and jeeringly labelled him Schicklgruber.)

  The epitome of a designer terrorist, Rickman has his hands buried deep in the pockets of a long cashmere overcoat as he emerges from the mob. Gruber wears a Mephistophelean goatee beard and moustache. In fact he is Valmont revisited, with the same facial hair. The sideburns and beard form one long seamless stripe of fur round the chops of this sexy weasel.

  After gatecrashing a Christmas party given by Bedelia’s Japanese-owned firm on the 30th floor of a skyscraper, the neo-Nazi admires a scale model of a business project in Indonesia. ‘I read an article in Forbes magazine,’ he name-drops suavely. ‘I could talk about industrialisation and men’s fashions all day, but I’m afraid work must intrude.’ A lovely camp flourish. Gruber is after 640 million dollars of negotiable bonds locked in the company vault. ‘Who said we were terrorists?’ he asks rhetorically, as if playing an elaborate game. He turns his head in slow-motion to glower at his henchman Godunov when the latter says ‘It’s not over yet’ to Bedelia’s captive Japanese boss. Rickman then shoots the latter in the head. ‘See if you can dispose of that,’ he orders, switching from the conversational to the callous in the abrupt way that is supposed to be the hallmark of the psychopath.

  His suit reveals Rickman’s surprisingly narrow shoulders. He’s big-boned but his lean body has absolutely no pecs appeal. although Alan does work out at the gym – reluctantly, according to him. Though he believes fundamentally that the best career advice to a budding actor is to stay fit and healthy, to look after ‘the instrument’ of your body, he finds the grind of gym a tedious business. In a 1995 Premiere interview, he told Duncan Fallowell that he goes to his health club ‘in secret – and I dutifully bore myself rigid on the machines’. Rickman’s Gruber travels light, with high cheekbones and a hawkish nose to confer authority. Willis looks like Popeye in comparison, though the sweaty vest (which surely should have won Best Supporting Performance) stands up quite well.

  Gruber has a rather contorted, very Germanic insult ready for Willis’ character John McClane: ‘Another orphan of a bankrupt culture who thinks he’s John Wayne,’ he sneers. On the contrary, McClane calls himself Roy Rogers, a Hollywood in-joke that’s just a little too smug. But then that’s Bruce Willis for you, revelling in the cat-and-mouse game McClane plays with Gruber.

  Hans is pragmatic and not uncivilised, however, just as Rickman insisted: when he takes the staff hostage, he graciously allows a sofa to be brought in for a pregnant woman at Bonnie’s request. Rickman’s feral face is well used here. A TV picture reveals Gruber to be a former member of an extremist German underground movement until his expulsion, too radical even for the radicals. It shows him with hair combed unflatteringly over his forehead, looking very drab and downbeat . . . this is Alan Rickman in real life as a superannuated student revolutionary, sloping down to buy his veggies at the Portobello Road market in Notting Hill Gate. With such a style makeover since his early days, clearly Hans is more in love with capitalism than he lets on.

  A welcome touch of satire has a crass Gareth Cheeseman type, of the kind created by the comedian Steve Coogan, emerging from the hostage group. He boasts to Hans that he can broker a deal by giving him McClane, ‘the guy on the roof who is the one man that can stop the terrorists. Gruber shoots the fool when he realises that he doesn’t know where the detonators are.

  They risk more subversive humour when Gruber barks at the police and the FBI that he wants ‘colleagues’ round the world released – in Northern Ireland, Canada and even Sri Lanka, conjuring up such groups as ‘Asian Dawn’. (‘I read about them in Time magazine,’ he stage-whispers with perfect comic timing to Godunov, who has mouthed the name in facetious surprise.) It really must be like this with some terrorists, making the revolution up as they go along.

  Gruber shows his mettle by posing as one of the hostages when McClane, toting his machine-gun, turns up to ask ‘How ya doin’?’ in that homespun, all-American way.

  This little detail is ridiculous: Gruber has altered his accent slightly, but surely McClane would recognise that rich drawl anywhere? He’s heard it enough times.
And how about the lethal-looking teeth, revealed in a wolfish smile? McClane hands him a gun, whereupon Gruber ominously grounds out McClane’s cigarette with his shoe (another cliché) and speaks in German (always a bit of a giveaway) on his mobile.

  ‘Put down the gun and giff me my detonators,’ he demands. It would be laughable in the mouth of anyone else but a deadly serious Rickman, who has both the intensity and the integrity to make you believe in his villains.

  Alan uses a machine-gun to shoot the glass out of a window in a movie with more than its fair share of defenestration. Again you’re suddenly very aware of Hans’ jangling nerves under that studied cool: he’s the student revolutionary who has hit the big time.

  The FBI men are the usual unbearable egomaniacs and McClane is no less smug in his rivalry with them, so much so that you almost feel perverse enough to want Hans to win – especially if he could wipe out some of Bruce Willis’s smirks. The villain is supposed to smirk, not the hero; Alan keeps his dignity by contrast. His best line comes when he realises Bedelia is McClane’s wife and makes her hostage-of-the-week with a gun to her head. ‘You are nothing but a common thief!’ she accuses him. ‘I am an exceptional thief, Mrs McClane,’ he hisses, putting his face close to hers like a furious lover. ‘Since I’m moving up to kidnapping, you should be more polite.’ But dear old Brute Willis keeps coming back for more punishment, covered in blood like Banquo’s ghost. McClane makes all the terrorists laugh, distracting them with a bit of male bonding for one vital moment. As a result, it’s all over. Gruber finds himself travelling backwards through yet another window. His head swivels slightly as if he were an angry snarling animal, and then he goes into freefall, imitating the rapid descent of that malignant comic cat Lucifer in Disney’s Cinderella.

  He vanishes like a magician into the ether, dropping 40 feet. All this and Rickman’s own stunts, too, as a first-time action man. The RADA fencing lessons had paid off; perhaps they put the vest on the wrong guy.

  ‘I got Die Hard because I came cheap,’ admitted Alan to GQ magazine. ‘They were paying Willis $7 million, so they had to find people they could pay nothing.’ However, it planted Rickman’s flag on the international map with a scene-stealing performance that began his new Hollywood career in grand larceny. ‘I wasn’t prepared for the reaction,’ he told Sean French in the same magazine the year before. ‘I flew to New York for a preview, and the audience just stood up and cheered and threw things at the screen. I walked into that cinema and I could have just been someone with a ticket, but when I walked out I couldn’t get to the car.

  ‘My girlfriend and I went to Anguilla at Christmas and you’re on this little West Indian island and everyone knows who you are. You’re not Alan, you’re the guy in Die Hard.’ He was still bemused when he told The Times magazine of 12 March 1994: ‘Black New Yorkers loved Hans Gruber. They come up to me and say: “Yo! My main man!” I don’t know what it is. They want him to get away with it, I suppose.’

  Yet he went from there straight back to BBC television and the intellectual comfort of a Michael Frayn play, Benefactors, which was transmitted on 28 May 1989. It reunited him with Harriet Walter, a member of the Rickman ‘harem’ whose inimitably dry little-girl voice was perfect for her role here. Benefactors was a miniature state-of-the-nation play – or perhaps just a state-of-South-London play – about the collapse of idealism. It told the story of how a tower-block architect – played by Michael Kitchen, with Barbara Flynn as his pragmatic wife – fell to earth. Rickman’s character was an ex-senior classics master at Eton, now the bad-tempered editor of a woman’s magazine. Harriet was his girlfriend, the archetypal dippy hippie-chick with a wonderfully vacuous and dithery manner and a maddeningly enigmatic air. They both sponge off Kitchen and Flynn, almost living round at their place. Harriet eats her hair and watches Z-Cars while the other couple, furious at her constant presence, argue about just whose friend she is. Kitchen and Flynn are capable, confident; the other two are incredibly disorganised, with smelly children we never see. With her long bell sleeves and curtains of hair, Harriet looks like the moping lady of Shalott. She whimpers a lot and tells herself she has held Alan back in his career.

  Of course she begins a relationship with Kitchen, and Alan gets his first chance – but by no means his last – to play a cuckold. He’s bitter and defensive, baggy-eyed and haggard.

  ‘Life goes round like a wheel: what we have done once, we do again,’ he says doomily.

  Kitchen’s anti-social skyscraping plans are leaked to the papers by Alan via Harriet. Alan goes to live in a derelict house in the middle of the redevelopment area, squatting there.

  ‘Welcome to the war,’ he snarls at the visiting Flynn and fires off an angry monologue to camera. ‘I see in you a little of the bleakness I have in me,’ he says provocatively to her. ‘That’s why you don’t like me.’

  He’s menacing, shaggy, sexual, insinuating: a natural subversive and tinpot urban guerrilla. It is to Frayn’s credit that he is not so obvious as to allow Alan and Barbara’s characters to end up in bed together, but it’s a natural conclusion to draw.

  ‘Don’t scrape the sky, just sweep the streets – a whole philosophy of government in eight words,’ Alan says, using his headline-writing skills. But, by the end, this vulnerable malcontent is drily reflecting: ‘We had all kinds of supporters by this time – but not all of them had heads.’

  Nevertheless, he becomes famous as a spokesman for the campaign and attacks ‘North London cultural imperialism’. He even survives two attacks by boiling brown stew from the hysterical Harriet, which would have scalded anyone with a thinner skin. Eventually Flynn fixes him up with a new job, while Kitchen’s practice withers in this nicely cynical but over-long piece.

  So much for the revolution, indefinitely postponed. It was in 1989 that Alan Rickman became a member of the property-owning classes. He was 43. After half a lifetime in the theatre, it was the first time that he had been able to afford a property. He and Rima had shared the rent on her Holland Park flat since 1977, but Die Hard had made a significant difference at last to his finances. Rima stayed put because she was required to either live or work in the borough of Kensington and Chelsea in order to remain a councillor.

  Though he was worried about how Rima would feel if he moved out, Alan bought a maisonette near a garden square just over a mile away from Rima. They lead such different lifestyles that it’s hardly surprising they find it difficult to share; but it was his burgeoning film career that made the real difference.

  Once you start playing the Hollywood game, you have to make yourself available to work around the world at very short notice. The restless Rickman is forever on the move, while Rima is permanently home-based by virtue of sitting on no less than ten council committees, not to mention her governorship of Barlby Primary School and her involvement with a canalside project and a community centre. Her speciality is education, despite, or because of, not having had any children of her own.

  ‘We were all very worried about them at first when Alan set up on his own, but it seems to have worked out,’ says the close friend.

  Indeed, there is a longevity to all his loyalties. Alan said no to several overnight movie offers on the back of Die Hard and returned to Britain and his old mentor Peter Barnes for three remarkable BBC projects: two period television dramas and a disturbing radio play, Billy And Me. He believes in causes, and he certainly found one in The Preacher.

  The latter was the third of four Barnes monologues under the series title of Revolutionary Witness, based on eyewitness accounts of ordinary men and women caught up in the French Revolution.

  Alan played Jacques Roux, a radical priest who officiated at the execution of Louis XVI and organised food riots in 1793. This was – and still is – the most passionate performance he has ever given, laying his emotions bare in a wonderful fusion of head and heart.

  Roux is standing in a pulpit in an apparently deserted church, with his dog Georges at the foot of the pulpit as his
only audience, apart from us. He is a true terrorist from history; this is the real thing, as opposed to Hans Gruber’s entertaining ersatz version.

  ‘God created rich people first and then showed them the world they would own,’ he says through clenched teeth. He has wild hair and looks incredibly unkempt, the epitome of the turbulent priest. ‘Your slavery is their liberty,’ he adds in a spell-binding incitement to righteous violence, based upon Roux’s own writings. ‘The church offers fear and punishment for ever and ever. Religion is a liar and a cheat. Mad Jacques, Red Roux, sower of sedition, subverter of all law.’

  His first sermon in a new parish is being preached in this ruined church. He goes before the tribunal tomorrow, charged with revolutionary excess. ‘It seems I’m too revolutionary for the revolution,’ he says with a bitter smile. ‘Do not forgive me, Father, for I have not sinned.’

  His own father had twelve children; Jacques was the cleverest. He was a priest at the age of fifteen years and became a professor of philosophy. Eventually he was arrested, he tells us, for a crime he didn’t commit. ‘This is how fires are kindled,’ he warns menacingly. For he was not given a trial.

  ‘Revolutions must be violent . . . the only way to end the greater violence,’ he says, banging his fist on the pulpit. As the title of one South African film put it, Death Is Part Of The Process.

  He lives, he tells us, with a good woman and is now a pamphleteer; she sells them. They adopted a son, Emile. The close-ups reveal Rickman’s sensual, well-defined lips, the upper one slightly lifted in that characteristically animalistic way. ‘Don’t be fooled by those who set themselves above you. Look at the bill they present you with. It’s not my purpose to be popular. I am here to sting.’ As Rickman himself is; he’s not a beige personality.

  ‘To stop me stinging, the Assembly hired me to write the report of the King’s execution . . . the rich we will gobble up, tra-la-la,’ he sings. He tells us how ordinary people die in the mud and calls King Louis a toe-rag.