Alan Rickman

by Maureen Paton

  ‘We must appropriate the land and money from the rich, who have it in excess. We have to push the revolution as far as it will go and then further . . . and that’s never enough for me.’

  He tells us he wrote a pamphlet condemning the revolutionaries for banning women from power; so he’s a male feminist as well as a socialist. ‘I shun fame . . . it costs too much,’ says this passionate, ruined romantic in his last confessional. Not Alan Rickman’s own words, but certainly his sentiments. ‘Making love or making revolution . . . but with a revolution, you have to be right.’

  He waves a sword in the pulpit and says he will strike himself down if he’s condemned by the tribunal. ‘Living well is so much harder than dying well,’ he says of the friends that he expects to ‘move on’ when he is dead. ‘I have tried to create a people who are sceptical, rational, critical.

  ‘We are of the generation that so transformed the world that it can never be the same. One last word . . . the revolution is not complete. Don’t sit back. Act. For God is an active power. We do his work in fighting.’ Roux committed suicide in 1794. You could almost fall in love with such a man, as conveyed by the Rickman brand of full-blooded romanticism that finally gives the lie to the image of this actor as the archetypal cold fish. Roux knows he’s condemned, but he has no self-pity. His friends will move on because they have the difficult task: to live. It’s a barricade-storming performance that sets out to change lives, just as he swears his was changed by Peter’s play The Ruling Class. ‘Alan’s Roux was Lenin and Danton rolled into one. He was too left-wing for Robespierre, who had to get rid of him,’ says Peter Barnes.

  The radio monologue Billy And Me was the familiar story of a ventriloquist who is taken over by his dummy, yet Rickman played it very effectively on a rising note of hysteria.

  ‘Yes, of course it’s my wife . . . would I have a maid so ugly?’ went his patter, very much in the spirit of Archie Rice in John Osborne’s The Entertainer. He proved an unexpected virtuoso at the music-hall innuendo; as with all great actors, Rickman has a strong vulgar streak of the grotesque in him. ‘I’m depressed. I feel so dull, I can’t even entertain doubt,’ he moaned; Alan’s natural lugubriousness is well employed here. Master Billy Benton is the creepy schoolboy dummy who exercises a sinister control over him. The ‘vent’ has had a nervous breakdown and becomes a schizophrenic as a result. He starts having visions and gabbles wildly about a row of dummies all singing Handel’s Messiah, as camply funny as it’s frightening.

  However, it was the third Peter Barnes project, the TV drama From Sleep & Shadow in a Screenplay trilogy entitled The Spirit Of Man, that was to provide a fascinating foretaste of his performance in Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves. Rickman often cannibalises himself: here, in this playful madman, is the genesis of his barn-storming Sheriff of Nottingham.

  ‘Peter Barnes is our most Gothic of writers,’ as Rickman’s co-star Nigel Hawthorne pointed out to me. ‘From Sleep & Shadow was a very complex religious thing, but we had a great deal of fun doing it and laughed immoderately throughout – which I don’t suppose was totally proper or totally what was expected of us, but it was certainly very good fun.’

  Alan was cast as a seventeenth-century Ranter, one of those travelling demagogues who sprang up in vast numbers during the apocalyptic New Age turmoil of what the Marxist historian Christopher Hill termed the English Revolution. The Ranters were a primitive branch of ultra-zealous Methodists who split from the prim ranks of the Wesleyans; most of them were barking mad, and there were many great pretenders among the sane ones.

  Rickman made his flamboyant entrance in twentieth-century sunglasses; it still amuses Peter Barnes that no one has ever spotted this camply anachronistic detail. ‘For the Ranter, the costume was made up from bits of different countries. I believe historical accuracy is not as important as dramatic accuracy, though some of the dialogue was from the pamphlets of the time.’

  Hawthorne played the right-hand man of the regicide Oliver Cromwell. He is mourning the sudden death of his beautiful young wife Abegail, played by Eleanor David. Now a pastor, he questions his faith. ‘This is God’s revenge for some unknown sin.’

  Upon which cue, Rickman bursts in like Monty Python’s Spanish Inquisition. ‘You sent for me and I am here . . .’ he says excitedly. ‘I’m naked before women . . . proclaiming the word of God.’

  Whereupon this extraordinary figure has a seizure, spluttering that Hawthorne had him whipped out of Southwark for enjoying bawdy mixed dancing and wearing shaggy hair and a hat during prayers. Hawthorne upbraids this lunatic upstart. ‘I’ll still rant with the best of them,’ shouts Alan, leaping around the room as if the bugs are biting his bum.

  He is Israel Yates, a tatterdemalion mountebank with a witty and paradoxical turn of mind. He mesmerises Hawthorne with his mad staring eyes, urging him to believe in faith-healing and telling him that Abegail is in a cataleptic coma. With his jigs and capers, it’s a preposterous but beguiling performance of enormous charm.

  ‘Curing carbuncles and haemorrhoids, capering up and down in the gutters of the world,’ is how he describes his vocation. He produces a quartz stone on a chain and waves it above her, a gesture that is very Mesmer. He sweats, and that quiescent hazel snake-eye suddenly becomes bright and human. Unfortunately, he’s brought the wrong woman back to life – Abegail is possessed by the spirit of Hawthorne’s first wife Sarah.

  Rickman is a cunning charlatan with a touch of genius, not quite in touch with his gift. Again, very Mesmer. He shouts in Abegail’s ear, playing the voice of God, and then kisses her violently on the mouth. She faints. Then she comes back to life, restored by the sheer randiness of this apparent exorcism. Brother Israel-of-the-ten-tribes-Yates then boasts: ‘We Ranters who cling to the bright lights of liberty and love.’ He exits, but then suddenly bursts in again with a thought for the day. ‘There can be no happy glad-man compared to a madman.’ He sings and dances on the table. ‘I’m shaking off melancholy soul-dust, sister.’ And the three of them form an all-singing, all-dancing, table-top chorus line.

  After this strange BBC interlude, Alan went straight back to Hollywood, but his inexperience made a bad mistake in choosing The January Man as his second foray. This lethargic and whimsical thriller about a serial killer might have worked if Rickman himself had been the murderer. Instead, he was the artist friend of Kevin Kline’s ex-detective-turned-fireman, who is reinstated by his police commissioner brother, Harvey Keitel, in order to find the murderer.

  Rickman was attracted by the cast – Susan Sarandon played Keitel’s wife, on the rebound from Kline – and the prospect of portraying an artist once more was such an easy gig that he nearly did it in his sleep. Perhaps he followed Sarandon’s advice rather too literally, for he later recalled, in a Los Angeles Daily News interview, how she had advised him not to think about it too much after seeing him agonise and pace back and forth before doing a scene. As he rationalised it, ‘You have to let the animal part of an actor have its head.’ Eventually Rickman was to patent a peculiar animal magnetism of his own, but in The January Man he was more of a good-humoured sloth than a prowling panther.

  The first scene recalled Vidal in Thérèse Raquin ten years previously. Rickman is an eccentric bearded painter with a dilettante air whose studio has a lush nude model installed on a sofa. ‘Just languish there, darling, don’t molest anything,’ he instructs her. Kline offers him a job. ‘I resent the fact I need money,’ Alan sniffs, and spends most of the movie squinting at a computer: ‘. . . trying to get the hang of this’.

  He is supposed to be Kline’s assistant, offering mumbled insights here and there. To add to the insult, he’s dressed like a kooky clown – baggy check trousers, violently clashing neckerchief. He looks like a German artist with his spikily-cut, shaggy hair, beard and moustache. But he makes much of raising a lone eyebrow and producing goodies from a hamper with a sardonic flourish – Alan always manages to manifest signs of humour somewhere.

  ‘I’m a
n artist, I watch the women,’ he jokes heavily when he declines to enter the murder apartment. As if to mean business, he’s now clad in a leather jacket that makes him look like an East German dissident with the faintest echoes of Hans Gruber. Essentially, he was paid to hang around as a spare part that became an embarrassment to him, judging by Alan’s inert performance. The film was a box-office disaster.

  It seemed that his Hollywood career was over before it had really begun until the Australian Western Quigley Down Under, released in 1990, rescued Rickman’s fortunes.

  ‘On Quigley Down Under, I hear he was so hysterical and anarchic that they loved him and he took over the film as a result,’ says theatre director Jules Wright.

  He had recovered his energy and intensity for another great scene-stealing performance in a movie that he took only, so he disingenuously maintains, to ‘visit the Outback’. Later he would talk about the ‘pull’ of the Australian desert landscape, the so-called red centre whose mysterious vastness would attract anyone raised in Acton. Movies are often chosen by actors for their location alone, but in this case Rickman chose the right vehicle. Its politically correct perspective was an obvious attraction for him; but he couldn’t resist the subversive urge to jazz it up.

  Quigley Down Under has to be the slowest Western since Dances With Wolves, which was made the same year. Rickman gives it a giant jolt of electricity as the guy in the black hat, the psychopathic land baron Elliott Marston. He has shaved off the beard but kept the Valmont moustache and tuft under the bottom lip, which makes him look rather like Eli Wallach at his most weaselly.

  His artistic eye insisted on changes immediately. ‘When I arrived in Australia, they had me dressed in a purple jacket and white trousers as this indolent ne’er-do-well who sat around drinking glasses of wine,’ he told the Guardian in July 1991.

  ‘I didn’t see Marston like that. He lived in squalor. He might drink wine, but from a dirty glass. My idea was to have him dressed all in black, which turned out to be a good choice but a hot one!’ The result was a rather sexy character straight out of a maverick spaghetti Western.

  Elliott has hired Tom Selleck as the finest long-distance marksman in the world. He wants him to wipe out all the local aborigines, for whom Marston has conceived a pathological hatred after the massacre of his parents. His mother, he reveals on a note of rising hysteria, was even butchered while holding her sewing. English hunting-parties did in fact conduct a campaign of genocide against the aborigines of nineteenth-century Tasmania; it remains an appalling blot on Australia’s human-rights record.

  Quigs, a fine, upstanding Wyoming cowboy of no little sensitivity and nobility, is so furious at this churlish commission that he hurls Elliott out of the nearest window. That’s another fine defenestration Alan’s agent got him into . . . And this after Elliott has even tried to make friends by offering Quigley ‘mint jelly on your lamb – it’s my own creation’ over a chummy meal. Every reasonable person would agree that Elliott has no choice thereafter but to leave Quigs plus leading lady Laura San Giacomo stranded in the broiling heat of the Outback desert as punishment, and none too soon so far as she is concerned. As the childish heroine Cora, Ms San Giacomo is seriously embarrassing . . . as well as being half Tom Selleck’s size. Only his gentlemanly upbringing makes him put up with this prattling circus midget when most of us would have dumped her in the Outback ahead of schedule; it makes one speculate wistfully about the rather more hilarious sparring partnership that the irascible Elliott would have had with the brat.

  When Quigs and Cora escape, Elliott’s men make the mistake of breaking the news to him while he’s being shaved at the barbers. Hence another entertaining outburst of peevishness from Rickman, who – be he never so villainous – makes a point of observing the proprieties. ‘Don’t bother to knock, will you? Oh SHUT up,’ he snaps.

  ‘He’s going to spring something on us during the night – all right, nobody sleeps,’ he snarls.

  Quigs, however, is captured and dragged back to base on the end of a rope pulled by a horse. ‘Good of you to drop in again,’ is another example of Rickman’s exquisite sarcasm. But Elliott is such a shameless showman that he insists on organising a duel with two Colt guns, which he mistakenly assumes Quigs has never used before.

  The excitement of the occasion makes Elliott wax philosophical, another endearing trait in Rickman’s laterally-thinking villains.

  ‘Some men are born in the wrong century. I think I was born on the wrong continent. Oh, by the way, you’re fired,’ he barks with superb delayed timing.

  That’s his last word on the subject – or any subject. He is dispatched with indecent haste, and the film ends with a scene that pays self-conscious homage to Zulu. An endless line of aborigines, armed only with Stone Age spears, appears on the horizon. This magic circle surrounds the hostile British soldiery and provides Quigley with a safe passage.

  ‘No animals were killed or injured during the making of this film,’ say the credits at the end of the most right-on B-movie ever made (if you count Dances With Wolves as an A-movie).

  The life goes out of it when Elliott finally catches that bullet, but Alan Rickman had now established himself on the movie map as the definitive die hard. Twice.

  8. HOW THEY SHOT THE SHERIFF

  BEHIND THE SCENES, Alan Rickman takes pains to behave like a real-life Robin Hood. He quietly gives away proceeds from his rich films to poor theatre projects, an orphanage in Romania and other pet causes such as Glenys Kinnock’s One World Action campaign against poverty and Children On The Edge. When he secretly agreed in 2001 to voice the Genie of the Lamp in Philip Hedley’s production of Aladdin at the Theatre Royal Stratford East on a strictly-no-publicity basis, Alan recorded it at RADA where he has long been quietly involved with fund-raising for his old theatrical alma mater. Yet his sharp looks made him a natural Sheriff of Nottingham.

  Everyone in the business has fallen for the rumour that Ruby Wax rewrote Alan’s dialogue for the Sheriff in the Kevin Costner movie Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves. Nearly every person I interviewed for this book muttered conspiratorially, ‘Did you know that Ruby . . . ?’, so it’s travelled a long way. It’s a great story, save for one thing: it’s not true. To be fair to Ruby, she herself has never claimed the credit; instead it was claimed on her behalf by friends and/or admirers who made the logical deduction: ‘The dialogue is funny, Ruby is Alan’s friend, Ruby is funny, so . . .’

  The real truth behind the Gothic humour of such bravura lines as ‘Cancel the kitchen scraps for lepers and orphans. No more merciful beheadings – and call off Christmas’ is that Alan’s old friend, Peter Barnes, was the author.

  Alan called him in to help as a script-doctor. A downmarket Greasy Spoon caff in London’s Bloomsbury was the improbable operating theatre as Alan spread pages of the script over the table and Peter rolled up his sleeves (very characteristic of Peter, this) and set to work.

  ‘I wrote the dialogue for the Sheriff,’ Peter confirms. ‘Alan and I have been friends for twenty years. I used to work a lot in the Reading Room of the British Museum. There’s a working-men’s café nearby and we went through the script together, because Alan said it needed some work on it.

  ‘So there we were: I said, “Look at us, we’ve ordered egg and chips and we’re working on the dialogue of a $40 million movie!” Alan, slightly misunderstanding me, said “Don’t worry – I’ll pay for the egg and chips.” And he did.

  ‘I made it more speakable. Kevin Costner was clonking around because his dialogue was a bit heavy-going. It doesn’t trip easily off the tongue. Alan is a mixture of Claude Rains and Basil Rathbone in the role. There was something about a teaspoon in the middle of one speech – cutting a heart out with a teaspoon. It was a bit oddly positioned, so I made it work. In an action movie, everybody kicks in with the dialogue. The poor old writers are very much relegated.’

  The results of that barnstorming session in a Greasy Spoon were such choice witticisms as ‘I had a very
sad childhood, I never knew my parents, it’s amazing I’m sane’, ‘You – my room at 10.30 tonight. You – 10.45. And bring a friend’ and ‘Now sew – and keep the stitches small’ to a physician.

  The year 1991 was Alan’s annus mirabilis. Four Rickman films were released, and only one of them – the little-known Closetland – was a flop. Truly Madly Deeply; Close My Eyes; and Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves all enhanced his reputation to an extraordinary degree, so much so that influential film critic Barry Norman named him British Actor Of The Year. All three films were in the Hollywood Top Ten.

  It was Robin Hood most of all that caught the imagination, though to my mind Rickman has never bettered his performance in Stephen Poliakoff’s Close My Eyes. Therein he gave a cuckold – that traditional figure of fun – an unprecedented dignity and complexity. Truly Madly Deeply completed the Top Ten triumvirate, remarkable for its raw emotional intensity. Few people know that it is also the story of Alan: the man you see on screen is his real self (save for the fact that he’s not a ghost and he hasn’t had an affair with Juliet Stevenson).

  Of course his mad, ranting, glam-rock Sheriff of Nottingham was a huge popular hit, and so completely upstaged Kevin Costner that there are stories circulating to this day about how Costner removed Rickman’s best scenes from the final cut in the editing room. What’s left is so wonderful anyway that one hardly needs to bitch about the missing bits.

  Kevin Costner didn’t really know who Alan was – the name meant nothing to him. But when filming started, Costner realised what a formidable actor Alan was. Costner has a reputation in Hollywood for being incredibly physically well-endowed. That’s why he didn’t wear the traditional tights in the role of Robin of Locksley; they made him a pair of breeches instead. However, Alan Rickman still upstaged him with his wonderful roguish quality and powerful presence.