Rickman’s single-minded intensity responded to the need for speed in filming the £25 million project. ‘The film lacked enough time. We were filming at the time of the year in England when you only have light until 3.30 p.m., so it was very difficult to get everything done,’ he admitted to Jeff Powell in the Daily Mail in 1991.
Yet his Sheriff almost never happened. ‘He turns a lot of things down, fussing a lot,’ says the playwright Stephen Poliakoff.
‘He tends to be a bit of a pessimist; he has mellowed a lot in the last year or so. He’s very honest; he sees the pitfalls perhaps a bit too much. He doesn’t bullshit and he’s very self-critical. And he said to me gloomily that he was about to ruin his career by signing to play the Sheriff of Nottingham in a new film about Robin Hood. I said to him, “Is Prince John in it? No? Do it!”’
So he did, persuaded only by an offer of some control over his lines with help from Peter Barnes. And the preview audiences at early screenings cheered for Rickman, not Costner, hence the notorious cuts in the editing suite.
‘At first I thought “Robin Hood – again?” I just turned it down flat. Then I started to hear of some of the names involved and I could see the way forward for having fun,’ Alan told People magazine in 1991.
And have fun he most emphatically did. ‘I tried to make him certifiable and funny – a cross between Richard III and a rock star,’ he explained to the Daily Mail. It was that Thin Lizzy Crotch-Rock memory again . . .
Director Kevin Reynolds, who had manifold problems in getting Robin Hood to the screen and lost the friendship of his old chum Costner in the process, wisely gave Rickman his head.
Closetland, Truly Madly Deeply and Close My Eyes were in the can by then. ‘So it felt okay to go back into the primary colours and just stride about in two dimensions for a while and have fun,’ Rickman told the Sunday Express in 1991.
For someone who is popularly supposed to be politically correct, Rickman has a lot of subversive humour. He’s one of the few actors who could turn the Sheriffs attempted rape of Maid Marian into an absolute hoot without making it tasteless. ‘It has to be treated with humour,’ explained Alan. ‘You give it a particular tone, so that it’s one of the more fun scenes. The only difficulty, to be honest, was getting out of the costume.’
Dressed in black, with sprouting ebony wig, beard and moustache, his Sheriff looked like the proverbial Bluebeard. ‘I thought about Richard III and a rock guitarist and I said, “Let’s make [his costume] raven so you know who’s coming,”’ he told Ann McFerran in an Entertainment Weekly interview. ‘It was a cartoon . . . I didn’t want the film to disappear into all that historical business.’ Once again, as with Elliott Marston in Quigley Down Under, Alan instinctively understood that the Man in Black always won the style wars when it came to imposing your presence on screen. Would you ever catch Cruella De Vil in verdigris or Darth Vader in violet? I rest my case.
But Rickman’s Sheriff made his first entrance as a wolf in sheep’s clothing, as it were, by posing as a masked, white-cowled monk on a horse, confronting Brian Blessed’s Locksley Senior with the snarl ‘Join us or die’ and a quick flash of his shark-like sneer.
The monks close in on Blessed with a pincer movement, their costumes and burning tapers deliberately evoking the Ku Klux Klan for the benefit of Middle America. Poor old Costner wears a duvet (known as a pelerine cloak in medieval times) and bird’s-nest hair. Needless to say, he doesn’t stand a chance in comparison with Rickman’s lacquered glamour. Nottingham Castle is depicted as Dracula’s lair; the horizon is studded with shrieking bats. Rickman is discovered nuzzling a girl’s body as if chewing ruminatively on a chicken-leg. His head is cocked bird-like on one side at an interruption, a typical pose for him. His chest is bare but casually framed with black fabric: the effect is very kinky and straight out of a bondage shop. ‘I trust Locksley has visited his manor and found the home fires still burning,’ he says suavely.
His entourage consists of Geraldine McEwan in a white wig as the wizened old witch Mortiana; they make a wonderful pantomime double-act. The terribly po-faced Robin, by contrast, carries a blind retainer around with him: the self-conscious effect is that of King Lear, lumbered for life with Gloucester.
The Sheriff was raised by the witch, and scenes that ended up on the cutting-room floor disclose that she was in fact his mother. ‘Zounds,’ he exclaims in horror at the moment of death, ‘who was DAD?’
Rickman’s old school master Ted Stead says: ‘You cannot get out of him what happened in the editing of Robin Hood, because he’s very professional. But he did say, “You should have seen the eyework that Geraldine and I had.”’
The Sheriff casts coquettish sidelong glances at Maid Marian in the cathedral; very reminiscent of Richard III and Lady Anne. ‘You shine like the sun, my lady,’ he snarls over Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio’s hand. The smile is like a rictus grimace, eyes suddenly flashing as if a snake had awakened with a start. He also has the beaky look of a bird of prey, his head so often cocked on one side that one begins to wonder if he’s slightly deaf in one ear. ‘Locksley, I’m going to cut your heart out with a spoon,’ he promises. He slides on the floor in his haste, swats at people in his rage and frustration and repeatedly bashes the guard who let Robin through the gate. As the luckless flunkey falls, his feet catch the end of the Sheriff’s cloak and there’s a hideous rending sound . . . this is a Sheriff who’s almost endearingly accident-prone.
‘Now sew – and keep the stitches small,’ is this piece of vanity’s instruction to a doctor about to patch up his face. A fury of nervous energy, he flagellates himself with rage and stabs at some meat on a plate as if trying to skewer an enemy. ‘Something vexes thee?’ enquires McEwan’s hag demurely.
He even glowers threateningly at his own statue, trying to wipe off its scar. ‘You – my room at 10.30 tonight. You – 10.45. And bring a friend,’ he tells two wenches.
The Sheriff skewers his useless whingeing cousin with a Spanish blade – ‘at least I didn’t use a spoon,’ he hisses. Even Costner’s bare bum can’t compete; both he and it are far too stolid. For, in truth, Robin’s ponderous tale is in dire need of Rickman’s diabolical inventiveness to jazz it up.
‘Tell me, Mortiana, am I thwarted?’ the Sheriff asks McEwan rhetorically, with a smile like a saw-toothed portcullis as he realises he can hire Celtic thugs to fulfil a prophecy and marry Marian by kidnapping her. So a mercenary band of cider-heads makes an appearance, brandishing bloodaxes on the edge of the forest. One is again reminded of Zulu and the shot of the assegai-carriers wrapped around the horizon as far as the eye can see. ‘Get me prisoners,’ grates Rickman.
As his men send flaming arrows into Robin’s Iron Age village, Rickman is caught gnawing his nail obsessively and fastidiously – as in real life. (One suspects the Sheriff was probably a late bed-wetter, too.)
For there is constant human detail in Rickman’s villainy. Howard Davies, director of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, says that Alan once rang him up in a fury to disagree after Davies had told a magazine that actors needed to find a trait they could love in a character. ‘On the contrary,’ admitted Davies to Allison Pearson in the Independent on Sunday magazine in 1992, ‘Alan sets out by exploring the pathology of a character. He cuts them open and looks for what makes them weak or bad or violent.’ Indeed, there is a crazy, deluded gleam in the Sheriffs eye, almost as if he really does half-imagine that Marian has fallen in love with him. Rickman’s Sheriff has been frivolously compared to Basil Rathbone’s Guy of Gisborne in the Errol Flynn version of Robin Hood, but Rathbone was incredibly stolid by comparison.
‘I had a very sad childhood, I never knew my parents, it’s amazing I’m sane,’ Rickman glibly tells a child whose life he’s threatening in front of Marian . . . such an obvious bid for our sympathy vote that it’s breathtakingly funny. There’s a hint of cynical contempt for such fashionable psychological sob-stories, too.
‘If you fail, I will personally remove your lying
tongue,’ he tells the spy Will Scarlett, who is now suspended by his ankles in the torture chamber. Rickman turns his own head upside-down to talk to him. At one point Rickman goes cross-eyed with exasperation (don’t we all). ‘Shut up, you twit!’ he shrieks. And when Mortiana slaps Marian’s face, he rasps proprietorially, ‘That’s my wife, crone!’
‘For once in my life, I will have something pure . . . will you stop interfering!’ he tells Mortiana, insisting that he won’t ravish Marian until they are married in the eyes of God.
His biggest weakness is revealed at the marriage ceremony: the Sheriff of Nottingham’s Christian name is George, which explains a lot. He desperately tries to unstrap his sword in order to subject Marian to marital rape as soon as they’ve exchanged their vows. ‘I can’t do this with all that racket,’ he says fretfully, trying to penetrate his bride while a battering ram bashes down the door in hilariously symbolic counterpoint. Geraldine helpfully puts a cushion under Marian’s head – better for conception, perhaps? Whatever, it’s another wonderfully funny detail.
‘Dew yew mind, Locksley? We have just been married,’ he sneers with a look of ineffable exasperation as Robin crashes through the stained-glass window of the tower to make a widow of Marian. Some of Rickman’s flamboyant curls are sliced up by Costner’s sword, but he hasn’t given up the glamour role yet. He kisses Marian violently in front of Robin and pulls the fatal dagger out of his own chest . . . quite heroic, really.
He goes fleetingly cross-eyed again and finally swoons with pain, lying like a broken-winged crow on the floor and looking oddly pathetic. Rickman’s full-blooded performance and quirky insights have made the Sheriff strangely lovable: you just know he was bullied at school and passed over for promotion. Yet the performance is never sentimental.
Neither was he to succumb to sentimentality in a film that would make a stone statue weep without recourse to any religious miracle. ‘The Sheriff of Nottingham is a troublemaker with a murderous streak, all right – but goodness, this is a costume melodrama, not Shakespeare. I believe this particular villain needs to be a little laughable, lest we mislead the audience into taking things too seriously,’ said Alan in an interview with the Fort Worth Star-Telegraph in 1991, adding plaintively that he wished more people knew about his performance in another movie called Truly Madly Deeply. ‘I’m looking to defy as many expectations as I can, in case the people who liked my turn in Die Hard should take that character as the only thing I’m capable of doing. That’s what I’m doing so much of the broad comedy-villainy for in Robin Hood . . . Kevin Reynolds and I worked out where I could get away with mugging the camera and sticking my nose into the audience.’
It was the modestly budgeted Truly Madly Deeply, which made £20 million from its cinema release, that established Juliet Stevenson as an international name; unlike Alan, however, she has not yet followed up that initial impact on the international stage. Anthony Minghella directed and also wrote the screenplay for the BBC-funded film, which is the most personal, autobiographical work of Alan’s career.
‘We used our own relationship in the film,’ Juliet admitted to GQ magazine in July 1992. ‘I really am the Nina character, juggling a hundred balls in the air at the same time and driving Alan potty with my scatterbrained way of doing things. He is much more selective and sure in his tastes, which can be equally infuriating. But he’s a great anchor in my life.’
The enigmatic Juliet, whose forthright independence had long made her an idol of the Sapphic community, now has a little daughter by her husband, American anthropologist, Hugh Brody. Director Jonathan Miller nicknamed Stevenson, Harriet Walter and Fiona Shaw ‘the nuns’ while they were at the RSC; and all three are great friends of Rickman. Such good friends, in fact, that he felt relaxed enough to remark years later, ‘Actually, I’ve kissed some of the greatest actresses around – Fiona Shaw, Harriet Walter, Juliet Stevenson’, without making it sound like a vulgar boast. And he was to claim that he and Stevenson had – with the aid of the famous BBC radio sound effect department, of course – performed ‘the first oral sex scene on radio in an Anthony Minghella play, A Little Like Drowning’. With bonding like that, no wonder Alan and Juliet went on to make Truly Madly Deeply with Minghella. The actor and director Philip Franks is another Stevenson buddy, and even he felt the need to explain himself thus: ‘I’m not gay . . . but I have a number of strong friendships with a number of women.’ Alan is just the same: a man who attracts all kinds of women, straight or gay. They are easy in his company because they enjoy being treated like equals.
Socialism is another common denominator for Rickman and Stevenson, a brigadier’s daughter who went to Fergie’s old school, Hurst Lodge, and has been trying to live it down ever since.
Both Juliet and Alan took part in the Labour Party TV broadcast for the General Election in April 1992, and she joins him on crusades: they hosted a party at the Red Fort Indian restaurant in London’s Soho to help black South African children. They are embarrassed by what they see as the trivia of showbusiness, and they’re forever trying to prove that they are serious people. Inevitable, then, that they would make a film together . . .
It’s true that Juliet, with her fierce, offbeat beauty, is what the French shrewdly call a jolie-laide (in its literal translation, prettyugly) . . . very much like Alan himself. And there are other similarities.
Truly Madly Deeply was filmed in Bristol and in Juliet Stevenson’s Highgate flat in North London. Minghella encouraged the actors to draw on their own experiences, introducing their own quirks into the film. Thus Juliet is a scatty, highly strung woman; and Rickman is the calm, slightly caustic control-freak in her life.
This scaled-down British version of Ghost tells the story of how Juliet’s character Nina learns to come to terms with the sudden death of her lover Jamie, played by Rickman. What makes it particularly difficult is that he returns to her several times in the guise of a ghost, accompanied by his friends from limboland.
The movie begins at Highgate Tube station and the long climb up the stairs from the underground tunnels into the wooded, slightly spooky exit. Nina is talking to herself: ‘If I’m frightened, then he’ll turn up,’ she reassures herself. ‘He always was forthright. I would have been feeling low and hopeless . . . and he’s there, his presence, and he’s fine. And he tells me he loves me . . . and then he’s not there any more. I feel looked after, watched over.’
This almost makes him sound like a Christ figure, except that the film has far too much humour for that. In fact, it exactly replicates Alan’s central role for his mates. ‘He’s an important figure in the lives of all his friends,’ says the playwright Stephen Davis. We realise that Nina is in fact talking about Jamie in this intense way to her psychiatrist. Then the camera cuts to Alan, feigning playing the cello (the sounds are not his). He frowns in concentration, his hair long, bleached fair and floppy and his moustache dark. The contrast suits him. The mourning Nina is surrounded by solicitous men who are desperately concerned about her: her language-laboratory boss Bill Paterson; a lovestruck, slightly mad and totally unsuitable Pole called Titus; Michael Maloney as the psychologist she meets in a café; and even the elderly oddjob man who has come to sort out the rats in her flat.
Indeed, Jamie is the only one who is never sentimental about her; and this is very much a Rickman characteristic.
‘He’s into the Tough Love Department,’ says Davis, who plays lead guitar in his own rock band and tells the story of how Alan told him to pull himself together during a panic attack for one gig. ‘I played live to an audience at London’s Pizza On The Park for three nights, and it was the most nerve-racking thing ever. I said to him, “This is killing me, I’m so nervous.” He looked at me and said, “No one’s making you do it.” We share each other’s troubles a lot. He says, “Don’t be negative”. But he is, too . . . and I listen to him. It’s a one-way street.’
Nina finds herself crying without warning, and they are real, uglifying tears that make her nose drip an
d her face flush red. This is very Juliet Stevenson. ‘I miss him, I miss him, I miss him, I miss him . . .’ Her pain is so raw that it hurts to watch. She’s angry with him for leaving her, a typical reaction of the bereaved. ‘I can’t forgive him for not being here.’
But this mood is counterbalanced by tantalising moments of fleeting happiness, such as when she is with her beloved young nephew. ‘You aren’t getting posh? Say bum and Trotsky twice a day,’ she teases him, joking but deadly serious at the same time.
Juliet is so committed that she was reported to have left the Labour Party in 1995 because she felt its modernist stance was compromising its politics. Alan, so far, stays firm.
Nina won’t give her nephew Jamie’s cello, however. It’s all she has of her dead lover . . . and she won’t let go. As she plays the piano, Jamie materialises behind her, playing his cello. He stands motionless as she cries, her face scarlet with grief. Then he hugs her as she weeps piteously. ‘I kept thinking,’ he says drily, ‘just my luck . . . dying of a sore throat. Maybe I didn’t die properly, maybe that’s why I can come back. Didn’t hurt.’ She gingerly feels him to see if he’s real.
‘Are you staying?’ she asks meekly. ‘I think so.’ ‘Can I kiss you? Your lips are cold.’ ‘This is a terrible flat,’ he grumbles. ‘And you’ve got RED bills. And you never lock the back door . . . driving me crazy.’
This is pure Alan, who keeps his flat in Westbourne Grove incredibly tidy and would lecture Ruby Wax about monitoring the central heating when they shared a flat together. ‘Thank you for missing me,’ Jamie says morosely, but not without lugubrious humour.
‘Your pain . . . I couldn’t bear that. The capacity to love that people have . . . what happened to it? I blame the Government. I hate the bastards,’ he ends with a growl.
‘You died and you’re still into party politics?’ she says, amazed. ‘I still attend meetings,’ says Jamie defensively.
He makes himself scarce as Titus arrives at the door and invites her to Paris for sex. ‘Now I’m depressed. I book tickets. Man with big emotion, big heart. I love you,’ says this ghastly character, a sexual harasser by any other name whom well-bred women are too polite to rebuff. When she comes back after tactfully getting rid of him, Jamie has apparently gone. ‘Who was that?’ he asks, emerging from underneath the bedspread and laughing almost evilly as she screams with fright. He warms his lips for her by breathing on his hand and then touching his mouth. They kiss.
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