Alan Rickman

by Maureen Paton

  They sing at each other, rather raggedly in that cracked, ironic way of close friends, droning their way through a Sixties/Seventies medley: The Walker Brothers’ ‘The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore’, Buddy Holly’s ‘Raining In My Heart’, Joni Mitchell’s ‘A Case Of You’ and Bob Dylan’s ‘Tangled Up In Blue’.

  They play the childish games of lovers as they vie with each other to declare their passion: ‘I really-truly-madly-deeply love you.’ He pushes her away playfully then pulls her back imperiously into his arms.

  Rickman plucks a guitar and sings again with that strangely musical cawing-crow voice of his, slightly reminiscent of the late Jeremy Brett, the definitive incarnation of Sherlock Holmes. Stevenson dances wildly. The rats have gone, perhaps terrified of his ghost – or their singing. Later he drips a glass of water on her face to wake her up and pushes her out of bed in his benignly bossy way. This is the essence of Juliet and Alan’s relationship; indeed, his relationship with everybody. He has tidied up and lit the fire for her. Jamie comes and goes with no warning. Nina’s handyman friend George, played by David Ryall, confides that he still talks to his wife who died in 1978. ‘And death shall have no dominion,’ he quotes sombrely.

  Jamie next pops up in the most surreal way when Nina is in the bath with a face pack on; he appears over the edge of the bath. He pokes a plastic toy animal in her face, and it whirs as it sticks its tongue out at her. ‘Oh come on, don’t be coy . . . I know you shave your legs,’ he says, asking casually whether he can bring some guys back to watch videos. Bizarrely enough, the spirits turn out to be huge film buffs who wrap themselves up in duvets and watch Brief Encounter intently before taking a vote over whether to see Five Easy Pieces or Fitzcarraldo. Jamie huddles up in bed next to her: ‘You smell so nice.’ He even brings a string ensemble back to play a Bach suite. She fetches him a hot-water bottle because he feels permanently cold, the only sign of his otherness.

  These quirky interludes are beautifully handled, though the contrasting ‘real life’ episodes with Michael Maloney have a slightly embarrassing whimsicality as he tries to jolly her along and bring her back into the land of the living. Rickman seems more real than any other man.

  Nina briefly glimpses Jamie again, but it’s just another cellist on the South Bank next to the National Film Theatre. Her dead love is then discovered sitting by the fire at her flat again. Nina is driven to distraction by his disorganised friends, who are playing chess and generally causing mayhem. Alan is even taking up the carpet to expose slightly mildewed floorboards, just as he did in their relationship. ‘Could everybody just go?’ she finally says. They all waddle out like offended penguins in the John Smith beer commercial on TV.

  She asks Jamie to remember their first meeting, and there’s a real intensity between them. ‘I want a life,’ she says; it is her bid for independence and freedom from his memory.

  Suddenly you notice that Rickman is grey at the temples. ‘Do you want me to go?’ Jamie asks softly. ‘No, never, never, never,’ says Nina fervently, thinking she means it. But the fraternity of ghosts does go; and she is finally over him as she rushes off to Maloney’s class to meet him.

  The rat is back; a pet one called Squeak, supplied by a company called Janimals. It’s a sign that the ghosts have truly gone. They come back briefly, with Rickman at their centre, to stare out of the window at the sight of Juliet kissing her new man in the garden.

  Rickman has never looked more romantic than here, like some sulky Russian dissident artist, but he made the part an anti-romantic one. The tug of nostalgia is very powerful, but his astringent personality gives the ghost of Jamie solidity. By contrast, though Maloney’s character lives in the real world – and you can’t get much more real than someone who works with Downs’ Syndrome adults – he has a gentleness about him that offers Nina an enticing escapism. As ever, Rickman’s instinct is to play against the character he is given, to introduce surprise and tension.

  By contrast, his next project was a big mistake. The low-budget Hollywood film Closetland was written and directed by a woman, Radha Bharadwaj; and, as with Kathryn Bigelow’s ultra-violent Strange Days, perhaps only a woman could have got away with it.

  Rickman plays a Fascist interrogator trying to break the will of Madeleine Stowe, the nearest he has got so far to the kind of Torquemada figure that some fans crave. All the action takes place in one room, a gleaming, high-tech affair that bears no resemblance to the moth-eaten Gothic dungeons favoured by the Sheriff of Nottingham. The victim is blindfolded, so that Rickman’s voice, slipping into different parts, confuses her. His character, according to the Variety review of 11 March 1991, is no brute, however, but ‘a complex, highly civilised man who displays a range of emotions and talents’.

  Stowe plays a children’s author whose work stands accused of feeding subversive ideas to infants in the guise of innocent stories. Rickman is an agent of the oppressive government. It becomes a contest of wills, with Stowe determined to awaken his conscience and Rickman trying to break down her resolve. Variety made the point that it is an essentially theatrical piece, difficult to sell to cinema audiences and perhaps better suited to TV. Amnesty International was the consultant and participated in the film’s marketing campaign, so it’s easy to see why Alan became involved.

  Rickman was praised for his multi-faceted performance; but he was very unhappy with the end result. ‘He said it was awful after it was edited, and he told me not to look at it,’ says his old Latymer Upper English teacher Edward Stead. ‘He hoped it would never open in England.’

  It had been a gruelling year. On the back of that disaster, he made Stephen Poliakoffs incest drama Close My Eyes, taking the part of the betrayed husband that Poliakoff created specially for him.

  Poliakoff had first come across him in 1976 when Alan played one of two middle-class drug addicts in Stephen’s play The Carnation Gang. ‘I then ran into him at the RSC during his second time with them in the mid-eighties. I did a starry workshop with Alan, Tilda Swinton and Juliet Stevenson. I was interested in doing a play about dreams, so we did a workshop. He and Juliet were very compelling as a weird, dark couple: brother and sister. She was druggy, he was dragging her down into a dark spiral. Essentially it was a portrait of the 70s and the 80s.

  ‘I gave Alan quite a lot of space when I was directing him for Close My Eyes,’ adds Poliakoff. ‘I made him feel secure; and I got the impression that not a lot of people had done that. Actors are always being judged on their physical qualities, so they’re very vulnerable.

  ‘Alan has big vulnerabilities. He worries that people are doing the work intelligently, and he and Juliet are big smellers of bullshit. It was the combination of Close My Eyes, Robin Hood and Truly Madly Deeply that finally made him known to the man in the street. With success, he expanded enormously in terms of his confidence. For an intelligent man, it’s difficult to sell yourself. Improvisations for directors are very tough for someone who’s intelligent. At least a writer doesn’t have to sell himself physically to a complete idiot.

  ‘Alan didn’t make any suggestion for the dialogue in Close My Eyes, but he did suggest wearing a baseball cap in the garden-party scene. And some of his sister’s children played the kids running around. I offered him the role of the husband Sinclair before I cast the brother and sister, and he’s renowned for being one of the longest drawn-out yes-noers in the business. He came in halfway through the shooting, and Clive Owen was slightly terrified of him. Sinclair has an opinion on everything; that’s slightly true of Alan, too.’

  Close My Eyes is a (very effectively) overheated tale of incest between a brother and sister, separated when young and only meeting later when both are grown up. Their grabby intensity could be taken as a metaphor for the Yuppie 80s, particularly as parts of the film were shot in the fashionable surroundings of Docklands London. Clive Owen plays the brother and Saskia Reeves the sister, married to Rickman’s watchful but enigmatic Sinclair.

  He’s supposed to be a high-pow
ered City solicitor, though Alan was careful not to include any detailed clues to the character.

  Alan used his own artistic background to collaborate closely with the costume and production designer so that Sinclair could not be put into any rigid social pigeonhole, according to an interview with Sean French in GQ magazine. ‘I didn’t want people to learn anything about him through where he lived or who his friends were.’ In other words, he is creating an archetype in this morality tale for our times.

  In his own quiet way, Sinclair is having the big adult breakdown while Owen and Reeves indulge in the screaming, shouting, childish melodramatics. He finds their relationship intense, but at first he doesn’t suspect . . . or doesn’t want to. At one point, we see him pushing a cart round the supermarket and questioning certain details that don’t quite make sense. Then he sits abruptly on the floor of the shop as the truth registers. It could almost be a scene from a Woody Allen film. There is another scene on a riverbank in which Rickman’s long look at Owen says everything he dare not quite admit to himself. It’s a devastating combination of suppressed rage and vulnerability.

  As Sinclair’s suspicions fester behind that outwardly calm facade, the tension becomes palpable . . . as James Delingpole pointed out in the Daily Telegraph, ‘You suspect that at any moment he might be about to commit some monstrous act of violence.’ This is a one-dimensional reading of the performance, however. It is Sinclair’s tremendous restraint that impresses: you know he knows, but he’s holding back all the time and trying to be civilised, not just for the sake of his dignity but because he feels like a clumsy, helpless outsider between the siblings. He is powerless to intervene . . . in a kinky Greek tragedy. Anyway, who wants to admit that you’ve been cuckolded by your brother-in-law? Particularly if you’re as rich – and as suavely attractive – as Rickman’s well-heeled character. Indeed, the only surprise is that Reeves finds Owen more attractive.

  On the BBC’s Gloria Hunniford show in 1991, Rickman said the film showed ‘how uncertain our lives are. It’s a story about Britain in the 90s, and my character is an arch-Yuppie.’ All the torrid sex is reserved for Reeves and Owen; Rickman admits to Gloria that he kept his knickers on and Saskia her nightie during a bed-scene. ‘I remember us all giggling a bit at that point,’ says Poliakoff. ‘I’ve done a lot of hopping in and out of bed naked, but this was my first actual sex scene,’ recalled Alan. ‘Saskia whispered to me, “Did I have any knickers on?” I did. I mean, God forbid there should be any real contact.’

  The female screams and whistles from the studio audience when he made his entrance on Hunniford’s show suggested that perhaps the wrong guy got his kit off (not that anyone in full possession of their faculties would kick Clive Owen out of bed). Rickman took the homage with gallantry and humour; despite the explicit letters, he tries to be polite to his fans and always signs autographs at the stage door.

  ‘We hadn’t even had a conversation; we had only just met again; and suddenly Alan was in bed and we had to begin that scene. It often happens like that if you go into Makeup and then straight on to the set. So I said, “Sorry, I’ll keep my underwear on,”’ remembers Saskia Reeves, who first encountered him at a play-reading at the Royal Court Theatre back in 1988. So Alan decided to preserve a bit of decorum too.

  ‘I like being around him because he’s such an extraordinary individual. He’s calm and extraordinarily eccentric – so different to anyone else I know,’ she says. ‘He makes me feel very relaxed. He always brings out a cheeky side in me: I tease him to make him laugh. He was very sturdy and confident and helpful on Close My Eyes. He’s a great socialiser. I invited the cast over to my flat and we sat up till all hours. I was quite surprised: he stayed the distance for lunch the next day and left in the evening.

  ‘It’s nice to find a kindred spirit. He’s a latter-day philanthropist, he brings people together. He’s not a parent figure, he’s my playmate. I tease him. I think he’s great.

  ‘In many ways, I sometimes wonder if there’s a hidden agenda with Alan. He can be quite removed: he’s like a character in a Pinter play, where the strongest person is the one who says least. I do that childish thing of teasing and tickling him. I teased and tickled my granny’s dog and eventually it bit me on the chin. But Alan has never bitten me yet . . . I try to make him laugh. I try to give him what I see him giving to others. He has this huge support-network whereby he supports and looks out for other people.

  ‘Sinclair in the film was a calm, solid, eccentric, tender man, rather like Alan. I’m not shy of him. I have never found him intimidating; that’s Alan. He and Rima came to see me in Stephen Poliakoffs play Sweet Panic at Hampstead Theatre in 1996, and he’s the kind of person who always knows nice places to eat. That sort of thing fascinates me about him, though I couldn’t begin to say what he’s about. I always feel very positive about him; I never feel intimidated by him.

  ‘Sometimes I feel as if he’s playing a game of being aloof on purpose, but it’s just the way he is. Sometimes he takes his time before he’s worked out what’s going on.’

  After wall-to-wall filming, Rickman was ready to head back to theatre with the Japanese play Tango At The End Of Winter, the story of an actor in crisis. His old friend Peter Barnes adapted it for the Edinburgh Festival and the West End stage, with the legendary director Yukio Ninagawa directing it.

  Rickman played Sei in the Kunio Shimuzu play about a famous matinée idol whose wife urges him to go back to the stage in order to stay sane. ‘He has the usual actor’s madness,’ Rickman told Jessica Berens in the September 1991 issue of Tatler. ‘You know, the voices inside the head. The usual . . . this is terrible, why on earth are you doing this?’ What a prophetic question; and very appropriate in these circumstances.

  His hooded eyes already looked the part; he was perfect for an Asiatic role. Unfortunately, even Peter Barnes’ adaptation couldn’t save this ponderous theatrical metaphor for life. Why did Alan do it? Because it was produced by his old friend Thelma Holt, who has been called ‘the last true impresario’ of the British stage. Like Alan, she’s a dedicated internationalist. But ultimately the name of Ninagawa, the Japanese Peter Brook, sold the project to Alan. There is a mystique about Ninagawa, as with Dennis Potter, whose own flawed script for Mesmer would later involve Alan in a major law-suit and creative stalemate for the first time in his career.

  Amid much publicity about rehearsals stopping for Japanese tea ceremonies, one sensed a case of the Emperor’s New Clothes.

  Rickman had seen Ninagawa’s Medea and thought: ‘This is what the word “unforgettable” means.’ Not everyone agreed: I remember a fellow critic muttering ‘This is the campest thing since Sunset Boulevard’ as he and I fled to file copy at the end of the show as though our trousers were on fire.

  But Rickman rationalised it to himself in an interview with Peter Lewis in The Sunday Times in 1991: ‘If you have such an experience watching someone’s work and are then asked to work with him, you are not being true to yourself unless you do,’ he said. Usually he’s too analytical and too aware of his working-class roots to gush, but this appealed to his quixotic side.

  ‘It wasn’t an easy decision. But there’s a voice somewhere inside that eventually packs the suitcase. It said, “If you are any good in films, it’s only because of what you do in the theatre.” Hence the sideways move in what many have seen as a quirky career. But as Albert Finney once pointed out, actors don’t ascend a great golden staircase to the heavens – it doesn’t work like that.

  Rather more prosaically, Ninagawa had chosen Rickman for the lead after seeing him in Die Hard – wherein he shot a Japanese tycoon in the head. He had also caught a preview of Truly Madly Deeply.

  Ninagawa is clearly not cocooned from reality, even if he does issue such statements as: ‘The playwright is the mother, the actors are the father, and between them they bear the child called Theatre. As director, I am only the midwife.’

  And the critics played King Herod. I reviewed the premi
ère at Edinburgh for the Daily Express: ‘Only the legendary status of Yukio Ninagawa can have persuaded Hollywood’s favourite British villain Alan Rickman to star in this empty domestic epic about a Japanese actor’s mid-life crisis. Yet even he flounders in a cliché-ridden play laden with pretentious symbolism.’

  Yet Ninagawa had directed, in Japanese, an unforgettable world-class production of Macbeth, with the fall of the cherry blossom symbolising the death of the tyrant and a Samurai parallel with medieval Scotland’s war-like hordes.

  Tango At The End Of Winter was Ninagawa’s first production with a British cast of actors. He didn’t speak English, so they communicated via an interpreter. Ninagawa did his own casting by making people talk about themselves at their auditions while he watched their facial expressions.

  Tango was a popular hit in Japan in 1988, but the predominantly female audiences there worship actors. A play on such a subject was bound to succeed, whereas in the West we see it more as a self-referential indulgence. The action was set in the shabby auditorium of a defunct cinema, with tattered curtains fluttering at the entrance to symbolise the transience of life. Figures from the actor’s past appeared and reappeared as if in a dream, summoned by memory, as he struggled with his madness. Acting styles varied wildly, given the language barrier between director and cast. Sylvia Syms’ talented daughter, Beatie Edney, played Rickman’s mistress, having appeared alongside Alan on Broadway in Les Liaisons Dangereuses. Friends believe that Beatie had a big crush on Rickman; an impression strengthened by the fact that later she dated his lookalike, a morose young actor called Ronan Vibert who is frivolously known as ‘Moanin’ Ronan’. He has never quite forgiven the London Evening Standard for calling him the poor man’s Alan Rickman in the BBC bodice-ripper The Buccaneers. Ronan certainly has a piratical smile but not, as yet, Alan Rickman’s gracefulness and subtlety.