Alan Rickman

by Maureen Paton

  ET was consequently much impressed by Rickman’s mature mixture of gallantry and irony. ‘He was splendid, charming and virile . . . (At) the party on Saturday, Alan nearly killed me, whirling me about the place.’ (As with many big men, he doesn’t always realise his own size and strength.)

  ‘Alan’s very moving,’ she later recorded. ‘He’s played Machiavellian types so effectively that it’s a thrill to see him expose the extraordinary sweetness in his nature. Sad, vulnerable but weighty presence. Brandon is the real hero of this piece, but he has to grow on the audience as he grows on Marianne . . . Finish scene with Alan. Me: Oh! I’ve just ovulated. Alan (long pause): Thank you for that.’ She marvelled later about how ‘Alan manages to bring such a depth of pain’ to what is, in effect, the plot of a penny dreadful.

  But the old tartness, thank God, was never far away. It’s a relief, in the middle of all these eulogies, to read his reaction to a trespassing moggie.

  ‘Very nice lady served us drinks in hotel and was followed in by a cat,’ Emma’s journal chronicled. ‘We all crooned at it. Alan to cat (very low and meaning it) “Fuck off.” The nice lady didn’t turn a hair. The cat looked slightly embarrassed but stayed.’ Perhaps he was under strain from being so nice all the time . . .

  The chance to play against type was a huge relief for Rickman. Sense And Sensibility also reunited him with an old mate, the actress Harriet Walter, who was on brilliantly malignant form as the snobbish Fanny Dashwood, the nearest that Jane Austen got to a traditional wicked step-sister.

  After Brandon’s nuptials to Marianne, he follows the custom of throwing a handful of coins in the air. One hits the frightful Fanny, and the film ends with a glimpse of her backwards collapse into a bush, a piece of comic business she and Rickman invented.

  ‘We are the envy of other countries because we have the identification with the theatre. It’s a heartbeat. In America they really envy it. And for me, Alan is one of the forces of gravity in theatre,’ says Harriet.

  ‘It’s not to do with throwing a lot of parties. He had that effect on people long before he was famous. He has high standards and he takes you seriously – you feel elevated, you think that someone out there is looking out for you. He manages to keep that interest in other people going.

  ‘You endow people like this with power, but of course you need to be critical yourself. It’s up to you to be grown-up. I don’t always agree with him, but we are aiming at the same centre. He has pretty tough standards, and I might rebel for a day or two.

  ‘But he’s a very good listener. He takes you seriously, you feel encouraged. That’s why we have kept up as friends for so long.’

  Movie-making is a schizophrenia-inducing business, however, and Colonel Brandon remains one of Alan Rickman’s least interesting parts even though he did his damnedest with it. He went straight from playing the nice guy to portraying that practitioner of the political black arts, Eamon de Valera, the man who is popularly supposed to have ordered the assassination on a lonely country road of one of the great Irish heroes. The career of Eamon de Valera forms a direct trajectory to the career of the current Sinn Fein president, Gerry Adams.

  13. ROCKET TO THE MOON

  BY 1995, RICKMAN’S old friend Peter Barnes was telling me: ‘Alan is now on a rocket to the moon – we are just waving to him from the launch pad. He has risen into the stratosphere.’

  And talking of space-travel, the role of Dr Who could have been tailor-made for Rickman. Even as late as early 1996, there were recurring rumours that Steven Spielberg still wanted him for the part. Mind you, they said the same thing about Eric Idle.

  The truth is that Alan Rickman’s name is flung into the ring whenever a producer wants to add tone to his project. It’s rather like the story of the drama critic who, when asked why his newspaper employed someone to write play-reviews, replied: ‘To add tone to the paper.’

  In fact the American enthusiasm for making a television movie about the eccentric British hero with two hearts, thirteen lives and a virginal girl companion came from Philip Segal, a self-confessed Dr Who nut and Steven Spielberg’s head of production at his former company Amblin. Eventually Paul McGann assumed the Einstein hairstyle and Regency dress sense of the latest Time Lord incarnation in 1996.

  On the advice of his agent, Rickman is wary of cutting himself down to size for the small screen: it seems a retrograde step. He did, however, make two exceptions for American television. The production values of Murder, Obliquely had been particularly high; and Rasputin was premièred on American television in March 1996, although its makers Home Box Office also hoped the film would have a theatrical release in the cinema when they sold the distribution rights. So far as British television is concerned, however, Rickman remains aloof, much to the chagrin of Jonathan Powell and other moguls at home. He was even suggested for the new incarnation of the dandified John Steed in a remake of the ultimate secret-agent spoof, The Avengers, but bowler hats don’t exactly become him. As his former co-star Sheridan Fitzgerald says, ‘The face is its own statement.’ In retrospect, it was just as well that he didn’t play John Steed; despite Ralph Fiennes in the role, the big-screen version of The Avengers was a flop.

  ‘I had the impression Alan won’t do television at the moment because his agent thinks he should be available for film,’ says the playwright Dusty Hughes. To Dusty, this is a shame.

  ‘Maybe it’s because I’m writing more and more for TV these days. But the situation is changing: the status of TV is going up in America, with series like ER. Quentin Tarantino directed one episode: there’s much more kudos about television out there now.

  ‘I absolutely adore the theatre, have done since I was fourteen. Alan is the same. I think he’ll always do theatre and also directing, if he can: he loves it all. I think he wants to direct films.

  ‘But one of the dangers with people who do stop being actors pure and simple is that they might completely stop acting one day.’

  With Rickman in so much demand, there seems little chance of that. There’s so much he has not done that one suspects the best is still to come. His Hamlet and Antony were very belated assaults upon the great Shakespearian roles, though he did briefly consider taking the offer of Oberon, king of the fairies, in a film version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

  Just as he was never one of life’s Romeos, so he would not make an ideal Henry V. On the other hand, he would surely make a magnificent Macbeth; and, of course, Prospero. His maverick talent is best suited to slightly off-centre parts.

  The real truth is that this fascinating oddity is a natural lago, the second-in-command who steals the limelight from Othello. Or a Cassius, upstaging Brutus. He is the hidden agenda who surprises us all, who emerges from the shadows. There is a lot of sense in what Peter Barnes says about villains being good stand-bys if you want a long career, a canny piece of advice that seems even cannier after Alan’s doomed attempt at playing ageing heroism in the National Theatre’s Antony and Cleopatra in 1998. But Dusty Hughes argues: ‘He can do the villains standing on his head – and probably yours too. Knowing Alan, he’ll always try to do the things that aren’t easy.’

  The year 1995 was another exceptionally busy year for Rickman. He went straight from the Sense And Sensibility set to Dublin for director Neil Jordan’s new picture Michael Collins, shot that summer.

  Liam Neeson played the martyred Republican hero Michael Collins, ‘The Big Fella’, with Rickman cast as his calculating adversary Eamon de Valera. At least, that’s the simplistic view. Rickman reverted to type, yet he still retains that ability to startle us out of our seats.

  The myth of Collins is that he was the bluffly heroic reincarnation of Finn MacCool, Cuchulain and other legendary Irish supermales. The Big Fella was a shrewd manipulator of men, with the devious silver tongue of an Irish Lloyd George. And Collins came up against that other Celtic smoothie when he entered into negotiations with Lloyd George over the establishment of the Irish Free State.

  Wil
y and ruthless though Collins certainly was, he cultivated a hail-fellow-well-met persona that made him an immensely popular folk-hero.

  By comparison, Eamon de Valera seemed a cold, charismatically-challenged figure; but Alan Rickman was determined to find the latent passions in this rather clinical, fastidious character. De Valera was a paradox, not only in having dual nationality – he had a Spanish-American father and an Irish mother – but in being an almost frigid intellectual among the poets and playwrights of the early republican leaders. He was a mathematician with ecclesiastical ambitions who involved himself in the passions of a nationalist uprising. He even dressed like a clergyman, with his long coat and hat. His lengthy tenure of office had as much to do with the clerical control of Ireland as the very priests themselves: he became the church-in-state. Historically, he was the Robespierre and Collins the Danton of Ireland. De Valera escaped the firing-squad after being condemned to death for taking part in the Easter Uprising; the British reprieved him, for devious reasons that have never been fully explored. He became the spokesman for the republican movement, just as Gerry Adams is today. De Valera made a speciality of touring America, whipping up support, holding out the fund-raising begging-bowl and meeting statesmen. Here, then, was an inscrutable strategist with a curiously contemporary appeal who cloaked himself in mystery; Rickman was in his element.

  Casting director Susie Figgis had already worked with Rickman on An Awfully Big Adventure and was later to cast him as Severus Snape in the Harry Potter films. ‘The indisputable thing about Alan Rickman is that he has strength. You notice him if he walks into a room: that’s what makes him a leading actor,’ she says.

  ‘I cast him in Michael Collins because we needed someone who had real weight, an intelligent political figure. He has to still a crowd of 2,000 people: Alan was the man to do it, without shouting.

  ‘He’s a big fish in a rather pathetic little British film pond. I can remember him in Les Liaisons; he’s one of only five and a half people or so in this country who can get a film on the road to finance . . . They are what’s known as The Money.

  ‘Alan’s certainly not the lavender thespian type. He went through a stage of not wanting to be a smooth villain, anyway. He brings intelligence to the role.

  ‘As de Valera, he was concerned to make the man multidimensional with a point of view. He’s very astute that the character should be brought forward. The first script was rather underwritten. He is the villain of the piece, but Alan would be anxious to play him not as a villain but as de Valera would have seen himself. With his own passionate beliefs and delusions.

  ‘His height helped too: de Valera was six foot two in real life. He was the really Big Fella of the two. Although he and Collins were originally brothers-in-arms, the main theory is that de Valera shafted him.’

  In 1922, during the Irish Civil War, Collins was ambushed by waiting gunmen on a country road eighteen miles outside Cork. Some think the British ordered the killing; but the finger of suspicion still points at de Valera. With his ascetic, bony face and aquiline nose, Rickman even looked like the man.

  As for the role of Rasputin that followed, what took such an ideal candidate for the Siberian Holy Devil so long? A delay by America’s Home Box Office in getting the wherewithal together. Yet from Mesmer to Rasputin was an obvious progression: both were highly charismatic, much demonised and much misunderstood characters who exercised an extraordinary power over women. By November 1995, Rickman was knee-deep in snow on location in St Petersburg. Greta Scacchi took the role of the Tsarina Alexandra, whose fanatical beliefs in Rasputin’s mystical powers contributed to the fall of Russia’s Imperial family. Ian McKellen was rather astutely cast as the ill-starred last Tsar, with Uli Edel of Tyson fame directing a production bolstered up by fine British character actors.

  The role of Rasputin was just the sort of part Rickman had been avoiding for years, but there are times when it is necessary to give in gracefully to one’s destiny. It was too good to miss.

  Most people’s hazy notion of the Mad Monk is of a long-haired, heavily-bearded orgiast with the most sinister powers of persuasion – in short, the Charles Manson of his day. Photographs show an altogether more sensitive-looking individual garbed in the robes of a wandering holy man, of the dubious kind that were two-a-penny in Imperialist Russia.

  Rasputin had become a member of the Khlisti, a strange, sex-based religious sect whose name means ‘whippers’ or ‘flagellants’ in Russian. Their leader kept a harem of thirteen women, whom he liked to pleasure en masse. As there are so many Greek words in the Russian vocabulary, it is possible that the Khlisti were also millenarians who believed Jesus Christ would return to earth and reign for a thousand years in the midst of his saints. Whatever, Rasputin certainly had a Christ-complex, strongly reflected in Peter Pruce’s screenplay and Alan Rickman’s impassioned performance.

  Obscurantism reigned at all levels in the benighted society of turn-of-the-century Russia, particularly among the ruling Romanovs who were in-bred and not very intelligent. There was every opportunity to make a glorious career out of charlatanism.

  The monk Rasputin was a self-styled mystic whose influence was based on his personal magnetism and alleged power as a healer; he had alleviated the sufferings of the haemophiliac Tsarevitch, the Crown Prince Alexei, hence the royal favour. Shades of Mesmer, indeed. Rasputin’s drunkenness, debauchery – said by their enemies to have involved the Tsarina herself – and shameless nepotism in promoting friends to high office produced more than the usual crop of foes. Some even convinced themselves that he and the Tsarina acted as secret agents for the Germans in the First World War, such were the hysterical stories surrounding him.

  Rickman approached the role with his usual analytical zeal, very much concerned to be more than just a pair of mad staring eyes and a matted beard. Rasputin is too complex, too controversial, indeed too poignant an historical figure to be played – in the style of the Sheriff of Nottingham – as a manic cartoon. Tempting though it must be. The murder of Grigori Efimovich Rasputin in peculiarly horrible circumstances by a group of noblemen was taken as a fatal omen, since he himself had made the prophecy: ‘If I die, the Emperor will soon after lose his Crown.’ And so it proved. Moreover, Rasputin’s legend was considerably enhanced by the fact that it took him an inordinately long time to die. He survived a large dose of cyanide before being buggered, then shot and slashed to death. Since his curse came true with the subsequent assassination of the royal family in a cellar, Rasputin could be said to have possessed an almost vampire-like vitality. Alan Rickman is one of the few actors who can suggest that kind of power from beyond the grave without resorting to the risible excesses of Hammer Horror. Rickman’s performance as Rasputin makes one long for his eagerly-awaited Aleister Crowley – if writer Snoo Wilson can ever get the go-ahead to make the film. And Rasputin also won him three Best Actor awards: an Emmy in 1996 and a Golden Globe and a SAG Award in 1997.

  The film opens in a Siberian forest in 1991, where the bones of the Romanovs are being disinterred. The Crown Prince Alexei is the narrator, apparently speaking from the tomb. ‘He was my saviour, my wizard. Father Grigori was magic,’ pipes the boy.

  Pruce’s script concentrates on the mystical side of Rasputin’s story, more or less ignoring the complexities of the political dimension. Rickman responds with an old-fashioned star performance that keeps Rasputin’s mystique intact. There is no fashionable deconstruction here to strip away the myths, just Rickman hypnotising the camera, and most of the cast, with his strange, kohl-rimmed, Siamese-cat eyes.

  He is first glimpsed on the snowy steppes of the Siberian lowlands, pulling a cart as if he were Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage – as ambiguous a figure as Rasputin in her way.

  Rickman looks authentically Asiatic. He is whipped by jeering horsemen who say that he has lost his soothsaying gift, but he doesn’t crouch down like a beaten dog for long.

  For Rasputin has attitude. Hearing a heavenly sound, he raises h
is arms to the skies in a self-consciously messianic way. The ‘felonious monk’, as Variety magazine wittily called him, has the striking, silvery pallor of a consumptive, or an elegantly wasted rock star with too much Gothic makeup. With his mossy brown beard and moustache, Rickman lurks under more facial hair than a hobbit, but those burning orbs and hawkish nose make him instantly recognisable.

  As usual, he refused to wear a wig; his blond mop was darkened and bobbed in a shorter, scruffier style than the Yogi-like Rasputin of history. In truth, Rickman’s Rasputin looked rather like a hot-headed revolutionary on a bad-hair day – an effect heightened by the Maoist-style collarless jackets of Russian tradition. It was an inspired image for the religious and political ferment of the period.

  In her book about her father, Maria Rasputin wrote of Grigori’s ‘potent animal magnetism . . . an almost aphrodisiac aura’. Edel’s film shows remarkable restraint in the sex-scenes; instead, it’s the man’s alluring personality that Rickman projects. He begins by spiritually seducing Peter Jeffrey’s Bishop, who falls down and worships this tatterdemalion scarecrow from nowhere.

  All the great risk-taking actors can give florid performances that verge on the vulgar. Sometimes Rickman’s thick Russian accent is comic, particularly when Rasputin is ingratiating himself with the ailing Alexei. The man is part mountebank, part mystic; and not quite in control of his gift. The oily richness of his voice luxuriates in such lush lines as ‘her voice blooms like a kiss in my ear’. He’s talking of the Virgin Mary at the time, but it could, of course, be any woman. He has an hypnotic effect upon Greta Scacchi’s Tsarina at their very first meeting. It is a soft-focus, discreet attraction that provides a marked contrast to the gross peasant appetites he displays elsewhere. If Rasputin really did entice the Tsarina into ways of wickedness, the director and screenwriter are certainly not going to tell us about them.