Alan Rickman

by Maureen Paton

  Rickman’s Rasputin is no common lecher; there is a strangely playful, childlike innocence about his greedy sensuality. The character feels helplessly dominated by his senses, something with which the highly sexed Rickman strongly identified and which attracted him to the role in the first place. ‘God blast desire! The lust of my flesh has tormented me,’ shouts a drunken Rasputin as he goes wenching late at night. It’s as if he is possessed by a demon of lust. But he can’t resist a dangerous flirtation with the royal princesses, asking them: ‘What do you know about love?’ as they walk in the grounds of the palace.

  There is a naïvety as well as a native cunning in this holy devil. ‘The soul may belong to God, the flesh belongs to us,’ he announces to the Romanovs over dinner.

  He slurps his soup, handles the potatoes and starts to tell such a dirty-schoolboy story about two homosexual monks that he is expelled from the table by Ian McKellen’s shocked Tsar, who appears to have led a very sheltered life of monogamous marital bliss. For if Rasputin is depicted as the innocent victim of destiny, so too are the Romanovs.

  ‘I didn’t choose to be a holy papa . . . it frightens me too,’ explains Rasputin as if he were a guileless child visited by God, an unworthy vessel into which is poured a divine power. It is his sheer force of will that appears to send Alexei’s illness into remission, though David Warner’s royal doctor explains in utter exasperation that the rogue is simply slowing down the flow of blood by hypnotising the boy.

  We have been kept waiting a long time for evidence of Rasputin’s notorious orgiastic endeavours, which begin halfway through the film when he is treated as a marriage-guidance counsellor by a comely woman whose husband is failing in his marital duty. Rasputin woos her with honeyed words, but one never feels that the man is cynically faking his ardour. Rickman’s performance has the fervour of one who genuinely wishes to make a convert to the doctrine of free love.

  ‘The greatest gift in the world is love . . . only then can we enter the gates of heaven. The greatest sin of pride is chastity. Before we repent, we have to sin,’ he tells her throatily, his voice thick with desire.

  He takes her in his arms and demands she kisses him, then indulges in an orgy of china-smashing to show off his passionate Russian temperament. ‘I would cut these wrists if it would give you a single moment of happiness. Think of God, my angel . . . he gave us this pleasure.’

  He lifts up her long skirts and whispers to her. Moments later, he’s kissing her neck on the bed. ‘God is love.’ He fumbles at his lower clothing and two prurient gentlemen in the building opposite raise their binoculars to catch sight of her legs wrapped round Rasputin’s neck. The next scene shows him besieged in his apartment by respectable ladies who all want to ‘come’ closer to God . . . the rest is left to our imagination. As ever, Rickman is flirting most of all with the camera . . . a gloriously old-fashioned seducer who understands the art of dalliance and knows how to take his time. No wonder so many women are intrigued by him.

  He goes further in a restaurant scene, where he is dancing wildly in a red shirt like a revolutionary who has unexpectedly won the election. Rasputin is as drunk as a skunk; yet Rickman skips lightly and deftly in his black boots, Fred Astaire at last.

  Here is the latent exhibitionism that is integral to the passive-aggressive syndrome. He sees the sex-starved woman whom he serviced so expertly and kisses her violently in front of her astounded husband. Rasputin is asked to leave (without the patronage of the Romanovs, he would have been challenged to a duel) and he roars, ‘The Empress kisses my hand . . . I’m her saviour and angel.’

  The Tsarina’s handsome young nephew Prince Feliks Feliksovich Yussupov rises angrily to his feet in the restaurant. Rasputin puts his face close to his and says provocatively, ‘Very pretty . . . but I prefer women.’ Maria Rasputin’s highly coloured account of her father’s rise and fall portrays the married Feliks as an aggressive homosexual who is mortified by Rasputin’s rejection of his advances. There is no such suggestion here in this sanitised account, but Feliks is to prove Rasputin’s Nemesis none the less.

  ‘I’m a great man,’ shouts Rasputin, climbing on a table and exposing himself in order to prove it. Not that we actually see the Rickman genitals – the camera cuts away just as Rickman is loosening his trouser-band.

  Rickman is hypnotising the viewer all the time with Rasputin’s wild mood-swings. He hurls furniture around, rips at his clothes in a frenzy as if tormented by what orthodox Jews call a dybbuk.

  ‘We will all drown in blood . . . oceans of tears . . . death is behind me,’ he shouts at Ian McKellen’s decent, mild-mannered, permanently perplexed Tsar. ‘Why was I chosen? I don’t know, but I am Russia. I have your pain.’ He’s a cross between a manic-depressive Jesus Christ and that wild New Testament drop-out, John the Baptist. Rivetting. And yet more momentous forces are at work; the heir to the Austrian Empire is assassinated by a Serb at Sarajevo, and one wonders just how much Rasputin is involved in the gunning down of the Russian Prime Minister Stolypin at the opera (apart from that, how did you enjoy the show, Mrs Stolypin?) ‘Death was behind him, just as Father Grigori said,’ relates Crown Prince Alexei with grisly relish.

  Rasputin has predicted both the First World War and the Russian Revolution, but he is demonised by the popular pamphlets for causing the deaths of ill-armed Russians facing the might of the Prussian machine-guns. He is the scapegoat that everyone needs now that the superstitious Tsarina’s support is falling away with the return of Alexei’s chronic haemophilia. Even Rasputin is beset by self-doubt: ‘The Holy Mother won’t answer my prayers . . . she has turned her back on me.’

  The final trap is laid for Rasputin, summoned to heal Feliks’ sickly wife. Rickman’s pallor is ghastly. Rasputin’s excesses have caught up with him. He registers a flicker of suspicion, but he’s so arrogant that he regards himself as impregnable. A man who can’t control his appetites, he greedily eats the cyanide cakes that Feliks has prepared for him. Yet they have no effect and the indestructible Rasputin grows drunker by the minute as a barrel organ cranks out a popular war-time song: ‘Goodbyeee . . . don’t cryeee . . .’ Even when Feliks shoots him in the chest, he is still hypnotised by Rasputin’s closed eyelids until a hand suddenly shoots out to clamp Feliks’ neck in a stranglehold. The legend seems to be true: Rasputin is the vampire they can’t kill.

  The film makes no attempt to dispel the myths. In reality, Feliks was probably a lousy shot, and Rasputin was heavily padded by his clothing and his sheer bulk. But Rickman’s interpretation, while never sentimental, gives itself over to romantic myth-making on an epic scale. We are invited to suspend our incredulity. Or, maybe, it is simply Rasputin’s sexy electricity that survives, the sheer force of character that can make one feel a long-dead person’s presence in a room.

  He escapes across the snow and the palace guards shoot at him. Finally a bullet from Feliks finishes him off as he scales the gates, staring up at the sky before he slithers down and dies. He seems to be offering up his soul to the moon.

  Students of the Russian Revolution will find the film a fatuous piece of highly partial history, but it’s Rickman’s show. Again. Rasputin’s body is thrown in the River Neva, but he bequeathes a poisoned legacy. He has left the Tsarina a letter with a premonition of his own death and a warning of worse to come: ‘You will all be killed by the Russian people.’

  As if by thought-transference, the Tsar finds a mystique within himself that awes the soldiers who have come to arrest him as an enemy of the people. He and his family last for another eighteen months after the death of ‘Father Grigori’ before they are shot in a cellar; yet, Alexei appears to survive the mayhem. ‘Sometimes we have to believe in magic,’ says the voice of this boy narrator. A member of the execution squad lifts a pistol as if to finish him off; the film tells us that Alexei’s remains have never been recovered. Did he escape with a charmed life like his mentor Rasputin? The latter’s influence lingers tantalisingly on.

  Rickman
may have complained that the final editing of Mesmer made the character too enigmatic, but all his own instincts conspire to create a mystery around the men he plays. Rickman’s Rasputin took his secrets to the grave, an endlessly fascinating riddle.

  14. THE BLEAK MID-WINTER

  AFTER FINISHING RASPUTIN, Alan needed a rest from the business, even though his three awards for Rasputin were to make him more in demand than ever. In his case, there were very personal reasons for dropping out of circulation for a while: his octogenarian mother had been unwell since 1995, so he began to spend more time in London.

  Just before making Rasputin he had also fitted in a blink-and-you’ve-missed-him performance in Lumière and Company, a short documentary to mark the centennial of those pioneering film-makers the Lumière Brothers, with François Mitterand, Isabelle Huppert and Liam Neeson among the cast and David Lynch and Spike Lee among the directors. At the beginning of 1996, he told friends that he was taking a long-delayed break for a few months before beginning work on the film of The Winter Guest. When Huppert came over from Paris to prepare for her role in Schiller’s Mary Stuart at London’s National Theatre, Rickman acted as escort and squired her round town, throwing parties to introduce her to people. Back in 1993, when his consortium made its bid for Riverside, he was to have played opposite Huppert in Strindberg’s Miss Julie, a much-postponed pet project.

  While he was beginning pre-production work on the film version of The Winter Guest, Margaret Rickman became increasingly poorly. Alan was acutely aware that his peripatetic career had kept them apart for long periods. Later, while ostensibly talking about The Winter Guest’s central mother-daughter relationship, he was to give away clues to that difficult time in his life: ‘It’s a moment that comes to many of us, that point when the roles switch and the child must become the parent. You either accept the responsibility and look after your parents or you don’t.’

  When Emma Thompson came on board to play her own mother’s daughter in the film, Rickman had signed the Oscar-winner who would guarantee the finances. As he explained to the Los Angeles Times in 1997, ‘Whenever the film version came up, it was sort of automatically assumed that Emma would do it too. She helped finance the project,’ he admitted, ‘but it’s also a great part for her as well as being a great gift to her mother.’ Alan felt a particular affinity with Phyllida Law, who had, he pointed out, been widowed young like his own mother. Margaret had brought up four children on her own, while Phyllida raised Emma and her younger sister Sophie after the death of their father Eric Thompson. As he acknowledged, the casting of a real-life mother and daughter ‘could have been a nightmare, they might have been horribly competitive or their real-life relationship might have been incredibly complicated to shake off. But their complementary acting styles and the ‘bonus’ of their physical resemblance turned them into a dream-team.

  Yet, in order to cast Emma, Rickman had to drop the Welsh actress Sian Thomas who had played her role on stage to great acclaim. He hated cutting Sian out of the equation, but it had to be; though he was tired of playing screen villains, Rickman was to discover the hard way that sometimes a director has to play the bad guy for the good of the film. ‘It was tough for her and me and it was a difficult thing to cope with in one’s head; we’ll do something else [together] down the line and I just hope that somehow makes up for it,’ he said.

  Despite the beautiful performances, however, the film is curiously inert, at times too reminiscent of a studio-bound television play. You may find yourself wondering why there are no frosty gusts of breath issuing from the mouths of the characters, who spend much of their time talking outdoors in the frozen wastes of a Scottish mid-winter, but that was because Rickman shot the film in a string of Fife fishing villages from October to December 1996 with the art department supplying the ice and snow that hadn’t arrived in real life. The frozen sea was created in the computer; what a pity they didn’t muster up ice-cubes for the actors to suck to make the setting look cold enough. A location like Iceland, Rickman explained, would have been ‘too cold – and you won’t get the insurance to put your actors on the ice’.

  By filming a story with such a wintry setting, no one could say that he made things easy on himself as a first-time director; but would we expect anything else? ‘It was a great experience, but sometimes it was just awful,’ Rickman admitted. As he told the Boston Globe, ‘My friend Bob Hoskins says film-making is like being pecked to death by pigeons; I would use a more violent bird. I suppose I saw it as a challenge – why not take it on?’

  Why, indeed? In early 1997, while he was in the middle of editing The Winter Guest, Margaret Rickman died. ‘He got very in on himself in that period when his mother died; he was very close to her,’ recalls Peter Barnes. ‘The film didn’t help; that subject matter is not a barrel of laughs at the best of times.’ Even Alan himself admitted that for him, the winter guest of the title was ‘a moment in the life of everyone when you have to grow up quickly’. It certainly was the ultimate maturing experience, that moment when the middle-aged man finally became an orphan and lost the one person who had always continued to indulge him on some level as a child. And for those who don’t have their own children, the sense of bereavement is even bleaker.

  But Alan doesn’t rant and rail and beat his breast; instead he retreats crablike into his shell (also a very manlike reaction, of course). He was determined not to allow himself to wallow in despair, either on or off screen. Yet despite changing the original tragic ending of the stage version and stubbornly describing the film as ‘a hymn to life’, Alan’s wanly delicate directorial debut seemed mired in gloom – though without being Bergman. Some viewers felt, and audiences seemed to agree, that the film was rather precious – in the wrong sense; although it had its admirers among the critics and it won three awards (including the prestigious Golden Lion at the 1997 Venice Film Festival), the lack of narrative drive hardly set the art-house box-office on fire.

  The same charge was levelled at Rickman’s next two projects that same year, with Alan returning to acting for the movies Dark Harbor and Judas Kiss. Rickman justified jumping back on the performing treadmill again by saying rather defensively to the Boston Globe, ‘Acting is not something I’ll stop doing. I can’t see how.’ He was anxious to reassure himself, after the loss in his own life, that it was business as usual; hardly ideal circumstances under which to make fully focused choices. Yet both movies were offbeat projects that carried the adrenaline-producing element of risk to which Rickman always responded. Dark Harbor, he hoped, would turn out to be ‘another strange love story in the vein of The Crying Game’. He played the husband, his first spousal role since Close My Eyes, in an arctic marriage that ices up even further with the arrival of a mysterious and good-looking stranger. The latter comes into the lives of a couple when they rescue him after an accident in which he nearly became roadkill. Playing the wife was Polly Walker, star of Peter Barnes’s Oscar-nominated Enchanted April, with newcomer Norman Reedus completing the triangle as the stranger to unsettling effect. Despite good reviews for the performances – and in particular, a role that astutely deployed the Rickman quality of tumultuous mystery – this wannabe Hitchcock was pulled from its US theatrical release and went straight to video.

  From Dark Harbor’s location in Maine, he flew straight to Pasadena to film the quirky Judas Kiss, which was also pulled from theatrical release and subsequently premièred on Cinemax cable TV in 1999. Though some critics detected the influences of Pedro Almodóvar and Quentin Tarantino in the film, it was by general consensus filed under ‘cult’ – always a useful way of hedging bets. But it did reunite Alan with Emma Thompson for the third time, one of the reasons why he had agreed to do it. As soul-mates in socialism with the same facetious sense of humour, they had become good friends. And, in the roles of an alcoholic police detective and an FBI agent respectively, Rickman and Thompson proved to be dryly amusing in what Variety magazine called ‘a wannabe film noir that’s badly in need of a rewrite.�
�� It gave Emma a gun-toting peach of a part, and it also cast her new partner Greg Wise, whom she had met on the set of Sense and Sensibility. Alan, by now permanently on the run from screen villainy, saw the chance to escape into lugubrious black comedy in this efficiently plotted but unsparkling script by a first-time writer-director who had been working as a Columbia TV stagehand until just before his metamorphosis into a would-be Raymond Chandler.

  To compound the problems, Alan’s old knee injury from Die Hard began playing up during the middle of filming Judas Kiss and left him in so much pain that he had to see a doctor. There was to be no let-up, though, because his next film project was due to start shooting in Memphis in February 1998. Rickman was cast as an angel with attitude in Dogma – the latest project from Kevin Smith, the loquacious, self-indulgent writer-director who might one day be a genius if only he allowed himself a tougher editor.

  Before arriving in Memphis, however, Rickman paid a flying visit to London to deliver a speech at the National Film Theatre that attacked his old alma mater, the Royal Shakespeare Company, and conclusively showed that the old campaigner in him had not been de-fanged by celebrity success. It’s difficult to think of any other actor with his international reputation who gets stuck into the politics of the British arts scene in this way, but Alan is as much a maverick as the parts he plays. He had discovered two remarkable schoolboy actors, Douglas Murphy and Sean Biggerstaff, for the cast of The Winter Guest, he remains heavily involved in fundraising for his old drama school RADA and he takes his growing reputation as a mentor for young people seriously. Impulsiveness is not a quality you immediately associate with Alan, but when he feels deeply about something, as Jules Wright discovered, he doesn’t hesitate to give it plenty of welly.

  Word had reached Rickman of some RSC company members’ unhappiness. Never having forgotten his own bad experiences there as a young actor, he called the organisation ‘a factory’. ‘It’s all about product endlessly churned out – and not sufficiently about process,’ claimed Rickman. ‘They don’t look after the young actors. There are a lot of people who slip through the net. People are dropping like flies.’ The RSC hit back by accusing Rickman of being ‘out of touch’, pointing out that the RSC was ‘one of the few companies actively concerned about nurturing and developing young talent’. Yet their subsequent troubles at the beginning of the 21st century – widespread opposition eventually engulfed Artistic Director Adrian Noble, leading to his decision to stand down after he had dared to make radical changes to the RSC – were to show that the prescient Rickman could claim to have had his ear to the ground two years earlier.