Alan Rickman

by Maureen Paton

  16. THE SLITHERY SLOPE TO SNAPE

  THANKS TO THE success of Private Lives on both sides of the Atlantic, Alan Rickman had proved he was back in action as a leading man. And Hollywood was watching; movie producers are always looking in the shop window of Broadway, which is how Alfred Molina landed the role of a lifetime as Frida Kahlo’s painter husband Diego Rivera in the film Frida after starring in the New York transfer of Art.

  Yet, because of Rickman’s commitment to projects by independents and his reluctance to sell his soul back to the major studios, his film career had taken a decidedly eccentric turn by the beginning of the 21st century. He not only dreamed of directing again, but also of becoming a producer in order to develop scripts himself. Having arrived at his mid-50s, he was learning to conquer his neuroses and owning up to his control-freak tendencies: ‘I suppose it’s the director in me,’ he admitted disarmingly to a group of drama students before adding: ‘But I’m getting better at letting it be.’

  At the Brussels Film Festival in 1998, he had argued that ‘there have always been actors who have become directors. You only have to think of Orson Welles, Robert Redford, Dennis Hopper . . . I think that we simply want to “write”. Working as an actor in many films allows you to observe directors. It’s like taking a film-school course.’ Or, as he put it much more trenchantly on another occasion to a group of students: ‘You learn fastest if, on the second day of filming, you realise, “It’s another idiot.’” No wonder some directors fear him. Yet, despite this nagging ambition to take over the show, he will never give up performing. ‘Acting is a compulsion,’ as he puts it.

  ‘Tides of banality and callowness have washed over society over the last ten years, and Alan has not budged a bloody inch,’ said the writer Stephen Davis, making his friend sound like some cranky old sea-god when I invited him to reassess Rickman in the summer of 2002. ‘His livelihood is in the celebrity business, but his integrity towards personal publicity and promotion in this New Labour age of cult celebrity and superficiality is an absolute bloody beacon. Of all the people I know who come from a generation where we were highly idealistic and optimistic, he, along with some of my old college contemporaries, has not wavered or diluted his values. Even when he does Noël Coward . . .

  ‘He doesn’t take himself as seriously as other people think he does. Above all, he doesn’t confuse the illusion with the reality in what has become a virtual reality society. He’s aware there’s something more significant. He’s not looking for the quick payday, the smash-and-grab raid on the BAFTA awards; he doesn’t care. He is indifferent to those things, and I think that’s fantastic. He’s a Bronze Age standing stone,’ adds Stephen, who in 2001 became the first person in a century to discover such a stone. Part of a pagan worship site, the 4,000-year-old, 6-foot-high stone was 300 yards away from Stephen’s house in his back garden. (He hasn’t yet decided whether to nickname it Alan – even though it’s the same height.)

  Considering that Rickman fears the ageism of the business more than most because he made his name relatively late, his incorruptibility shows no little strength of character. He knows what he’s up against as a middle-aged actor: ‘You are on a shelf with a sell-by date on your forehead. You are in a profession where you are constantly judged.’ Yet he has joined the ranks of the movie immortals, celebrating his 57th birthday in February 2003 in the knowledge that he has now become a household name to millions of children around the world for his role in the Harry Potter films. And that meant getting into bed with a major movie studio again.

  As with Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones series, the first two Harry Potter films, The Philosopher’s Stone (known in America as The Sorcerer’s Stone) and The Chamber of Secrets, reverted to that sure-fire formula for success of going back to the future, with movies that recreated the old-fashioned excitement of movieland’s melodramatic past but repackaged it for modern audiences with the cutting-edge special effects of today. After all, that was the whole point of the books themselves, the secret of their success. And the movie realisation was exactly the kind of project that suited Rickman’s retro appeal, which harked back so effectively to a more glamorous age where silken villains prided themselves on a deadly wit and chutzpah.

  Yet some argued that Alan had not been showcased to his best advantage in Harry Potter, since he had to share screen space not just with Dame Maggie Smith, Richard Harris, Robbie Coltrane and Zoë Wanamaker but also myriad special effects of the kind that can blow a mere actor away. He had feared the same with his very first movie, Die Hard, but at least that had no fire-breathing dragons or hobgoblins hogging the limelight – only Bruce Willis.

  ‘There was no place for the actors to expand in the first Harry Potter film,’ complains Peter Barnes. ‘I thought they were terribly restricted. I gather that a lot of scenes had been cut, and it certainly gives that impression – particularly with Alan’s scenes. But that’s formula film-making at its peak, I suppose,’ he concludes, shrugging. ‘Painting by numbers.’ There’s no help for it, then, but to wait and see it as a series, judging the performances across all seven films.

  Other friends feared that, with the role of Severus Snape, Rickman had fallen into the trap of villainy again after years of resistance. But, as all fans of Harry Potter know, Snape, the Professor of Potions and head of Slytherin House at Hogwarts, is a classic red herring: a neurotic, irritable schoolmaster capable of petulance and viciousness but not, as it turns out, a malignant baddie. In other words, he’s not as black as his hair is painted, even though he does a very good job of putting the filmic frighteners on. Even so, Rickman had deliberated ‘for ever’, he later confided, about doing the film – until everyone he knew insisted that he ‘must’ do it. Why? Because it was an event, a phenomenon. Had he played that old vampire Voldemort, of course, he would have been locked into villainy forever.

  Yet, as soon as you see Snape on screen, the logic of Rickman playing him becomes apparent with the unmistakeable influence of an earlier incarnation of Rickmanesque deviousness: Obadiah Slope from The Barchester Chronicles, Alan’s first big success. The pasty face, the clerical look, the flapping black cloak, the sulky lips: it’s all there, bar the obvious contrast between Snape’s lank and sooty hair and Slope’s swept-back blond quiff. And how Slope-like are such lines as ‘I can teach you how to bewitch the mind and ensnare the senses’, delivered with Rickman’s usual menacing sibilance.

  From the very beginning, Rickman catches Snape’s vulnerability, despite the fact that the camera is up to its old tricks with him by shooting him up the nostrils in order to depict him at his most sinister. Snape seems frightened and uneasy in the presence of Harry, which puts him on the defensive: a classic passive-aggressive reaction. ‘I think at heart Snape is basically quite an insecure person,’ Alan later admitted. ‘He’s always longing to be something else that people will really respect, like a black magician – not just a schoolmaster. That’s why he envies the more popular and successful boys like Harry.’

  Snape, of course, does have the secret ambition to be a Professor of the Dark Arts, the source of all the dramatic tension in his character. And in Potter he enviously recognises the real thing: a genuine wizard garbed in grubby schoolboy attire. The legion of adult fans of Harry Potter will appreciate such nuances, but Rickman took care to put on a grandstand show for the tots as well. As J.K. Rowling described him, Snape had ‘greasy black hair, a hooked nose and sallow skin’. In other words, a pantomime villain on the page, but, with Rickman’s performance, a supercilious class act on screen; you certainly wouldn’t want to be kept in detention by him.

  That was not his only contribution; such is the collaborative medium of movie-making that everyone is encouraged to chip in with ideas, and Alan had not forgotten his art-school training. The thirteenth-century Lacock Abbey in Wiltshire was used by the design team as location interiors for Hogwarts, but other shots of the boarding school for young wizards bore a distinct resemblance to Woodchester Mansion in Glouceste
rshire as well: It was not a coincidence: Woodchester Mansion happens to be a special conservation project for Rickman’s old friend, the Cotswolds-based Stephen Davis, who has now persuaded the Prince of Wales to become its patron. ‘The Harry Potter people worked very hard to make the location of Hogwarts resemble our conservation project, which looks like a cliché of an abandoned Gothic mansion,’ confirms Davis.

  Despite his early misgivings and the fact that some of his scenes were cut, Rickman was firmly on board the Harry Potter rollercoaster. After finishing the Broadway run of Private Lives in September 2002, he went off to film the third Potter movie.

  In the meantime, Rickman had also kept up his commitment to indie film-making by starring alongside Michael Gambon and the model-turned-actress Sophie Dahl in a fifteen-minute silent film about theatre queues, Standing Room Only, which was released in 2002. But he was more in demand than ever, and yet another biggie beckoned: the latest romantic comedy from the award-winning Richard Curtis.

  The Four Weddings and a Funeral screenwriter was making his directing debut with Love, Actually and taking no chances with his casting. Hugh Grant, Colin Firth, Rowan Atkinson and Liam Neeson were joined by Emma Thompson (reunited with Rickman to play his wife), Sharman Macdonald’s talented actress daughter Keira Knightley and that inveterate scene-stealer Bill Nighy for a shoot that began in September 2002.

  By 2002, Rickman had also formed a production company with the Australian actor Hugh Jackman, whom he had first met at the National Theatre back in 1998. Jackman, best known to movie-goers for his role in X-Men, had won over British audiences as a personable Curly in Trevor Nunn’s hit revival of Oklahoma!, while Rickman was starring in repertoire in the asp disaster on the same Olivier stage. The two men got on so well that when Jackman’s actress wife Deborra-Lee Furness made her directorial debut four years later with Standing Room Only, there was a part in it for Rickman as well as Jackman. Even the names seemed made for each other.

  Somerset Maugham’s The Moon And Sixpence was intended to be one of Rickman and Jackman’s first projects as co-producers, with a screenplay and direction by Christopher Hampton. It was planned that Rickman should take the lead in Maugham’s story of a stockbroker who deserted wife and country to become a painter in the South Seas. But, although Hampton was enthusiastically telling me in late 2002 that he thought the part was a potentially great one for Alan, the team found themselves bogged down in tortuous negotiations for the rights from the Maugham estate. The dual role of an actor-producer can be an immensely draining one, though it’s a route that more and more actors are opting to take. Yet, as Alan’s old friend Jenny Topper points out, ‘Acting alone has never truly been enough for Alan.’ And support from Rima, moral and otherwise, was going to prove vital in this new venture.

  In July of 2002, Rima had taken early retirement from academia at the age of 55 after a send-off from Kingston University that earned her a herogram tribute on its website. Inevitably, her early retirement meant that Rima and Alan could spend more time together. Friends were wondering whether she might join him in his new producing venture. So far, however, there are no signs of Rima, one of the few experts on applied microeconomics with acting experience, joining her partner in the movie-making business. ‘He does have this tendency towards the weaker sex,’ says one friend. ‘He does like to promote talented women; he’s always got a script by some female under his arm. But, although some people say that Rima grounds him, I think they ground each other; it’s pretty mutual.’

  ‘He really admires Rima’s mind,’ says another associate, Theresa Hickey, ‘perhaps because, through Rima, he can live a vicarious political life. Actors have multiple identities, not to mention multiple personalities.’ With Rima now confining her political ambitions to low-key local-government level, Alan can quietly support her political achievements without the spotlight constantly upon him. If she had been thrust on to the national stage as a Member of Parliament, it would have placed a great strain on a relationship that is based on discretion. And she remains devoted to him. In an interview with the Daily Mail in 1991, Alan described their life together without children as ‘like a trampoline . . . which gives a certain freedom.’

  His playwright friends in particular have strong views about what he should do next. Peter Barnes would like to see him doing more comedy, claiming fretfully that Alan ‘shies away from it’. Snoo Wilson thinks that the comic roles immortalise him: ‘When you have somebody like that who has great comic timing and can take a whole house of people with him, it’s like a good tennis serve. It comes from a fully integrated mind and body; it’s like being able to hypnotise. To be able to embody so many qualities and to be funny as well raises the consciousness of audiences; it’s a truly great gift, I think. Comedy is a higher art form than tragedy.’

  Yet some will assume that he’s sold his soul to the devil again and opted to return to villainy if Snoo’s screenplay about Aleister Crowley ever gets made with Alan in the lead. ‘Alan agreed to lend his name to my script in the early 90s – in other words, he’s interested in playing the role,’ says Snoo. ‘You can then wave that at producers. But I want to do it with Alan because he would understand the comedy of it: the part of Crowley is written as somebody who enjoys being awful and has a wicked sense of humour, who enjoys his role as someone who’s vilified in the press as the wickedest man in Britain. I wrote it because Crowley’s era is an interesting prism through which to look at us; it was the dawn of psychedelia. I think Alan is a supreme comic actor who can add psychological depth even to Coward, which is quite something.’

  Though he can be a curmudgeonly bugger, it says a lot for Rickman that so many of his friends have had such big plans for him: to be a great villain, to be a great comedian, to run a company. Indeed, it’s surprising that Alan has not shown any signs of wanting to run another, more manageable theatre than the Riverside arts centre. For someone with such decided opinions on every aspect of his business, he remains remarkably elusive and hard to pin down. It’s as if, like Colonel Brandon, he simply aims to be a good influence in the background. One can’t help thinking that it’s a substitute for a family.

  Sir John Gielgud always reacted with a certain amount of giggly horror at the thought of younger actors grovelling at his feet and asking his advice ‘as if I were some terrible old Dalai Lama’. Alan Rickman seems to have no such qualms.

  ‘I would hope that one day Alan would be in charge of a company. He’s very much a leader of men and women. He has astonishing leadership and spokesman qualities. He has passionate views on subjects and issues: training, the subsidy of theatre, new young actors,’ adds Peter James, who asked Alan to address his students at LAMDA in 1995.

  Peter wanted a level-headed guide and mentor who would not give them false hopes, but who would still be successful and glamorous enough to be inspirational. ‘That’s what makes him a great role model: he’s a thinking actor. He’s being offered parts that take him into the stratosphere, yet he’s still asking serious questions.

  ‘He thinks not only about the profession he’s in but the political life of the nation. He applies a very strict criterion to what he accepts. His Labour Party commitment is part of a much broader world view; he’s concerned with good quality offered to the public. Many actors think “I’d like to do posh work, not pap”, but with Alan, there’s a moral view about what the public should be sold. It’s rather like the Fabian view, although he’s not old-fashioned. It’s a view about what you offer young people. We share an anxiety about the deregulated free market, whether that can deliver.

  ‘He’s anxious about doing quality work,’ concludes Peter, who talks about modern standards of ‘junk’ education and worries that his students haven’t read enough classic texts before they arrive at LAMDA. As with all teachers these days, he’s even seriously concerned about standards of literacy.

  ‘Someone like Alan, who takes his work seriously, is a person of tremendous value to students. We have similar backgrounds: I
came from the working-classes. My father was a casual racist at first, thinking that black people jumped council-house queues and all that stuff. Then he met my black geography teacher who was an absolute charmer. The two of them got on like a house on fire after that.’

  Peter believes that Rickman could have been just as successful as a designer. ‘He has a wonderful taste in clothes and design. He could equally well have gone in that direction: he has an expertise in all that,’ points out Peter.

  ‘He has an elegant, unmistakable face and frame. He is not a chameleon actor, because he is very noticeable. It seemed to me that Mesmer was the next step, and I’m very sad it didn’t appear to have worked out.’

  ‘He hates to be pigeonholed,’ says Blanche Marvin. ‘He’s much more an Alec Guinness than a Laurence Olivier, and there has been no set pattern to Alec’s career.’

  As for the charismatic villains, Dusty Hughes never saw them as part of Alan’s long-term game-plan. ‘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. His dignity on stage will become an enormous force.

  ‘Perhaps he’s too intellectual to be an actor,’ hazards Dusty. ‘It’s terribly hard if you are that. A lot of directors are serious charlatans. Any director who is like that doesn’t want to meet Alan, who could eat you for breakfast. But he’s never unpleasant. He’s always even-tempered: I’ve never known him lose his temper. Some directors get by on a lot of bullshit. They are all control freaks; I suppose Alan is a bit of a one himself, though he’s low down on my list of control freaks. He’s a very strong personality and identity, a very likeable one.’

  Stephen Poliakoff has argued that he ‘needs a part that Mesmer was obviously meant to be. Like Anthony Hopkins with Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs. Alan is the actor closest to Paul Scofield: that worn but urbane and weathered world-weariness. Scofield made it with the role of Sir Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons.