I interviewed Alan Rickman over the telephone in 1982 for a feature in the Daily Express on his performance as the oleaginous supercreep Obadiah Slope in The Barchester Chronicles. This breakthrough role introduced him to millions and made women, in particular, aware of his perverse sexiness. In that role, he sulked for Britain. He sounded suspicious to the point of hostility until I started inserting a few jokes about Slope into the conversation to lighten the atmosphere. I could almost hear the Titanic-sized iceberg slowly cracking up and defrosting at the other end of the line as the voice relaxed.
Given that he was playing a woman-chaser with such slithery conviction, questions about his own domestic set-up seemed justifiable, especially since he had managed to reach the age of 36 without the ritual march to the altar. In appropriately churlish Slope mode, Alan refused to discuss his private life. Later, someone told me that he had lived with the same woman for a long time. Just how long, not even their best friends knew.
I was subsequently to discover that Rima Horton and Alan Rickman have been together since the mid-60s, an impressive record by any standards whether in or out of wedlock. He met Rima, a labourer’s daughter who became an economist and politician, at Chelsea College of Art in 1965. They appeared on stage in various amateur productions when he was nineteen and she was a year younger. That early shared interest plus his exact age – Alan is as vain as the next man – and his second name of Sidney were his most closely-guarded secrets. Not even Rima’s friends knew that she was once an actress in the dreaded Ham Dram; perhaps she is too embarrassed to mention it in the same breath as Alan’s career.
They are considered to have one of the strongest relationships in the business despite – or perhaps because of – the absence of children. It has survived the setting up of separate flats, when Alan decided he needed his own space and moved out of Rima’s apartment to buy a maisonette.
Though the decision alarmed all their friends for quite a while, the arrangement seems to suit them both. So far they are as solid as ever. If he is a pessimist, she is an optimist. ‘Rima has a very sunny nature, she’s very pragmatic with her feet on the ground,’ says Peter Barnes. ‘It helps that she’s not in the profession herself, a great help.’ Espousing the easy-go attitudes of the 60s, they have never bothered to get married. Who needs a ring for commitment? Yet Peter Barnes, Alan’s oldest friend after Rima, told me when I met up with him again over a plate of oysters in August 2002 that he had a gut feeling Alan and Rima would suddenly surprise everyone and tie the knot one day after all. ‘I’m expecting their marriage to happen; it’s the old romantic in me. And as he goes up the aisle, I shall be laughing madly,’ Peter added fondly. Such steadfastness is remarkable in Rickman’s peripatetic profession, since he necessarily spends much of his time abroad on location. ‘Rima and Alan are like-minded people – it’s a common-law marriage of true minds,’ says the playwright Stephen Davis. ‘They were once in CND together. They argue a lot about politics.’ Indeed, a fervent political discussion is their idea of a good night in.
Alan has acknowledged that the reason for their relationship’s longevity is that Rima is ‘tolerant. She’s incredibly, unbelievably tolerant. Possibly a candidate for sainthood.’ And why, pray, does she need to be so tolerant? ‘Because I’m an actor,’ he added, only too aware of the self-obsession and insecurity that his profession breeds. ‘I’ve never learned that trick of leaving business behind in the rehearsal room; I bring all problems home, I brood. But Rima just laughs and goes straight to the heart of the matter. No matter what problems she has, she puts her head on the pillow and goes straight to sleep.’ Sounds like the perfect personality for politics, an arena where only the calm (or thick-skinned) survive. Actors, on the other hand, can, and certainly do, use their neuroses in their work. As the film director Mike Newell was later to say: ‘Alan is neurotic but intense, incredibly focused and authoritative as an actor. All his insecurities as a person are completely healed by acting.’
Certainly it was impossible to imagine the mean-spirited, calculating Slope, forever in pursuit of rich widows and richer livings, as having a stable home life. Obadiah was anybody’s, if they were wealthy enough. But Alan’s remote air gives him an unattainable quality, which makes him a challenge; hence the intense female interest in him.
As the theatrical agent Sheridan Fitzgerald, his former leading lady at the RSC, remarks: ‘Women are always falling in love with the unattainable.’
‘Alan’s too serious to be flirtatious,’ says Jules Wright. ‘He’s not aware of his attractiveness, which of course is what makes him really sexy on stage. He’s very grunge to look at in his private life, he doesn’t run around flashily at the Ivy,’ she adds, referring to the famous showbusiness restaurant in London’s West End.
Rickman slops around in blue jeans and polytechnic-lecturer jackets in real life, looking deliberately downbeat. With his hair brushed forward over his forehead, he is almost unrecognisable. There are times when he looks as if he shops at Oxfam, although Peter Barnes, whose only sartorial concession to his own success has been to grow a beard, playfully points out that ‘if he dresses down, he dresses down very expensively these days. But he’s more or less the same Alan.’
‘You won’t find Alan guzzling champagne in some nightclub or driving a fast car,’ says another friend, drama-school principal Peter James. ‘He’s like Bob Geldof – scruffy, yet asking serious questions.’
The forces of political correctness maketh the New Man, of course, and actor Christopher Biggins has the feeling that Alan is ‘. . . snobby. I often see him at dos and I think he looks like a maths teacher. He comes across as a sexual animal; you feel he’s going to be brilliant in bed. But you wouldn’t think he’s an actor. There’s no reaction. No sense of humour. Of course, he may be very, very nervous.’
(And with Mr Biggins – who has quite an edge to him under that jovial exterior – glowering at the apparent reincarnation of his least favourite teacher, who can blame him? But Biggins was right about the sexual aura, if a later remark by Rickman himself is anything to go by. ‘Sitting around a table with good friends, some sympathy, nice wine, good talk, what could be better than that? Except sex? Or getting it right on stage,’ he said, leaving us in little doubt how highly he placed sex as a priority. Because Rickman would never include any other leisure activity in the same order of importance as stage acting without meaning exactly what he said.)
‘There is a chip on the shoulder. It doesn’t surprise me that he was brought up on a council estate; so was I. But you either have a chip or you deal with it,’ says Christopher, who makes no bones about being a true-blue Tory. ‘These champagne socialists are very odd. I have a feeling that Alan surrounds himself with a close circle who are very protective. Some people don’t want fame. They like it; but they don’t want it,’ he adds shrewdly.
Rickman’s first property purchase back in 1989 was a spacious maisonette, part of an elegant Italianate terrace of Victorian houses in west London’s fashionable Westbourne Grove. In 2001, he sold up and moved on to an even larger flat nearby. When he can, he pops over to France to a holiday cottage.
Until his mother’s death in 1997, he lived just three tube stops away from her neat council house, only a few streets from Wormwood Scrubs prison with a bingo palace, DIY superstore and snooker hall nearby. His mother and younger brother Michael bought this trim semi-detached home together under the Right To Buy scheme introduced by the Tories and deplored by all Old Labourites. Alan visited her regularly; he has always had a good relationship with his family, even though he keeps those two worlds separate most of the time.
Though he would always see his mother, he seems to find it diffficult to come to terms with his background, to fit his family into his life as an actor.
His elder brother, David, works for a graphic design company and Michael is a professional tennis coach. They live quiet and modest lives far away from showbusiness circles, though they get on well with the famous member of the
family.
‘Class has been a bizarre accident that happened to Alan,’ observes Stephen Davis. ‘We were the post-Beatles generation: we invented ourselves. Alan’s background is a major influence on him, though. He moves in a privileged world but refuses to forget his past. He wants to be sure that he’s not confused in his own shaving mirror about who he is.’
Peter Barnes has a different perspective: ‘My own feeling is that Alan has created himself. The persona has created him; the mask becomes the face. His family look very different. Actors have created themselves, they know exactly who they are. I haven’t got the same confidence he’s got on the phone, but then everyone recognises his voice because most actors have distinctive voices. Whereas I always feel I have to introduce myself by saying, “It’s Peter, Peter Barnes.”’
Another friend, Blanche Marvin, agrees: ‘Alan likes to feel he’s his own creation.’ In other words, this fiercely independent man won’t be beholden to anyone.
In some ways Rickman is a man born out of his time: there’s a dark and disturbing retro glamour about this saturnine actor that really fires up an audience’s imagination.
He’s the antithesis of the bland boy-next-door with an Everyman persona, with whose unthreatening ordinariness millions of movie-goers will identify. And costume roles particularly suit Rickman because of that air of patrician superiority. It goes with the sometimes frightening looks that recall a well-known portrait of the writer, scholar and intriguer Francis Bacon whose unblinking gaze was once likened by a contemporary observer to the stare of a watchful viper.
In an age that lets it all hang out, Rickman is famous for giving audiences more fun with his clothes on. And this despite the fact that, back in 1983, he let it all hang out in a nude scene for Snoo Wilson’s play The Grass Widow, later recalling, ‘It was a very strange thing to do. You have to pretend that it’s not happening to you.’ Because of that very public early lesson in the vulnerability of standing on stage with no clothes on, he is a past-master at portraying the art of sensual anticipation and sexual control. In fact, Rickman’s Valmont, a role for which he seemed to have been waiting all his life, was carefully based on a seventeenth-century rake he had played on stage with the disconcerting name of Gayman.
‘He looks like a Russian Borzoi dog, one of those silent wolfhounds with a long neck and silky white coat. You always wonder whether you should speak to a Borzoi, as well . . .’ says Peter James. ‘It’s his frame and physical look, a quality of stillness. It reminds me of some astonishingly aristocratic faces I saw in Russia, who looked as if they came from a different race.’ How appropriate, then, that he should later take on the role of Rasputin.
Yet, for all his air of seigneurial self-control, he has big vulnerabilities. Alan was born with a tight jaw, hence the slightly muffled drawl: it must be one of the sexiest speech defects in the business. ‘He doesn’t have an active up-and-down movement of his jaw,’ says Blanche Marvin, a former drama teacher.
‘It’s the way that he’s generally physically co-ordinated: he has a lazy physical movement and a lazy facial movement. He’s big-boned, and it’s hard for him to move in a sprightly way.’ Hence his lifetime’s obsession with trying to move with the fluidity of a Fred Astaire.
Despite the working-class upbringing, that honeyed-buzzsaw voice was perfected at private school: Latymer Upper in Hammersmith, also Hugh Grant’s Alma Mater.
Rickman, a clever child, won a scholarship there at the age of eleven. The process of reinventing himself, of keeping his past at arm’s length, began as English teacher Colin Turner became his mentor, much as the playwright Ben Jonson, stepson of a bricklayer, was ‘adopted’ by his teacher Camden. Alan was only eight when his father died of cancer, and Turner filled that gap in his life.
Latymer Upper has been almost as great an influence upon his life as Rima continues to be. He is emotionally attached to the place that gave him such a superior start.
In the autumn of 1995, this former star pupil had a minor falling-out with his old school when he refused to allow his photograph to be used in a recruitment drive. His political convictions simply wouldn’t allow him to publicly endorse a private, fee-paying education. Rickman melodramatically asserts that he was born ‘a card-carrying member of the Labour Party’, but he only finally joined in 1987 after he and Rima had enjoyed a relatively frivolous youth in CND.
Rumours attach themselves like barnacles to Alan Rickman, who is famously economical with the facts about himself. There was once a wild story that this friend of former Cabinet Minister Mo Mowlam and millionaire Labour supporter Ken Follett was a member of Vanessa and Corin Redgrave’s Workers’ Revolutionary Party. Yet Rickman is far too straight and astute to get involved with the lunatic fringe. He is an idealist, but he’s also startlingly pragmatic.
Rima, an economics lecturer at Kingston University (formerly Polytechnic) in Surrey, who took early retirement in 2002 at the age of 55, is a Labour councillor and former prospective parliamentary candidate for Chelsea, the safest Tory seat in the country . . . hence her defeat in the 1992 General Election.
She subsequently endured the indignity of losing another battle. Despite the fact she was selected as Labour’s candidate for the Mayoral elections in Kensington and Chelsea in 2001, friends now believe she is no longer looking for a safe Labour seat in Parliament but has forced herself to be philosophical. She still looks young enough to stand for election; Rima and Alan are a striking couple who could pass for a decade younger than they are. Not having had any children probably helps; so, too, does Rickman’s thick, dark-blond hair, which for years he wore slightly long.
It is Rima who dictates the political and intellectual agenda. This is borne out by Peter Barnes, who recalls Alan deferring to his girlfriend’s greater judgement when the two men met up at the funeral of the director Stuart Burge. After the service, Peter started raging on about the ‘iniquities’ of Tony Blair’s New Labour government, but Rickman refused to take the bait. ‘I’m very Old Labour and I think Alan is. At least, I hope he is. But he got very defensive at that point,’ remembers Peter, ‘and said that it was more Rima’s area.’ Alan, who graduated from two art colleges with diplomas in art, design and graphic design, is the creative one; Rima is the academic one of the two.
Rickman is very far from being the humourless grouch that his famously cross-looking demeanour suggests. Always droll, he has mellowed a lot over the years as success has given him more confidence. His sense of humour alone would have kept him out of the paranoid ranks of the WRP, which seemed to expend most of its energies on slagging off other far-Left groups.
‘He’s a bit of a Wellington with his ironic bon mots and his raised eyebrows,’ says Stephen Poliakoff. ‘He’s self-critical and he doesn’t have a naturally sunny disposition. But he’s very life-enhancing, despite the pessimism: it’s a curious combination. People find his dangerous wit attractive. He’s quite lugubrious, but he’s also quite teasable. Some people find him intimidating, but he just has to be provoked out of a pessimistic view of the world.
‘Acting is very serious for him, but he’s more relaxed now. He loves to talk. He likes to feel things are controlled; he doesn’t like to feel too exposed.’
In his fifth decade, at times Rickman resembles the late Frankie Howerd, especially when his large, crumpled face is split by a great pumpkin-head grin.
One of the more endearing aspects of Alan Rickman, who is not an immediately cuddly person, is that he has never bothered to get his crooked and discoloured bottom teeth fixed. When he became a Hollywood star at a relatively late age, it didn’t go to his head (or his teeth).
‘He was never one of the lads,’ according to his old friend, the theatre producer Patrick (Paddy) Wilson. Alan has no interest in the stereotypical male pursuits of pubs and sports, hence his vast number of close female friends.
‘New writing and politics are his life. He has no car, no interest in sport,’ says Peter Barnes, although Alan watches Wimbledon ou
t of loyalty to his tennis-coach brother Michael. ‘He’s interested in politics and the wider world,’ says Stephen Poliakoff.
All this may make him sound like the career woman’s ideal consort, yet he surprisingly admits that he had to have male feminism knocked into him; he was once a primitive model.
Now, surrounded by a seraglio that includes the actresses Juliet Stevenson and Harriet Walter, the comedienne Ruby Wax and the impresario Thelma Holt, he is everyone’s theatrical agony uncle. ‘He’s got the widest circle of friends and acquaintances I have ever known,’ says Peter Barnes. ‘In the theatre, he unites opposites – because he knows so many people.’
‘The only person I know who has more friends than him is Simon Callow,’ says Jenny Topper, Artistic Director of London’s Hampstead Theatre and a friend of Alan’s since 1981.
‘It feels nice to be around him. He has a very loyal group of female friends: not a harem, but very intense. Alan is very loyal, very protective and very kind. He has strong views. He listens: he has that concentration, hence the female friends. He’s also very proper: he cares about fans at the stage door and those who seek his advice and support.
‘That gliding movement of his is almost balletic,’ adds Jenny of the man who would be Fred Astaire. ‘He’s a great comic actor: the secret is timing. But his humour is very dry: he doesn’t suffer fools gladly.’
‘I associate him with complete integrity,’ says Harriet Walter. ‘He is a central figure in a lot of people’s lives. He’s not a guru as such; I don’t think of him as a saintly, priestly person. It’s not all grovelling at the feet of the effigy. He just makes you laugh. He’s like a good parent . . . there’s a feeling that Alan won’t let you get away with things.
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