Alan Rickman

by Maureen Paton

  This exasperates all those who would like to see more of Rickman in what they say is his natural habitat on stage: ‘He is the most complete man of the theatre I know,’ insists his old RADA contemporary Stephen Crossley.

  ‘I ask Alan Rickman every year to rejoin the RSC; I ask him to name his parts,’ Adrian Noble told me in 1995. ‘But it’s difficult when you enter the film game to find the time; with film, it’s not only the actual filming that takes time, but the hanging around beforehand while they find the money.

  ‘Once you move into film seriously, it’s very hard to carve out the time to do more theatre. It’s much more risky – you stand to lose more.’

  Peter Barnes agrees. ‘It’s difficult to return after you leave the theatre, because theatre is hard. And you get more exposure in movies, so theatre becomes something you do only for yourself. I have always done movies to finance my theatre work. With theatre for actors, it’s very much a case of working for yourself.

  ‘He’s obsessed about not playing villains. I can understand why he doesn’t want to do them, but for a long career it’s pretty good to have a stand-by like that. You will never be too old to become a villain. He’s more a character star than a star star. And Gene Hackman doesn’t go out of fashion.

  ‘Alan turned down the Lytton Strachey role in Carrington before Jonathan Pryce was offered it. He’s since moaned to me about turning that down plus the role of the baddie Scar in Disney’s The Lion King, which then went to Jeremy Irons. He had second thoughts, but it was too late. He was too proud to admit it, when he should have done it.’

  Indeed, it’s tempting to conclude that Alan had his regrets only after Pryce and Irons were seen to have made such tremendous successes of Strachey and Scar; a dog-in-the-manger attitude is only human, after all. After much humming and haaing, Sir Anthony Hopkins finally agreed to play Richard Nixon on film only after director Oliver Stone craftily asked him what he thought of Gary Oldman for the role. ‘I think Alan is much better than Tony Hopkins, who has never been the same since he gave up drinking,’ is Peter’s opinion. ‘One doesn’t wish for artists to self-destruct, but in giving up one must be brutal and say they lose something.’

  ‘I certainly discussed the role of Lytton Strachey with him,’ says Christopher Hampton, writer and director of Carrington. ‘When he came with me to the screening, I think Alan was upset that he hadn’t taken it. He said, “Oh my God, what have I done!”’

  ‘He was also offered the role of Peron opposite Madonna in the movie version of Evita, which then went to Jonathan Pryce,’ says Barnes. At this rate, Pryce – yet another friend of Rickman’s – will be learning to read Alan’s fingerprint profile on every script he’s sent.

  ‘Alan was also told that he was second on the list after Anthony Hopkins to play Hannibal Lecter in Silence Of The Lambs. If Hopkins had decided not to do it, then Alan was the next choice,’ explains Peter.

  ‘The funny thing is, Alan said that that one couldn’t be turned down, that it would make him the biggest and most powerful star in Hollywood. It would have been a stellar leap. I think Alan would have been extraordinary, though I can’t understand why it didn’t go to Brian Cox – who played Hannibal Lecter originally in the film Manhunter.’

  Silence Of The Lambs did finally make Hopkins a British superstar in Hollywood. He won the Oscar for Best Actor and was also awarded a knighthood, though many felt that the Queen’s honours system should not have rewarded an actor for playing a serial killer who disposed of the bodies by eating them.

  Still, it was a testament to the sheer size of the part, which Hopkins seized with tremendous relish. ‘But it was a one-note performance,’ said one film critic in exasperation. One can only sadly speculate on the insidious power of Alan Rickman in the role.

  ‘I think Alan is much better than Tony Hopkins, who has never been the same since he gave up drinking,’ is Peter’s opinion. ‘One doesn’t wish for artists to self-destruct, but in giving up one must be brutal and say they lose something.’

  Some of the stories about the scripts on which Rickman has first refusal are almost farcical, though not particularly funny, of course, for the actors that unwittingly took his leavings. ‘In The Last Action Hero, the villain was played by Charles Dance. He agreed to it after seeing an early script. Then he happened to see a later script with the words “Alan Rickman” in brackets after the name of his character . . . !

  ‘Alan takes endless time to decide about which scripts to accept, goes through the whole Hamlet routine and cogitates for ever about whether to take a part,’ adds Barnes fondly. ‘He often rings up friends. He rang me up about playing Colonel Brandon in Emma Thompson’s film of Sense And Sensibility – he said to me, “The thing has got Hugh Grant in it.”

  ‘I think he was worried at the time about all the attention on Hugh Grant. Plus I have the impression they didn’t get on in An Awfully Big Adventure.’

  The director Mike Newell was a modestly successful film-maker who unexpectedly hit the jackpot with the low-budget British movie Four Weddings And A Funeral. It became the biggest-grossing UK film of all time and turned Hugh Grant into an international star, charmingly knock-kneed and sweetly stammering. The overgrown-boy-next-door image was, of course, far too good to be true. An over-tired Hugh sullied his escutcheon when his idea of in-car entertainment at the seedier end of Sunset Boulevard excited the prurient attention of the Los Angeles Police Department. The rest is mugshot history.

  Grant was signed up for Newell’s follow-up project, a screen version of Beryl Bainbridge’s story of a post-war Liverpool repertory theatre company and its struggles to stage a production of Peter Pan. The title, An Awfully Big Adventure, was a quote from a poignant line in J. M. Barrie’s play about the little boy who didn’t want to grow up: ‘To die will be an awfully big adventure.’

  By general critical consensus, the lightweight Grant was disastrously miscast as the manipulative and vitriolic theatre director with whom the naïve young heroine falls in love without realising that he is homosexual. (The word is not in her ken.)

  Not many people know, however, that Alan Rickman was offered the role of the waspish, cold-hearted Meredith first. The casting would have made a great deal of sense. ‘I asked Alan’s agent if it was the case that Alan doesn’t want to play villains,’ remembers Newell. ‘He said yes, that was the case, but that Alan would like to play the part of P. L. O’Hara instead.’

  O’Hara is the film’s equivalent of the cavalry, riding to the rescue of the heroine (and the movie itself) on an old Norton motorbike. Just when you feel the story couldn’t get more leaden, along comes Rickman to wake things up. The result is a broken-backed piece of work that is fascinating only for a few well-observed cameos and for yet another of Alan Rickman’s scene-stealing performances.

  ‘He is not a chameleon actor, because he is very noticeable,’ says Peter James, principal of the London drama school LAMDA. ‘It seemed to me that Mesmer was the next logical step for him. You can’t cast him in absolutely anything, although he’s managed to cover a surprising breadth of roles. But it would be very difficult for him to play a plumber. He looks so elegant, so aristocratic.’ As opposed to Kenneth Branagh, who is forever being told (despite the kings he has played) that he looks like a plumber. Both Ken and Alan come from similar backgrounds – if anything, Branagh’s origins are more bourgeois – yet you would never associate Rickman with the tradesman’s entrance.

  ‘God didn’t mean him to play small roles,’ is Newell’s classic observation. ‘But I don’t agree that he couldn’t play a plumber; he would just make you feel that the plumber was a leading part.

  ‘In theatrical terms, he’s absolutely a star. But on film he’s a leading actor, a great big leading actor who graces any film he’s in. He’s financially very useful because people feel easier about investing in a film he makes.

  ‘Alan feels he’s a leading actor; in the theatre, he’s allowed to play a huge range of parts. In Hollywood he playe
d villains before heroes, thus he has been typecast in villainy. That way he’s going to have a boring time; it limits him.

  ‘His villains are in fact warped tragic heroes. But he’s very canny, and doesn’t get that across in a wrong-headed way as some actors do. It’s difficult to get actors to play motiveless malignity; they want the devil to be understood, at least. On the contrary, I want to be satisfied in my villains, not for them to be understood!

  ‘Alan is pernickety sometimes; but then famous old actors like Ralph Richardson and Laurence Olivier were also pernickety about getting something absolutely right and pat. There is a sense of rhythm and fitness and being in the right place at the right time. But I had a harmonious relationship with him.

  ‘Affection is important to him,’ adds Newell. ‘He wants to have the sort of authority where people take advice from him. He’s a guru.’

  Newell denies the rumour that there was a rancorous atmosphere between Rickman and Grant on An Awfully Big Adventure; Hugh’s encounter with the prostitute Divine Brown was to occur later, duly recorded by Emma Thompson’s Diary (‘“All right for some,” I thought’) on the filming of Sense And Sensibility.

  Rickman and Grant are, however, completely different types, though Newell insists, ‘There was no coolness. But Alan does have a bit of Eeyore in him, though he would be puzzled if you pointed that out. It doesn’t strike him that he’s pessimistic.’

  The one thing Grant and Rickman indisputably do have in common, of course, is their invaluable early dramatic experience as Old Latymerians. Hugh was also taught English and Drama by Alan’s old mentor, Colin Turner, and appeared in many school productions during the 70s. In 2001, Latymer Upper’s Head of Middle School Chris Hammond was invited to a party at Mel Smith’s London house where he found Alan Rickman and Hugh Grant reminiscing together about their days at Latymer, all rivalry between the first choice and second choice for the male lead in An Awfully Big Adventure apparently long forgotten.

  Given his aversion to yet more screen villainy, it’s rather amusing to see Rickman briefly donning the mantle of a black-hearted fiend when P.L. O’Hara plays Captain Hook in Peter Pan with Hugh Grant’s Meredith taking over after O’Hara is drowned. There is no comparison between the two performances. O’Hara is also an intriguing mixture of hero and villain in his own right, befriending and sexually awakening the heroine without realising – until the devastating finale – that he is in fact seducing his own long-lost daughter. Both Meredith and O’Hara are seducers of the young and innocent; and when O’Hara tries to upbraid Meredith for his treatment of a youth, he is fatally compromised by his own cavalier behaviour.

  ‘There was a big difference in the two voices for Captain Hook,’ Newell admits. ‘Hugh had a thin tenor and Alan a great booming, baritone voice. It’s the difference between a film actor and a stage actor, because Alan is very much a theatre animal.

  ‘Alan is very ambiguous and enigmatic, very powerful. He stands still, which reinforces the enigma. He’s a calm actor rather than a tumultuous one; everything seems to come from a very deep and solid place. You are constantly invited further and further in, so you find yourself suckered in.

  ‘He’s what is known as a backfoot actor, with tremendous weight and talent. He would have been fairly obvious casting as Meredith; he would have been magnificent. He’s very difficult to miscast, because he hides everything.

  ‘I do regret not being able to go into O’Hara’s previous history before he was presented in the film. I wished I had actually shown his failed life as an actor, his cramped Maida Vale flat.’ In the event, however, the sad cast of Rickman’s haggard face said it all.

  ‘It was a great moment of revelation for Alan at the end of the film when O’Hara realises that he’s the father of Stella, the girl he’s seduced. He played the version without words; we had two versions. He said to me, “I know what you’re going to ask me, to do it without words.” And of course he had this amazing eloquence without words.

  ‘We used a Norton motorbike – the biggest bike we could get hold of, 450 cc or 500 cc. I wanted something truly huge, but this was the biggest, meanest bike the English made in those days. He rode the machine for 20 to 30 yards, then a stuntman took over. You are not supposed to notice the join.

  ‘An old bike like that is a cranky thing, and I was concerned about Alan breaking bones. I was very unhappy about him half-learning to ride it. I remember one time that it wasn’t quite in control. But he was very game.

  ‘As for the death scene, he fell just nine inches into the water; we showed the cast-iron wheel hitting his head, but in fact it was foam rubber. The sound effects did the rest.’

  An Awfully Big Adventure contained Rickman’s first film sex scene, with P. L. O’Hara and Georgina Cates’s Stella both naked from the waist up for an unusually delicate and tenderly erotic deflowering of a virgin. We see a back view of Rickman, bending over her in bed: he might have been her tutor.

  He certainly fitted Bainbridge’s description of O’Hara in the original novel: ‘in profile, the man appeared haughty, contemptuous almost.’ O’Hara clings to the rags and tatters of a thing he once called integrity, but the character is so tarnished by his equivocal relationship with Stella – partly paternalistic, partly predatory – that only Rickman’s strong and complex presence ensures he retains our sympathy. O’Hara’s doubts and misgivings are evident throughout.

  Charles Wood’s screenplay was far too episodic to maintain a strong narrative, and most viewers will have been either bored or confused or both. An Awfully Big Adventure was a cinematic flop, going quickly to video.

  So much for the dream team of Newell and Grant, with only Rickman and a few other stalwarts – Alun Armstrong as Stella’s uncle, Prunella Scales, Nicola Pagett and Carol Drinkwater – emerging with much credibility.

  Mike Newell says, rather cruelly under the circumstances, that for the supporting cast of An Awfully Big Adventure, ‘I wanted people who were over the hill or about to be over the hill’. And Alan himself admitted in a location interview on Barry Norman’s Film 95: ‘It’s a strange film to be doing in a way, a bit like being a vulture on your own flesh . . . we have actors playing actors, using a stage for a film set and using our own lives as raw material. Georgina is remarkable . . . she claims to be seventeen but I’m going to put it out that she’s forty-three.’

  He reminisced about his own days in rep: ‘I had to haul up my own cross because I was Inquisitor and ASM at the same time for a production of Shaw’s St Joan. And then I had to put the kettle on. Everyone’s memories of rep have that kind of mixture – pleasure and pain.’

  There is precious little pleasure in An Awfully Big Adventure, compared with much pain and cynical back-biting, led by a hard-boiled Nicola Pagett and a jaded Carol Drinkwater.

  The theme of lost innocence – pace Peter Pan – is brusquely handled in a relentlessly downbeat and depressing setting that should at least dissuade a few cross-eyed daughters of Mrs Worthington from following a hard life on the wicked stage.

  It’s hard to care about anyone, not least the coldly self-contained young heroine Stella. Little wonder that An Awfully Big Adventure failed to catch fire at the box office, with most people attracted only by the names of Hugh Grant and Alan Rickman.

  Variety magazine loathed it, calling the film ‘a dour, anti-sentimental coming-of-age story . . . a rather disagreeable look at the irresponsible and corrupting behaviour of adults toward youthful proteges’. Austerity Britain, indeed.

  Rickman’s character was a misfit in more ways than one: he looked anachronistically modern, with a blond bob that inspired a catty story in the London Evening Standard about shipments of hair gel to the location in Dublin (there wasn’t enough of pre-war Liverpool left to shoot there).

  This unglamorous evocation of his theatrical beginnings fired him up to go back to the stage with a long-held ambition. After one or two forays as a director, he wanted to flex his controlling muscles again. Ruby’s one-woma
n show had been really a matter of editing.

  Rickman wanted to join the grown-ups and direct a proper drama, specifically Sharman Macdonald’s The Winter Guest – a project that had been thwarted by the failure of his Riverside bid. Even so, for someone who gives the impression of being the epitome of self-control, he was still oddly uncertain about his own capabilities. ‘When he wasn’t sure if he could do The Winter Guest, he asked me to look at it with a view to me doing it,’ says Richard Wilson. ‘And while he was directing it, he said to me, “Your name is mentioned often.”

  ‘But you always felt Alan should become a director – I’m surprised it took him so long. Alan is always being sought after for his advice. He gives it freely. I have asked him things too; he is a sort of guru.

  ‘He does go along to an enormous number of productions. He’s very supportive of friends who haven’t worked for a while, giving encouragement to them during bad spells. Now he’s a movie star, it doesn’t prevent him going to Fringe shows. And there’s no reason why it should.

  ‘My feeling is he would want to do both: act and direct. It’s nice to be able to think about your role and forget everyone else as an actor, because directing is tough. But I would be surprised if he ever left the theatre.’

  For a Fringe salary of less than £200 a week, Rickman premièred The Winter Guest at West Yorkshire Playhouse in January 1995. A co-production with London’s fashionable Almeida Theatre, it starred Emma Thompson’s actress mother Phyllida Law. The play had come about through conversations between Alan and his old Les Liaisons co-star Lindsay Duncan. Back in the late 80s, Lindsay would visit her mother, a widow who had become seriously ill with Alzheimer’s disease, in a seaside town on the west coast of Scotland. Not that it was all gloom and doom: when they got together, there was much laughter and mutual comfort. From Duncan’s stories, Rickman gradually realised there was the genesis of a mother–daughter play in this; and who better than his old discovery to depict that most intense of all family relationships? Poignantly, Duncan’s mother, to whom the film was dedicated, died while Sharman was writing the play whose very title referred to winter’s most reliable visitor: Death.