Alan Rickman

by Maureen Paton

  At Leeds, the Guardian’s Michael Billington called it ‘a haunting, elliptical play about unresolved lives, beautifully directed by Alan Rickman’. Alastair Macaulay of the Financial Times thought ‘Rickman shows considerable skill as a director, not least in pacing. Nothing rings false’.

  Charles Spencer in the Daily Telegraph felt: ‘Macdonald’s great gift is the ability to persuade an audience that it isn’t watching a play but rather the random, remarkable flow of life itself . . . beautifully drawn characters have come to seem like familiar friends by the end of Alan Rickman’s superbly acted production.’

  The design was so effective at creating an icy seaside-town setting on the West Coast of Scotland that it took me back to marrow-freezing childhood holidays on bleak pebbly beaches in Montrose . . . as Mark Twain said of a summer in San Francisco, ‘the coldest winter I ever spent’. Rickman and his designer Robin Don communicated wordlessly by sending each other sketches.

  When it opened in London two months later in March, my Daily Express review praised ‘the beautifully fluid production that dips in and out of four different couples’ lives in an almost cinematic way’. Jack Tinker in the Daily Mail wrote: ‘Alan Rickman directs with an unerring sense of place and occasion . . . An evening of magnetic and haunting charm.’ And Clive Hirshhorn of the Sunday Express called ‘this nostalgic tone poem . . . an unflashy little gem’.

  Benedict Nightingale’s Times review was equally impressed: ‘This is a funny, touching, rather beautiful play: in the most literal sense, a haunting piece of writing.’ Yes, we were all beautifully spooked and transported.

  Poor Rickman then sat and waited for the directing offers to pour in, as opposed to the acting offers that must have given his postman Repetitive Strain Injury from the weight of the scripts. ‘We were having lunch at my usual table at the Café Pelican in St Martin’s Lane and Alan was moaning that no one had asked him to direct again after The Winter Guest,’ remembers Peter Barnes. ‘I said, “Alan, don’t you realise that people have pigeon-holed you as an actor? They want to see you in front of the camera, not behind it!”’ Barnes adds, with some sympathy, ‘It’s very difficult for actors to become directors; I can think of only three or four who have pulled it off in the past.’ Yet he can see only too clearly why Rickman longs to do more directing in order to be in greater control of his career. ‘As an actor, you can only do what you’re offered. And one of the big dilemmas for any actor working in the movies is, do you actually make every film that’s offered to you if you’re free and the script doesn’t actually offend you, or do you select the scripts?’ says Peter. ‘Both decisions bring with them certain drawbacks: either you become a hack or, if you select, there are great gaps in your career. And there’s never any guarantee that a film is going to be good; you are in the hands of the director and the cast and a script that may seem good but which goes down the tubes suddenly. The problem is that you might have good instincts about a script, but there’s an awful long gap between the written word and the realisation on screen. Alan is intuitively good at selecting, but no one ever knows how things will work out. It’s a dilemma for intelligent actors.’

  ‘If Alan wanted to direct more, he could,’ insists Adrian Noble. ‘I don’t think he’s pining to be a director at all.’ And he recalls his 1985 RSC production of As You Like It, with Alan so perfectly cast as the Forest of Arden’s dandified drop-out Jaques. ‘You can’t be a Jaques type as a director, you have got to be Duke Senior. You have to say “We have to leave the forest today.” You don’t dally with being a director.’

  Perhaps, then, there really is a hint of Jaques the intellectual dilettante about Alan Rickman. He finds it hard to stay in one place for long: he once told the journalist Valerie Grove in Harpers & Queen magazine that he liked to present ‘a moving target’. Hence all the obsessive travel, never happier than when on trains and boats and planes, from one film location to another.

  ‘Alan has a terrific visual sense; he gets cross about designs sometimes. He endlessly goes on about design not happening till rehearsals begin,’ adds Noble. ‘In fact that happened with our design for As You Like It, which didn’t materialise until six weeks after rehearsals started. And it was awful.

  ‘He is a fantastic collaborator: he has a peculiar blend of terrific analytical skill plus improvisational or group effort. He has a strong visual sense, and a sense of the function of theatre. But being pernickety is an actor’s prerogative, of an intelligent human being. Alan is careful.’

  Rickman even hoped that he could turn The Winter Guest into a movie, perhaps encouraged by the critical use of the word ‘cinematic’. His big ambition was to direct on screen, and he had talks in Los Angeles with his old friend Niki Marvin over possible ideas.

  But the general consensus on The Winter Guest was that this was a fragile tone poem unsuited to the wide sweep of cinema. That didn’t stop him from directing a film version in late 1996, however, with Phyllida Law and Emma Thompson.

  He certainly loved the change of pace in directing on stage. ‘He has a wicked sense of humour, and he had a brilliant relationship with the younger members of cast,’ says an Almeida Theatre worker. ‘He behaves like a born father; I’m surprised he hasn’t got children of his own. But he’s not into small talk. He’s not frightening exactly, though he could be. He knows exactly what he wants.

  ‘When I first saw him, I was surprised that he hadn’t done anything about his teeth . . . But so many women are fascinated by him, my mother included.’

  Directing The Winter Guest was an obvious move, given his Riverside ambitions to spread the scope of his talent. He told Michael Owen in the London Evening Standard on 10 March 1995: ‘It’s been like bringing the two disciplines of art school and drama school – which were both my background – together for the first time. A complete pleasure, until you come to that moment when, as it should be, the play passes into the hands of the actors. Then I feel a bit of an intruder, the guy with the coffee cup who keeps interfering.’

  ‘It was a very important thing for him – even more than winning the BAFTA awards,’ says Stephen Poliakoff.

  When producer Niki Marvin’s film The Shawshank Redemption was nominated for eight awards in the 1995 Oscars, her mother Blanche asked Alan whether he was going to escort Niki to the ceremony in Los Angeles. He smiled but politely declined: ‘I’ll go when it’s my Oscar,’ he said with some determination.

  The pull of acting, however, was still too strong. Emma Thompson had just finished a screenplay for Jane Austen’s Sense And Sensibility, commissioned four years earlier after the film producer Lindsay Doran had seen a comedy sketch about two sexually unawakened Victorian ladies from Emma’s BBC TV series Thompson. At the time, Doran was working with Emma and her then husband Kenneth Branagh on the latter’s film noir Dead Again.

  It just so happened that Rickman had made another interesting little film noir called Murder, Obliquely for a 1993 American TV anthology under the series title of Fallen Angels. The play was eventually shown on British television’s BBC2 in 1995.

  One of the producers of Murder, Obliquely was Lindsay Doran; and the executive producer was the veteran Sydney Pollack. In a passably languid American accent, Rickman had played the part of the wealthy and enigmatic Dwight Billings, over whom Laura Dern’s heroine nearly lost her reason. Despite the knowing voice-over and the retro costumes, this stylish exercise was just the right side of camp; and Rickman also gave it a weird kind of rumpled integrity. He looked like a human being, not an idealised eligible bachelor with a dark secret.

  There was a hint of Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon about the melancholy anti-hero of Cornell Woolrich’s short story, set in the 40s (though, as usual, Alan Rickman’s hair lived in a different decade).

  Cleverly, the role added a sinister overlay to the familiar Rickman quality of sexual danger. There is a moment when the light hits Rickman’s left eye (the right one is coyly hidden behind a door), giving it a translucent, X-ray quality.
Only then does it suddenly seem feasible that this likeable, vulnerable man, who has been valiantly trying to piece together the fragments of his heart, might have murdered the bosomy trollop who broke it. And who called him Billie, to add insult to injury. The puckered lips, the tight smile, the abject eyes of a man who is a prisoner to jealousy . . . he plays, with some subtlety, a pitiable victim turned aggressor. There is a sting in this tale.

  And you realise he might just be asking Laura Dern to marry him at long last, after she’s given him more shameless encouragement than is strictly decent in a good girl, in order to provide himself with an alibi. Or just to kill her too, having acquired a taste for it. Even his butler Luther was slightly creepy.

  For their next project, Doran and Pollack wanted the same ‘brooding romanticism’ that they had also seen him deliver in Truly Madly Deeply.

  Sense And Sensibility controversially cast Alan Rickman as a doormat: the chivalrous, kindly and thoughtful middle-aged Colonel Brandon. It was dangerously close to playing a nonentity. Rickman was there to add gravitas to a cast led by Hugh Grant again, Thompson herself, rent-a-beau actor Greg Wise and newcomer Kate Winslet.

  Brandon is almost a feminine role in the traditional mode, in that he must sit back and possess himself in patience while he waits for Marianne, the flighty young girl of his dreams, to grow up and see sense. Eventually he gets his chance to play the hero when he leaps on his horse for a secret mission whose outcome drives the narrative along; but most of the time he’s lurking discreetly in the background like the proverbial good deed in a naughty world. If he were a woman, he would be knitting and doing good works; here he stoically cleans his gun as if his life depends on it. (Very Freudian.)

  To make a personality like this more than just a gentlemanly wimp represents a considerable challenge for an actor with edge; and no one has more edge than Alan Rickman.

  In the novel, Brandon is a rather shadowy figure; Jane Austen’s men exist only in relation to her women. In the Taiwanese director Ang Lee’s film, Rickman gave Brandon the intensity of a soul in torment.

  ‘He accepts the relationship between Marianne and Willoughby with great grace and dignity,’ said Rickman later, explaining his take on the man. ‘He doesn’t ever assume that Marianne will return his feelings, and he behaves like a perfect gentleman even while watching the woman he loves fall in love with another man.

  ‘Brandon carries a fair amount of mystery with him, because of a long-ago love affair that went very wrong. And he hasn’t formed any close relationships since. Brandon is a very compassionate and feeling person. He becomes Marianne’s anchor, allowing her to mature from a creature of many moods to a wise young woman. So my job, really, is to present a very steadfast image, the opposite of the more mercurial Willoughby.’

  Steadfast on screen, steadfast in life. What the screenplay doesn’t say – and Ang Lee ruthlessly cut out a melodramatic scene in which Brandon visits a fallen woman he once loved – Rickman expresses with his eloquent eyes. His face is puffy, middle-aged; at the age of 49, he’s playing a man that Thompson’s script says is 40 and Jane Austen described as 35. In truth, it gives him an extra dimension of vulnerability; and he immediately wins the sympathy vote.

  Austen baldly described Brandon as ‘the most eligible bachelor in the county . . . though his face was not handsome, his countenance was sensible’. At first Rickman seems distinctly uncomfortable in passive mode as the lovesick Brandon, magnetically drawn to Marianne.

  The film makes overt what the understated Austen style made covert. And the unfortunate goblin hat in outdoor scenes hardly helps: there are times when he’s in danger of looking like a nineteenth-century Diddyman.

  For the first time in his movie career, Rickman was having to sell simple virtue without making it sanctimonious or boring, although it was not the first time that he had played a victim. He couldn’t even take refuge in the kind of scathing humour shown by the satirically-minded ghost Jamie in Truly Madly Deeply. And he met his directorial Waterloo in Ang Lee, who is a great believer in the dictatorship of the director (as opposed to the proletariat).

  ‘He likes to participate in the movie-making process, does Alan,’ says Stephen Poliakoff. ‘He sees himself as a participant.’ Alan picked holes in the direction, as is his wont. Do birds fly? Do fish swim? There were reports that Lee immediately warned Rickman not to overact (he also told Emma Thompson not to look so old and Hugh Grant not to be nerdy). And it was back to school for the entire cast as they were set 75-page essays to write on the motivation of their characters. Why I think Colonel Brandon is one of the good guys . . . by Alan Rickman. Or words to that effect.

  There were dark mutterings of mutiny from Rickman, the most experienced film actor of all the principals, but nevertheless he picked up Ang Lee’s Best Director Golden Bear award for him at the Berlin Film Festival in February 1996. Clearly there were no hard feelings.

  Yet Colonel Brandon is such an insubstantial part on the page that anyone, frankly, would succumb to the temptation to overact in order to bring him to life. Rickman duly absorbed Ang Lee’s t’ai chi philosophy of less is more and settled into the rhythm of the strong-and-silent act with grace and authority.

  ‘It’s true that I asked Alan to write an essay on his character,’ Ang Lee told me. ‘Alan was able to bring out the tragic depth and hidden righteousness of Colonel Brandon to make him an attractive character.

  ‘I wouldn’t say that I “warned” Alan not to overact; one doesn’t “warn” British actors not to overact,’ he added humorously. ‘Instead I encouraged him to act less and make Colonel Brandon a genuine man. Alan Rickman is a brilliant performer. His portrayal of life as an actor is maybe too good to be true to modern life, yet brilliant is brilliant.

  ‘His voice possesses a musical quality that produces a lyrical line-delivery. He can read off a telephone book and make each entry sound important, special and attractive.

  ‘He possesses an outstanding look. His presence is so impressive, and so unlike the character portrayed in the novel, that at first I thought casting him would be a risk,’ the director admits. ‘Alan, however, downplayed the inherent passive and unattractive characteristics of the character, as suggested by the novel, to make his Colonel Brandon an attractive man; in essence, he gave a real boost to Austen’s character.’

  Neither was Rickman’s own directing experience an issue, according to Ang Lee. ‘Alan’s directing experience on stage has nothing to do with his performance as an actor,’ he explains. ‘Acting and directing aren’t related. As a director, you watch people. As an actor, you are watched. Though the two may co-exist in one person, they are definitely two different, separate creatures. I only know him as an actor.’

  In one of the most prolonged pieces of foreplay between an actor and the audience in the history of the cinema, it seems an age before Rickman’s slow-burn Brandon makes his move and eventually gets the girl. ‘He’s the sort of man that everyone speaks well of, and no one remembers to talk to,’ sneers Greg Wise as Brandon’s spiteful rival Willoughby at one point. That’s the one line which doesn’t ring true with this casting: on the contrary, Rickman’s Brandon has far too much presence to be ignored.

  Brandon’s air of mystery is second nature to Rickman; and he can also make the memory of grief still seem raw. ‘As Alan puts it,’ wrote Emma Thompson in Sense & Sensibility: The Diaries (published by Bloomsbury) on the making of the film, ‘it’s about a man thawing out after having been in a fridge for twenty years. The movement of blood and warmth back into unaccustomed veins is extremely painful.’

  Nevertheless, there are still flashes of Alan’s old asperity (i.e. attitude) here and there. Brandon stirs himself out of his lovesick reverie when he stares challengingly at Willoughby, with that curdled look of jealousy which Rickman does so well. There is also one early scene in which Brandon immediately endears himself to his lady love’s young sister by satisfying her curiosity about the mysteries of the East Indies. In the kind
of intimate gesture that is peculiar to Rickman, he leans forward and whispers sibilantly ‘The air is full of spices’ with one of his hot hisses. It’s a variation on the technique he uses to intimidate a screen enemy: far from being coldly aloof, he’s the ultimate in-your-face actor.

  Rickman’s on-set composure even discombobulated Emma Thompson, as her Diaries records. ‘Sometimes Alan reminds me of the owl in Beatrix Potter’s Squirrel Nutkin. If you took too many liberties with him, I’m sure he’d have your tail off in a trice.’ Since Old Brown the owl held the impertinent rodent by the tail in order to skin him alive, that’s quite a menacing role-model. You can even see a distinct physical resemblance to Rickman in Potter’s illustration of Old Brown’s narrow amber eyes.

  It was a remarkably apt analogy. She drew it after a sopping-wet Greg Wise had ‘bounded up to Alan and asked, with all his usual ebullience, how he was. Long pause, as Alan surveyed him through half-closed eyes from beneath a huge golfing umbrella. Then, “I’m dry.”’ Indeed, ‘dry’ just about sums him up.

  Thompson’s description of her own character Elinor – ‘a witty, Byronic control-freak’ – in fact fits Alan exactly. If you want romantic gravity, you reach for Rickman. As Emma gushed in a BBC2 documentary Sense And Sensibility: Behind The Scenes, ‘Colonel Brandon is the man of all our dreams: the wounded older man who’s a river of compassion and love and strength and honour and decency.’ For Ang Lee, ‘Colonel Brandon was the only solid man, the real man in the movie.’

  Thompson’s Diaries recalls how she and Alan talked seriously about the rigours of theatre over lunch in his trailer: ‘He was as much put off by two years in Les Liaisons as I was by fifteen months in Me And My Girl.’

  But much of the time on set, he earned his keep as the king of the wry one-liners. When Thompson’s co-star Kate Winslet complained, ‘Oh God, my knickers have gone up my arse,’ Alan’s reply was: ‘Ah: feminine mystique again.’