‘I was surprised that he took Rasputin after all; at one stage it had fallen through, and then it was on again. He did say that he wouldn’t play any more villains, but it’s difficult for actors of his age to get the lead role in films.
‘He needs a really good part in the middle of a large film. If he gets that, he could have a career like Anthony Hopkins. Does Alan want that? I don’t know. It’s unusual for actors to get as successful as late as that.’
It’s canny of Poliakoff to question whether Rickman does want all that, because he’s still undecided. He has not quite sorted out his attitude towards the fame game.
On the one hand, he’s certainly not a self-publicist like the comedienne who was ‘on’ for the entire length of a Tube train journey I shared with her. On the other hand, no one wants to be ignored, especially if your face is your fortune.
A female friend tells the story of how they were both in a shop, and Alan was not recognised by the staff. He took care to say goodbye with elaborate politeness. That was his usual manner, of course, but she did wonder whether he was just a little piqued at not being spotted and wanted to give them a second chance to realise who he was. That could have been unjust to him, of course . . . he’s a kind man.
‘Writers don’t have the visual currency of actors,’ says Stephen Davis. ‘I think Alan is ambivalent about publicity. He hasn’t yet completely decided what he thinks about it.
‘Even I, as a writer, faced a watered-down version of an actor’s dilemma: “Shall I live here or shall I go to California and be a stamped-out version of myself?” There’s always some price to pay. That’s what I mean by the Faustian contract.
‘I have known him for years; he’s one of my oldest friends. It was Alan Who? in those days. And he said Stephen Who? He walks in his moccasins and I walk in mine.
‘We all want to use Hollywood, but it’s too big, too relentless and too corrupt for everyone to use it,’ warns Stephen.
‘Alan was educated in the idea of the virtuoso actor being a chameleon. That versatility that Olivier had, which Antony Sher has. I think Alan recognises that is what acting is all about. As Alan gets more successful, he’s threatening to become a cult personality. He could have a tacky career as a Hollywood villain, but he doesn’t want that. There are no careers for actors in Hollywood, just careers for stars.
‘Tommy Lee Jones is similar to Alan: he gets offered villains because of his strong looks, when he’s actually a brilliantly versatile actor. If you play villains all the time, you just get this cheesy repetitiousness.’
If Rickman is wary about publicity, that is because he fears being corrupted by it. No danger of that, say his friends. Unlike some actors, Rickman has not succumbed to the urge to dump his nearest and dearest as soon as he became a serious Hollywood star. ‘Alan hasn’t changed at all. People do start believing their own publicity, but not him,’ says Adrian Noble.
Not that Rickman doesn’t feel exhilarated by America every time he goes there. He walks even taller on US soil. ‘When you get off the plane in Britain, you’ve got to shrink a little bit, hug yourself into your coat a bit more,’ he told the writer John Lahr in Woman’s Journal of January 1993.
He likes the place because he feels he is not categorised there by the British class system, by the inferiority complex created by his background. ‘I stand straighter in LA. It’s something about how the English are brought up and what we’re told we can expect. Maybe it’s because I drive a car in LA and I don’t at home. I feel more in charge of myself. I wouldn’t dream of being out there as an actor looking for work. To actually say, OK, I’m going to pitch a tent and wave a flag saying “Employ me” – I couldn’t do that. But I enjoy being there. It’s disgusting and wonderful. Like going to Dunkin’ Donuts every day.’
Rickman’s contradictory nature clearly saw the other side of the story with all its pitfalls: ‘I like the phrase of David Hare’s: “Show business thins the mind!” If you spend any time in Los Angeles, there’s only one topic of conversation,’ he told The Times magazine in 1994.
He calls himself an archetypal Piscean, identifying with the symbol of the two fish who are swimming in different directions. That’s another reason why he gets on well with women; few men, frankly, are prepared to discuss their horoscope. Indeed, one friend says that he has the intuition while Rima has the intellect. Rare, indeed, to find a man happy to settle into that role without feeling threatened. ‘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.
‘Alan’s quite unique in the intensity of his internal life. He’s a shifting, mercurial kind of person – and very, very mesmeric,’ his Mesmer ‘wife’ Gillian Barge told The Times magazine in 1994.
Which is why, more than most people, he absolutely hates being taken for granted. ‘I don’t mind seducing as long as at the end of the seduction there’s an idea or a shock,’ he told John Lahr. ‘You can lull the paying customers as long as they get slapped. I like introducing ambiguity. I like the fact that people get confused about my character.
‘In every area of my life, complete opposites are at work all the time. I stagger myself sometimes. Who is this person? The “you” who can’t organise picking up the laundry – and you know that “you” very well – watches the other one in a rehearsal situation and says “Who is this person who has all these ideas and all this invention?” There’s a very, very instinctive person and a very, very practical person. It depends on what time of day it is, I think.’
Some women, of course, would say it depends on their time of the month. Only Alan Rickman would say that it depends on his time of day.
‘Most of our lives we function with a huge divide between the head and the body,’ he added. He finally felt the gap had closed when he first got to RADA, but he’s still trying to be as free as Fred Astaire.
‘I like getting ambiguous responses from people. I’m not up there in a glass cage to be admired and for people to be enchanted by me. I like to mix it up. Audiences shouldn’t be passive creatures. They come to work.
‘I want bigger challenges. I want to touch that unknown part where you know you’re not just a collection of other people’s preconceptions.’ Which is beginning to sound positively transcendental. As ever, Rickman is trying to rise above what he feels are his limitations. ‘The typecasting is probably because of the way my face is put together,’ he told Jeff Powell in the Daily Mail in 1991. ‘Each character I play has different dimensions. When people try to stick a label on my life, I think, “It doesn’t seem like that to me.”’
He became crossly eloquent on the subject in the 1994 Times magazine interview with David Nicholson: ‘The reason I don’t like talking to most journalists is their desire to reduce everything to a one-page article and to make you compare things. You find yourself forced to answer the question, when really what you want to say is: “Nothing is like anything else and I’m not thinking of anything else I’ve done, just the job in hand.” So a slight prison is created.
‘I need time to go home and find out who I am,’ he added revealingly. ‘Most scripts are like junk food, things to keep the cinema full. Some things I’m offered in the States, I can’t actually see why anyone’s bothering except for the pay cheque. You read the script and think, “Why?” It’s a law of diminishing returns because if I don’t believe in it, then I won’t be any good. You come to see yourself as a chemical component to be injected into something.’
But even that can cause a bad chemical reaction; no wonder Rickman’s permanently frustrated, forever chasing some Holy Grail of the perfect performance in the perfect production. He’s like the little boy whose mother tells him that he thinks too much.
‘You can think, “This is my moment of utter emotional honesty” and then the camera goes another foot lower down and shoots up your nostrils and that’s emotional honesty out t
he window. Suddenly you’re being incredibly devious.’
Only the director is in complete control, of course. Which is why Alan Rickman wants to be one as well as everything else.
It strikes me that he enjoyed his villainous parts – while not entirely approving of them, of course – because, fundamentally, they are such wonderful control-merchants.
For Alan Rickman really is the psychopath’s psychopath; he would feature strongly in any Good Screen Psycho Guide. In the political satire Bob Roberts, the writer, director and star Tim Robbins chose Rickman as the sinister campaign manager Lukas Hart III because, as he told John Lahr in Woman’s Journal: ‘I don’t like safe actors. Which is why I chose Alan, who has the courage to make bold choices and chew on the scenery a little bit. He’s also got a whimsy to him when he plays evil that’s very seductive. I’d like to play opposite him in a movie about competing psychopaths. I’d like to try to out-psychopath Alan Rickman.’
No chance. But Hannibal Lecter was the one great part that got away, of course, and it is tempting to speculate whether Rickman would have added more characteristically dry humour than is seemly to the story of a sophisticated cannibal. For there is a tendency to subvert the genre when he gets up there on the screen. Rickman can be a little too ironic, too knowing, to terrify us thus far.
Kevin Spacey, however, seems to have no scruples about playing completely creepy; neither does Hopkins, of course. ‘I’ve only seen ten minutes of the Silence of the Lambs sequel Hannibal, and I thought it was cardboard villain stuff,’ says Snoo Wilson. ‘I could see how an actor of Hopkins’ ability would get bored with repeating himself. There’s no development there – where do you go beyond cannibalism? What good does making Hannibal do to the planet? Or, indeed, I suspect, Hopkins himself? Apart from his bank balance. So I think Alan is probably very wise to diversify. He’s not simply being an actor, a mask for hire; he. has a a lot of other things in his life.’
Rickman’s irony comes down to the George Sanders/Claude Rains syndrome again, when he can’t resist showing off his wit. The Independent on Sunday’s Anthony Lane compared him to that select band of thespian brothers – James Mason, Robert Donat and Sanders – who are ‘sensual, unhurried, turning everyone else into jitterbugs. Their villains are played like lovers and vice versa; you don’t trust them for a minute, but they won’t give you a minute to look away.’
Black comedy comes very easily to urbane British actors. Hans Gruber was only scary by flashes, mainly when he showed his teeth; mostly he was a major stylist and ad-lib man who seemed to have strayed in from a menswear catwalk. And the Sheriff, of course, was a wonderfully amusing cartoon who couldn’t even claim to be a legend in his own torture-chamber; fine swordsman though he was, this was the kind of sad chump who would always stab himself in the foot.
The Vicomte de Valmont was the absolute heart of darkness for him; and even then, you felt a certain pity for this self-made monster, who had checkmated himself. There’s a hint of the psychologist in his approach, though he prefers to think of himself as a pitiless pathologist. He is well aware of the Fascist impulse of which Sylvia Plath wrote. ‘People allow the Valmonts of this world,’ he told the Daily Mail in 1991. ‘It was fascinating to watch that kind of evil being so entertaining and erotic. But it was a cruel part to play for a long time. It would take a lot to get me to do that again. I wasn’t very pleasant to live with during that period.’
Film allows him to make a quick getaway, from his character as well as the job. Alan Rickman is at heart a theatrical animal because he relishes the control, when the actors take over the play after the director has finished rehearsals. But it also means lingering night after night over every little nuance when it may be driving him mad.
That was why the Sheriff came as such a light relief. ‘I thought it important that the Sheriff amused the audience as much as anything else. People should come out of that movie, having had a good time. The characters were up for reinvention.
‘With the Sheriff of Nottingham, it’s probably okay to be manic and over the top. It was certainly tough shooting my final fight with Kevin Costner. We didn’t have any rehearsal for it. We just ran through it sequence by sequence as we put it together, so it had real danger in it.’
Success for him means keeping in touch with reality. ‘Being reasonably successful doesn’t, God forbid, mean losing touch with what ordinary people are going through. I still suffer because I live here and I step out of my front door and smell the quality of life, the waste, the lack of imagination, the appalling selfishness,’ he told GQ magazine indignantly in 1992.
The one thing over which Rickman is never remotely flippant is politics. He will keep the light ironic tone when talking about himself or his perceived difficulties with a certain performance, but he takes his political beliefs seriously. There is also a feeling that he should always be seen to be on his best behaviour, that Rima’s work makes the life of an actor seem petty and frivolous. Little wonder, then, that he’s so painstakingly analytical, so academic about acting.
There is something of the lecturer manqué about Alan Rickman, hence the seraglio, the networking, the feeling of a man on Mount Olympus. As his former schoolmaster Ted Stead says, ‘He would have made a very good teacher himself.’
Jenny Topper is very perceptive on his appeal to women in particular. ‘Women tend not to be very good at being absolute and sure about things,’ she told GQ magazine in the same 1992 feature. ‘Alan has this hand-on-heart quality. He is always absolutely sure about his opinions, what is good writing and good theatre, and he has tremendous loyalty to those things.
‘Also, in a totally admiring way, I wonder if there isn’t a streak of femininity in him, a kind of sweetness that perhaps you expect more from other women than men.’ It is still extraordinary in this day and age that a red-blooded man who enjoys the company of women has to justify himself; not that Alan Rickman does any such thing.
He is fortunate to live among that great big family called the British theatre, a substitute for the more traditional nuclear kind. His empathy with the female sex is accepted and respected.
The playful quality that Jules Wright admired, the playmate whom Saskia Reeves teases: all come together in this tall and imposing figure who doesn’t need to prove anything. As Elaine Paige once said, small people have to shout ‘Look at me, I’m down here.’ But showbusiness is full of ambitious midgets. The giants of this world have a more relaxed and almost passive attitude, which brings us back to Alan Rickman’s passive aggression.
Friends and colleagues do feel tender about him; despite their criticisms, mostly constructive ones, he is regarded as a force for good. As with Latymer, he cocoons himself within an inner circle of supporters. And, as with all mavericks, he gravitates towards film roles that are sometimes glorified versions of cameos.
In his ideal world, designer, director, writer and actors would come to rehearsals with nothing decided and they would all have a great big glorious nit-picking session. He’s taking the academic approach of a tutorial, influenced by his partner Rima.
The acting world knows it as the improvisation process that has been perfected by the idiosyncratic film-maker Mike Leigh. Actors, though they may curse the Method-acting process at times, love the challenge because they feel they have completely created their characters. No longer are they thought to be stupid, empty vessels into which tyrannical directors pour their fatuous fantasies.
‘There is a blurring between what I am asked to do as an actor, what I can do and what I’m actually like. It has very little to do with me as a person,’ Rickman insisted in a Drama magazine interview.
He is a star by instinct on screen. Colonel Brandon was disappointing precisely because there was too little on which to work. Rickman still needs to bring something of himself, to project his own personality with that supreme gift of which his friend Stephen Davis speaks.
Alan Rickman is constantly at odds with himself. Given his eloquence and his status a
s an actor’s adviser, he seems to be strangely inhibited about putting his thoughts down in permanent form. That one essay on Jaques, when he played the old poseur in Adrian Noble’s As You Like It, is his only published work.
There is another side to him that has never been fully developed: the enticing prospect of an all-singing, all-dancing Alan Rickman to recall his days in Guys And Dolls in repertory theatre at Leicester. The longing to be as free as Fred Astaire has not left him.
He won an award at the 1994 Montreal Film Festival for Mesmer, the Evening Standard Best Actor award in 1991, Best Supporting Actor at the 1992 BAFTAS and an Emmy and a Golden Globe for Rasputin. But if he’s to be more than the Gossard Wonderbra of acting, Alan Rickman must take control of himself and emerge as a force in his own right – not a flashy foil.
It is relatively easy to hide behind the lead actor, to peer slyly out and be subversive and steal the show. What is harder is to carry the show on your own shoulders; and even he couldn’t do that with Mesmer.
One returns to the question raised by Jules Wright, in some ways his fiercest but fondest critic. She saw in him the potential to be a leader, but she had to fight against prejudice from those who thought him merely reactive rather than proactive. For all his insistence on living in the real world and not forgetting his roots, there is something rarefied about Alan Rickman. He tries not to be precious, but there are times when he takes himself just a little too seriously. And friends saying ‘He’s too intellectual to be an actor’ hardly help.
Certainly he feels self-conscious about being one of life’s observers as opposed to participators; although he will bridle and insist, as he did with Michael Owen in the London Evening Standard in 1993, that he’s always ‘got stuck in’.
Well, you can’t get stuck in if you don’t bang on doors to ask people to vote for your girlfriend because you feel your face is too famous. Wear a pair of glasses or a wig.
Alan Rickman Page 34
