Alan Rickman Read online

  CONTENTS

  About the Book

  List of Illustrations

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue: Vinegar in the Salad

  1. THE FAUSTIAN GIFT

  2. THE SURROGATE FATHER

  3. ‘HE’S VERY KEEP DEATH OFF THE ROADS’

  4. ‘THE WICKEDEST MAN IN BRITAIN’

  5. ‘I WANT WOMEN’

  6. VALMONT IN CURLERS

  7. A DEAL WITH THE DEVIL

  8. HOW THEY SHOT THE SHERIFF

  9. IMMORTAL LONGINGS

  10. THAT SINKING FEELING

  11. ANIMAL MAGNETISM

  12. ‘GOD DIDN’T MEAN HIM TO PLAY SMALL ROLES’

  13. ROCKET TO THE MOON

  14. THE BLEAK MID-WINTER

  15. SHRIEKS ACROSS THE ATLANTIC

  16. THE SLITHERY SLOPE TO SNAPE

  Picture Section

  Chronology of Alan Rickman’s Career

  Index

  Acknowlegements

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Alan Rickman is an enigma. Widely known for his portrayal of Professor Severus Snape in the hit Harry Potter films. Rickman is also one of Britain’s greatest stage actors, embracing everything from Shakespeare, Chekhov and Noel Coward, to directing Ruby Wax on stage. He has also appeared on television in shows as varied as Rasputin, The Barchester Chronicles and Victoria Wood with all the Trimmings, though global fame came with his move on to the big screen. His first part as terrorist Hans Gruber in Die Hard and he has gone on to star in such diverse movies as Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Sense and Sensibilty, Dogma and Galaxy Quest. He has shown his versatility as the villain, the comic actor and the romantic lead and, while his award-winning performances have made him a leading man directors call, his air of mystery, his smouldering good looks and his unique voice have made him an international sex symbol.

  Yet behind all this glamour lies the west London working-class socialist with strong political principles. Hollywood is the dream factory, yet Rickman’s heart is often within the theatre. His reputation suggests a man difficult to work with, so is he similar to the characters he plays? Or is that the mark of this great actor – that he is nothing like them?

  In this revised and updated biography, Maureen Paton encompasses the private, professional and political life of this most enigmatic, charismatic and intensely private of actors.

  Alan Rickman: The Unauthorised Biography

  Revised and Updated Edition

  Maureen Paton

  To Liam

  List of Illustrations

  Alan Rickman’s school nativity play (C. Hullah)

  Alan Rickman in Guys and Dolls, 1975 (Haymarket Theatre)

  Alan on tour with the rep in Ibsen’s When We Dead Awaken (Gerald Murray)

  First stint at the RSC with Glenda Jackson and Juliet Stevenson (Shakespeare Centre Library/Joe Cocks)

  As Antonio in 1979 (Shakespeare Centre Library/Joe Cocks)

  As Achilles in Troilus and Cressida (Shakespeare Centre Library/Joe Cocks)

  The cast of Lucky Chance

  As Vicomte de Valmont in Les Liaisons Dangereuses (Shakespeare Centre Library)

  The ultimate challenge – as Hamlet in 1992 (Nottingham Playhouse/Donald Cooper)

  Taking the lead role in Dennis Potter’s Mesmer (The Ronald Grant Archive)

  PROLOGUE: VINEGAR IN THE SALAD

  CALL HIM A luvvie at your peril. According to one of his oldest female friends, he’s the epitome of passive aggression. The passive-aggressive syndrome in psychology sounds impressive, but needs to be demystified. It used to be known as ‘silent insubordination’ in the Army: in other words, good old-fashioned bloody-mindedness. This syndrome says everything about the stubborn temperament of the internationally renowned British actor Alan Rickman. You can see just how this tall and scornful perfectionist, the nonpareil of nit-pickers, came to embody a formidable intelligence and reined-in power. He could never play a weakling.

  At just over 6ft 1in and big-boned with it, he has the haughty bearing of a natural aristocrat. All his showiest roles point to a sense of innate superiority, from the terrorist Hans Gruber in Die Hard and the Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves to the megalomaniacal Rasputin in the film of the same name and the disdainful Professor Severus Snape, scourge of the schoolboy wizard, in the Harry Potter films. It’s a look that says he’s a member of the theatrical master-race.

  Which is a problem, since he’s also a member of the Labour Party. Paradoxically, this enigmatic actor is a painter and decorator’s son from working-class Irish and Welsh stock who was raised on a west London council estate. Given his high-profile support of socialism, he’s oddly private about his humble background and doesn’t do the cloth-cap-and-clogs routine. He has a rarity value, since he gives little away about himself. Alan Rickman, as all his many friends in the business testify, has a horror of anything that smacks of self-promotion. He backs shyly into the limelight. At the same time that he simultaneously opened in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone and in the West End with an acclaimed revival of Noël Coward’s Private Lives, Alan Rickman’s sepulchral rasp could also be heard as the Genie of the Lamp for the Christmas pantomime Aladdin in one of the poorest boroughs in London. He recorded the performance for free on the condition that there was a publicity black-out.

  Rickman has a strange aura around him that is extremely successful. However, he’s also known to be socialistic and has avoided the honours trap. So he trails this remarkable integrity by being very Jesuitical about publicity; yet on the other hand he’s a famous actor.

  Indeed, on screen and stage, he can project everyone’s idea of seigneurial decadence; an impression that gained hold when he played the first and best incarnation of the vicious Vicomte de Valmont in the acclaimed Royal Shakespeare Company production of Les Liaisons Dangereuses. Yet Alan Rickman longs to be thought of as a true man of the people. Inevitably, there is a conflict between his past and his present that he has never quite resolved.

  Those narrow Grand Vizier eyes, the colour of pale amber, seem to look down his long nose. There is something of the Marquis de Sade in his anachronistic appeal to women as an arrogant, feline fop. His sudden gestures can be transfixing: Rickman has the most extraordinary way of laughing quietly with a sort of silent snicker, a grimace that contorts his face.

  His personality is piquantly flavoured sweet-and-sour, Chinese style. The two phrases that crop up most about him are: ‘He doesn’t suffer fools gladly’ and ‘He’s a guru.’ They are by no means mutually exclusive; one has the feeling that, for many admiring acolytes, the rigorously principled Rickman has the elevated status of a jealous god who is just as likely to smite the sinful with a plague of boils as to reward the godly with his gracious approbation. They look up to him even though Rickman himself has admitted that his main vice is ‘a wounding tongue. I’m working on it; perhaps it’s the Celt in me.’

  In a notoriously insecure industry, he is regularly paged for advice as if he were a Delphic oracle. ‘He likes to be everyone’s guru,’ says the playwright Stephen Poliakoff. Rickman keenly feels the powerlessness of the actor’s passive role, which is why he’s a great organiser of support networks for fellow thespians. He espouses causes. In his heart, he’s Don Quixote; in his head, he’s Sancho Panza.

  Yet he has his own raging insecurities, which may account for the public sulks when he can seem a spectacular misery-guts. There is the recurring stage fright that affects this most theatrical of animals: ‘I get gremlins in my head, saying, “You’re going to forget your lines”,’ he told The Times magazine in 1994. Film was a liberation in more ways than one. In June 2002, after a triumphant Broadway opening with an acclaimed, award-
winning London revival of Noël Coward’s Private Lives that reunited the Les Liaisons Dangereuses team of Rickman, Lindsay Duncan and director Howard Davies, Rickman told the US TV interviewer Charlie Rose: ‘I think I’m better at the stage work because of film work. The trouble in the theatre is that there’s this huge fear. It’s something that I guess is connected to adrenaline and focus and energy, but it’s a useless thing – like some gremlin that sits on your shoulder and tries to make you fail. And often succeeds. At least on film if you screw up, you know there’s another take. And it [the fear] doesn’t get any better. I’m seriously thinking of trying to find some kind of hypnosis that will get rid of it.’

  Sometimes there’s a sense of simmering resentment underneath his surface calm; if he’s the proverbial cold fish (given that there’s no such thing as a warm fish), he is one that swims in hidden depths.

  Occasionally, a bitterness breaks surface: ‘Some actors have opportunities and shapes given to them,’ he once said to John Lahr in Woman’s Journal, January 1993. ‘Not me. I’ve had to guide my career and seize any opportunity that came my way.’ He made his first film, Die Hard, at the late age of 42 because he came cheap.

  One publicist remembers with a shudder how rude Rickman was to her when he was still unknown. Perhaps it was simply her proximity to the Press, because he detests the snap judgements and pigeon-holing tendencies of the Fourth Estate. Yet scores of actors and writers testify to his warmth and kindness, even if he’s not nearly so supportive of directors as a breed. ‘All his roles have attitude,’ as one former associate, the theatre director Jules Wright, puts it. ‘Directors fear to take him on.’

  ‘Alan has a lot of attitude . . . which is another aspect of control,’ says his playwright friend Stephen Davis. ‘I get the impression it’s a bit arbitrary. He does have this awesome side to his character. Alan Rickman is the only person I know who will make me nervous about what I’ll say next. He won’t let you be self-pitying or gratuitous.’

  In Hollywood, he has achieved the status of a brand-name: they now routinely refer to ‘an Alan Rickman role’ whenever they want someone with the gift of playful evil.

  This multi-faceted man, who also created the comedienne Ruby Wax and discovered the award-winning playwright Sharman Macdonald, has walked away with film after film by turning his villains into warped tragic heroes with an anarchic sense of humour. Indeed, he’s had such a spectacular career in grand larceny on screen that no one would guess he was born with a speech defect. It has made him so self-conscious about his voice that he still fears death by review as his frustration and despair at the critical mauling for his National Theatre debut in Antony and Cleopatra in 1998 showed only too clearly. After that disaster at the age of 52, he told one friend that he felt like never going back to the theatre again – even though he will say to people that he never reads reviews. Yet Rickman’s bravura assurance and style has given him a greater following than Hugh Grant, fifteen years his junior.

  ‘Alan has a quality which is attractive to both men and women. It’s what makes star quality: it means that everyone is looking at you,’ points out Jules Wright. ‘Ian McKellen and Mick Jagger have it too; so do Alan Howard and Alec Guinness. There’s an ambivalence: they’re not macho, but they’re not particularly feminine, either. There’s an ambiguity there.’

  The bizarre downside to the public fascination with this intriguing maverick comes in the form of sackloads of intrusive and obscene mail from otherwise respectable women, for whom he represents some kind of sexual release from repression. A typical letter to Alan Rickman goes: ‘Dear Mr Rickman, I have always considered myself a staunch feminist, but you have a very disturbing effect on me . . .’

  Even worse was the malicious correspondence from a (male) grudge-bearer who found out where he lived and made a point of sending him any bad reviews he could find.

  For no one ever feels tepid about Alan Rickman. He inspires fierce loyalty, admiration and widespread affection, but some are highly critical of his apparent intractability.

  ‘He’s too intelligent to be an actor,’ is the blunt opinion of one friend. That sets up a constant tension, partly because Alan is a frustrated director and partly because he entered the business at a relatively late age.

  He has acquired a reputation for being difficult, culminating in damaging publicity on the litigation over the film Mesmer. The movie that was to provide him with his first lead role in the cinema became mired in law-suits. Rickman stood accused of intellectual arrogance; yet the real truth about Mesmer is more complex than mere tantrums. Alan himself, always his own fiercest critic, did concede in front of a packed audience for a question-and-answer session at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in 1995 that fame had probably corrupted him ‘to some extent’ by causing a mild outbreak of childish foot-stamping. Yet he had told Duncan Fallowell in the Observer a year earlier, ‘There are plenty of people more “difficult” than me. Juliet Stevenson, for example. I would say that “difficult” means a highly intelligent human being who asks pertinent questions and tries to use her or himself to the fullest extent.’ So there; trust Rickman to answer his carpers by turning the criticism into a compliment and throwing it back at them as a challenge. Even, it has to be said, at the risk of pomposity.

  There is also an extraordinary allegation that, in the wake of the so-called Rivergate fiasco that lost him the chance to run his own London arts centre, Alan Rickman was seen handing out copies of a published letter of support from leading drama critics to a bemused queue at a fashionable London fringe venue. Not to mention a stand-up row in the foyer of another theatre with his rival to run Riverside, which had never – until this book – been reported. There’s even talk of a confidential document that went missing.

  Despite his languid image, there is clearly a lot of the street activist left in this former art editor of a radical 60s freesheet that was based in London’s answer to San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury: Notting Hill Gate.

  ‘Having done something else before acting made him a better actor,’ says the writer Peter Barnes, a long-standing friend. ‘It was a very deliberate U-turn.’ The theatre director Michael Bogdanov, another mate, agrees: ‘It’s often an advantage in starting late as he did. Actors go to drama school far too young.’ Alan has all the doubts of the late starter, with an understandable neurosis about his age: no one in his inner circle knew in advance about his landmark 50th birthday in February 1996. ‘His age was a closely guarded secret,’ says Stephen Poliakoff. ‘Actors are much more secretive about their age than actresses.’

  At the age of 38, a gloomy Rickman was in almost Gogolian despair about his long-term prospects in a wayward career that seemed to be going nowhere. Jules Wright remembers one outburst in Sloane Square at two in the morning after a meal. ‘Alan suddenly said to me, “Nothing’s ever going to happen for me. No one will ever notice me. My career isn’t going to go anywhere.”’

  He also told GQ magazine: ‘I lurch from indecision to indecision. All I ever seem to do is smash up against my own limitations. I have never felt anything but “Oops, failed again”.’

  As with all great actors, he takes a lot of calculated risks that have inevitably meant several brushes with failure. After learning his trade and paying his dues in provincial repertory theatre, he joined the Royal Shakespeare Company for a short and unhappy season in which he thought himself an unattractive misfit. He felt compelled to leave because, as he put it, he wanted ‘to learn how to talk to other actors on stage rather than bark at them.’

  As a television unknown in the early 80s, he went on to steal the BBC drama series The Barchester Chronicles as an ambitious young clergyman whose divine unctuousness upstaged such major players as Donald Pleasence, Geraldine McEwan and Nigel Hawthorne. Later he explained that, typically for Alan, he based Obadiah Slope on all the Tory politicians he detested, starting with Norman Tebbit and Margaret Thatcher. That was the first of many defiant challenges. Rickman rarely gives interviews; but when he does,
they can be more like military skirmishes.

  His shiftiness had become a star turn, yet he was still a recognisable face rather than a name. Only when he was invited back to the RSC in 1985 for a second chance did he reveal his true range in the leading part of the Vicomte de Valmont.

  However, playing a professional seducer in Les Liaisons Dangereuses for almost two years nearly drove him mad: the political ideals that now make him feel guilty about his immense Hollywood bankability also make him yearn to be thought of as one of life’s good guys. Yet there he is, playing a rapist or a murderer. It offends his puritanical streak.

  ‘We had a harmonious relationship: affection is important to him,’ insists the film director Mike Newell, who worked with him on An Awfully Big Adventure. ‘He has private demons,’ admits Peter Barnes.

  One of them is his ambivalent attitude towards the sexual power that has played its part in making him a major star. ‘Alan is incredibly aware of his professional sexual charisma,’ says Stephen Davis. ‘He has hordes of women writing to him. There is evidence that it gets in the way, and he wants to avoid being cast for it.

  ‘He’s not an exploitative person in his private life, not in the remotest a sexual predator. He’s vexed by this image, this matinée-idol hold over the audience. In his personal life, he has enormous self-control . . . unnervingly so.’ Alan was to remark tartly: ‘I have never been remotely sexually voracious, whatever that is . . . but maybe I’ll be sexually voracious next week.’ In the grand old tradition of keeping them guessing, it was another example of his dry sense of humour.

  For Rickman is a one-woman man who has known Rima Horton, his first and only girlfriend, for more than three decades. Their fidelity to each other is a legend. ‘He’s similar to John Malkovich, though not, perhaps, to Valmont in Les Liaisons, the character they both played, except in one important respect. Alan is quite unpromiscuous – which is very rare for actors,’ says a friend, the playwright Dusty Hughes. Like Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir or the late Peter Cook and his last wife, Alan and Rima keep separate establishments within a mile of each other. In 1989 they split up in order to stay together – but apart.