BEHIND THE SCENES, Alan Rickman takes pains to behave like a real-life Robin Hood. He quietly gives away proceeds from his rich films to poor theatre projects, an orphanage in Romania and other pet causes such as Glenys Kinnock’s One World Action campaign against poverty and Children On The Edge. When he secretly agreed in 2001 to voice the Genie of the Lamp in Philip Hedley’s production of Aladdin at the Theatre Royal Stratford East on a strictly-no-publicity basis, Alan recorded it at RADA where he has long been quietly involved with fund-raising for his old theatrical alma mater. Yet his sharp looks made him a natural Sheriff of Nottingham.
Everyone in the business has fallen for the rumour that Ruby Wax rewrote Alan’s dialogue for the Sheriff in the Kevin Costner movie Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves. Nearly every person I interviewed for this book muttered conspiratorially, ‘Did you know that Ruby . . . ?’, so it’s travelled a long way. It’s a great story, save for one thing: it’s not true. To be fair to Ruby, she herself has never claimed the credit; instead it was claimed on her behalf by friends and/or admirers who made the logical deduction: ‘The dialogue is funny, Ruby is Alan’s friend, Ruby is funny, so . . .’
The real truth behind the Gothic humour of such bravura lines as ‘Cancel the kitchen scraps for lepers and orphans. No more merciful beheadings – and call off Christmas’ is that Alan’s old friend, Peter Barnes, was the author.
Alan called him in to help as a script-doctor. A downmarket Greasy Spoon caff in London’s Bloomsbury was the improbable operating theatre as Alan spread pages of the script over the table and Peter rolled up his sleeves (very characteristic of Peter, this) and set to work.
‘I wrote the dialogue for the Sheriff,’ Peter confirms. ‘Alan and I have been friends for twenty years. I used to work a lot in the Reading Room of the British Museum. There’s a working-men’s café nearby and we went through the script together, because Alan said it needed some work on it.
‘So there we were: I said, “Look at us, we’ve ordered egg and chips and we’re working on the dialogue of a $40 million movie!” Alan, slightly misunderstanding me, said “Don’t worry – I’ll pay for the egg and chips.” And he did.
‘I made it more speakable. Kevin Costner was clonking around because his dialogue was a bit heavy-going. It doesn’t trip easily off the tongue. Alan is a mixture of Claude Rains and Basil Rathbone in the role. There was something about a teaspoon in the middle of one speech – cutting a heart out with a teaspoon. It was a bit oddly positioned, so I made it work. In an action movie, everybody kicks in with the dialogue. The poor old writers are very much relegated.’
The results of that barnstorming session in a Greasy Spoon were such choice witticisms as ‘I had a very sad childhood, I never knew my parents, it’s amazing I’m sane’, ‘You – my room at 10.30 tonight. You – 10.45. And bring a friend’ and ‘Now sew – and keep the stitches small’ to a physician.
The year 1991 was Alan’s annus mirabilis. Four Rickman films were released, and only one of them – the little-known Closetland – was a flop. Truly Madly Deeply; Close My Eyes; and Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves all enhanced his reputation to an extraordinary degree, so much so that influential film critic Barry Norman named him British Actor Of The Year. All three films were in the Hollywood Top Ten.
It was Robin Hood most of all that caught the imagination, though to my mind Rickman has never bettered his performance in Stephen Poliakoff’s Close My Eyes. Therein he gave a cuckold – that traditional figure of fun – an unprecedented dignity and complexity. Truly Madly Deeply completed the Top Ten triumvirate, remarkable for its raw emotional intensity. Few people know that it is also the story of Alan: the man you see on screen is his real self (save for the fact that he’s not a ghost and he hasn’t had an affair with Juliet Stevenson).
Of course his mad, ranting, glam-rock Sheriff of Nottingham was a huge popular hit, and so completely upstaged Kevin Costner that there are stories circulating to this day about how Costner removed Rickman’s best scenes from the final cut in the editing room. What’s left is so wonderful anyway that one hardly needs to bitch about the missing bits.
Kevin Costner didn’t really know who Alan was – the name meant nothing to him. But when filming started, Costner realised what a formidable actor Alan was. Costner has a reputation in Hollywood for being incredibly physically well-endowed. That’s why he didn’t wear the traditional tights in the role of Robin of Locksley; they made him a pair of breeches instead. However, Alan Rickman still upstaged him with his wonderful roguish quality and powerful presence.
Rickman’s single-minded intensity responded to the need for speed in filming the £25 million project. ‘The film lacked enough time. We were filming at the time of the year in England when you only have light until 3.30 p.m., so it was very difficult to get everything done,’ he admitted to Jeff Powell in the Daily Mail in 1991.
Yet his Sheriff almost never happened. ‘He turns a lot of things down, fussing a lot,’ says the playwright Stephen Poliakoff.
‘He tends to be a bit of a pessimist; he has mellowed a lot in the last year or so. He’s very honest; he sees the pitfalls perhaps a bit too much. He doesn’t bullshit and he’s very self-critical. And he said to me gloomily that he was about to ruin his career by signing to play the Sheriff of Nottingham in a new film about Robin Hood. I said to him, “Is Prince John in it? No? Do it!”’
So he did, persuaded only by an offer of some control over his lines with help from Peter Barnes. And the preview audiences at early screenings cheered for Rickman, not Costner, hence the notorious cuts in the editing suite.
‘At first I thought “Robin Hood – again?” I just turned it down flat. Then I started to hear of some of the names involved and I could see the way forward for having fun,’ Alan told People magazine in 1991.
And have fun he most emphatically did. ‘I tried to make him certifiable and funny – a cross between Richard III and a rock star,’ he explained to the Daily Mail. It was that Thin Lizzy Crotch-Rock memory again . . .
Director Kevin Reynolds, who had manifold problems in getting Robin Hood to the screen and lost the friendship of his old chum Costner in the process, wisely gave Rickman his head.
Closetland, Truly Madly Deeply and Close My Eyes were in the can by then. ‘So it felt okay to go back into the primary colours and just stride about in two dimensions for a while and have fun,’ Rickman told the Sunday Express in 1991.
For someone who is popularly supposed to be politically correct, Rickman has a lot of subversive humour. He’s one of the few actors who could turn the Sheriffs attempted rape of Maid Marian into an absolute hoot without making it tasteless. ‘It has to be treated with humour,’ explained Alan. ‘You give it a particular tone, so that it’s one of the more fun scenes. The only difficulty, to be honest, was getting out of the costume.’
Dressed in black, with sprouting ebony wig, beard and moustache, his Sheriff looked like the proverbial Bluebeard. ‘I thought about Richard III and a rock guitarist and I said, “Let’s make [his costume] raven so you know who’s coming,”’ he told Ann McFerran in an Entertainment Weekly interview. ‘It was a cartoon . . . I didn’t want the film to disappear into all that historical business.’ Once again, as with Elliott Marston in Quigley Down Under, Alan instinctively understood that the Man in Black always won the style wars when it came to imposing your presence on screen. Would you ever catch Cruella De Vil in verdigris or Darth Vader in violet? I rest my case.
But Rickman’s Sheriff made his first entrance as a wolf in sheep’s clothing, as it were, by posing as a masked, white-cowled monk on a horse, confronting Brian Blessed’s Locksley Senior with the snarl ‘Join us or die’ and a quick flash of his shark-like sneer.
The monks close in on Blessed with a pincer movement, their costumes and burning tapers deliberately evoking the Ku Klux Klan for the benefit of Middle America. Poor old Costner wears a duvet (known as a pelerine cloak in medieval times) and bird’s-nest hair. Needless to say, he doesn’t stand a chance in comparison with Rickman’s lacquered glamour. Nottingham Castle is depicted as Dracula’s lair; the horizon is studded with shrieking bats. Rickman is discovered nuzzling a girl’s body as if chewing ruminatively on a chicken-leg. His head is cocked bird-like on one side at an interruption, a typical pose for him. His chest is bare but casually framed with black fabric: the effect is very kinky and straight out of a bondage shop. ‘I trust Locksley has visited his manor and found the home fires still burning,’ he says suavely.
His entourage consists of Geraldine McEwan in a white wig as the wizened old witch Mortiana; they make a wonderful pantomime double-act. The terribly po-faced Robin, by contrast, carries a blind retainer around with him: the self-conscious effect is that of King Lear, lumbered for life with Gloucester.
The Sheriff was raised by the witch, and scenes that ended up on the cutting-room floor disclose that she was in fact his mother. ‘Zounds,’ he exclaims in horror at the moment of death, ‘who was DAD?’
Rickman’s old school master Ted Stead says: ‘You cannot get out of him what happened in the editing of Robin Hood, because he’s very professional. But he did say, “You should have seen the eyework that Geraldine and I had.”’
The Sheriff casts coquettish sidelong glances at Maid Marian in the cathedral; very reminiscent of Richard III and Lady Anne. ‘You shine like the sun, my lady,’ he snarls over Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio’s hand. The smile is like a rictus grimace, eyes suddenly flashing as if a snake had awakened with a start. He also has the beaky look of a bird of prey, his head so often cocked on one side that one begins to wonder if he’s slightly deaf in one ear. ‘Locksley, I’m going to cut your heart out with a spoon,’ he promises. He slides on the floor in his haste, swats at people in his rage and frustration and repeatedly bashes the guard who let Robin through the gate. As the luckless flunkey falls, his feet catch the end of the Sheriff’s cloak and there’s a hideous rending sound . . . this is a Sheriff who’s almost endearingly accident-prone.
‘Now sew – and keep the stitches small,’ is this piece of vanity’s instruction to a doctor about to patch up his face. A fury of nervous energy, he flagellates himself with rage and stabs at some meat on a plate as if trying to skewer an enemy. ‘Something vexes thee?’ enquires McEwan’s hag demurely.
He even glowers threateningly at his own statue, trying to wipe off its scar. ‘You – my room at 10.30 tonight. You – 10.45. And bring a friend,’ he tells two wenches.
The Sheriff skewers his useless whingeing cousin with a Spanish blade – ‘at least I didn’t use a spoon,’ he hisses. Even Costner’s bare bum can’t compete; both he and it are far too stolid. For, in truth, Robin’s ponderous tale is in dire need of Rickman’s diabolical inventiveness to jazz it up.
‘Tell me, Mortiana, am I thwarted?’ the Sheriff asks McEwan rhetorically, with a smile like a saw-toothed portcullis as he realises he can hire Celtic thugs to fulfil a prophecy and marry Marian by kidnapping her. So a mercenary band of cider-heads makes an appearance, brandishing bloodaxes on the edge of the forest. One is again reminded of Zulu and the shot of the assegai-carriers wrapped around the horizon as far as the eye can see. ‘Get me prisoners,’ grates Rickman.
As his men send flaming arrows into Robin’s Iron Age village, Rickman is caught gnawing his nail obsessively and fastidiously – as in real life. (One suspects the Sheriff was probably a late bed-wetter, too.)
For there is constant human detail in Rickman’s villainy. Howard Davies, director of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, says that Alan once rang him up in a fury to disagree after Davies had told a magazine that actors needed to find a trait they could love in a character. ‘On the contrary,’ admitted Davies to Allison Pearson in the Independent on Sunday magazine in 1992, ‘Alan sets out by exploring the pathology of a character. He cuts them open and looks for what makes them weak or bad or violent.’ Indeed, there is a crazy, deluded gleam in the Sheriffs eye, almost as if he really does half-imagine that Marian has fallen in love with him. Rickman’s Sheriff has been frivolously compared to Basil Rathbone’s Guy of Gisborne in the Errol Flynn version of Robin Hood, but Rathbone was incredibly stolid by comparison.
‘I had a very sad childhood, I never knew my parents, it’s amazing I’m sane,’ Rickman glibly tells a child whose life he’s threatening in front of Marian . . . such an obvious bid for our sympathy vote that it’s breathtakingly funny. There’s a hint of cynical contempt for such fashionable psychological sob-stories, too.
‘If you fail, I will personally remove your lying tongue,’ he tells the spy Will Scarlett, who is now suspended by his ankles in the torture chamber. Rickman turns his own head upside-down to talk to him. At one point Rickman goes cross-eyed with exasperation (don’t we all). ‘Shut up, you twit!’ he shrieks. And when Mortiana slaps Marian’s face, he rasps proprietorially, ‘That’s my wife, crone!’
‘For once in my life, I will have something pure . . . will you stop interfering!’ he tells Mortiana, insisting that he won’t ravish Marian until they are married in the eyes of God.
His biggest weakness is revealed at the marriage ceremony: the Sheriff of Nottingham’s Christian name is George, which explains a lot. He desperately tries to unstrap his sword in order to subject Marian to marital rape as soon as they’ve exchanged their vows. ‘I can’t do this with all that racket,’ he says fretfully, trying to penetrate his bride while a battering ram bashes down the door in hilariously symbolic counterpoint. Geraldine helpfully puts a cushion under Marian’s head – better for conception, perhaps? Whatever, it’s another wonderfully funny detail.
‘Dew yew mind, Locksley? We have just been married,’ he sneers with a look of ineffable exasperation as Robin crashes through the stained-glass window of the tower to make a widow of Marian. Some of Rickman’s flamboyant curls are sliced up by Costner’s sword, but he hasn’t given up the glamour role yet. He kisses Marian violently in front of Robin and pulls the fatal dagger out of his own chest . . . quite heroic, really.
He goes fleetingly cross-eyed again and finally swoons with pain, lying like a broken-winged crow on the floor and looking oddly pathetic. Rickman’s full-blooded performance and quirky insights have made the Sheriff strangely lovable: you just know he was bullied at school and passed over for promotion. Yet the performance is never sentimental.
Neither was he to succumb to sentimentality in a film that would make a stone statue weep without recourse to any religious miracle. ‘The Sheriff of Nottingham is a troublemaker with a murderous streak, all right – but goodness, this is a costume melodrama, not Shakespeare. I believe this particular villain needs to be a little laughable, lest we mislead the audience into taking things too seriously,’ said Alan in an interview with the Fort Worth Star-Telegraph in 1991, adding plaintively that he wished more people knew about his performance in another movie called Truly Madly Deeply. ‘I’m looking to defy as many expectations as I can, in case the people who liked my turn in Die Hard should take that character as the only thing I’m capable of doing. That’s what I’m doing so much of the broad comedy-villainy for in Robin Hood . . . Kevin Reynolds and I worked out where I could get away with mugging the camera and sticking my nose into the audience.’
It was the modestly budgeted Truly Madly Deeply, which made £20 million from its cinema release, that established Juliet Stevenson as an international name; unlike Alan, however, she has not yet followed up that initial impact on the international stage. Anthony Minghella directed and also wrote the screenplay for the BBC-funded film, which is the most personal, autobiographical work of Alan’s career.
‘We used our own relationship in the film,’ Juliet admitted to GQ magazine in July 1992. ‘I really am the Nina character, juggling a hundred balls in the air at the same time and driving Alan potty with my scatterbrained way of doing things. He is much more selective and sure in his tastes, which can be equally infuriating. But he’s a great anchor in my life.’
The enigmatic Juliet, whose forthright independence had long made her an idol of the Sapphic community, now has a little daughter by her husband, American anthropologist, Hugh Brody. Director Jonathan Miller nicknamed Stevenson, Harriet Walter and Fiona Shaw ‘the nuns’ while they were at the RSC; and all three are great friends of Rickman. Such good friends, in fact, that he felt relaxed enough to remark years later, ‘Actually, I’ve kissed some of the greatest actresses around – Fiona Shaw, Harriet Walter, Juliet Stevenson’, without making it sound like a vulgar boast. And he was to claim that he and Stevenson had – with the aid of the famous BBC radio sound effect department, of course – performed ‘the first oral sex scene on radio in an Anthony Minghella play, A Little Like Drowning’. With bonding like that, no wonder Alan and Juliet went on to make Truly Madly Deeply with Minghella. The actor and director Philip Franks is another Stevenson buddy, and even he felt the need to explain himself thus: ‘I’m not gay . . . but I have a number of strong friendships with a number of women.’ Alan is just the same: a man who attracts all kinds of women, straight or gay. They are easy in his company because they enjoy being treated like equals.
Socialism is another common denominator for Rickman and Stevenson, a brigadier’s daughter who went to Fergie’s old school, Hurst Lodge, and has been trying to live it down ever since.
Both Juliet and Alan took part in the Labour Party TV broadcast for the General Election in April 1992, and she joins him on crusades: they hosted a party at the Red Fort Indian restaurant in London’s Soho to help black South African children. They are embarrassed by what they see as the trivia of showbusiness, and they’re forever trying to prove that they are serious people. Inevitable, then, that they would make a film together . . .
It’s true that Juliet, with her fierce, offbeat beauty, is what the French shrewdly call a jolie-laide (in its literal translation, prettyugly) . . . very much like Alan himself. And there are other similarities.
Truly Madly Deeply was filmed in Bristol and in Juliet Stevenson’s Highgate flat in North London. Minghella encouraged the actors to draw on their own experiences, introducing their own quirks into the film. Thus Juliet is a scatty, highly strung woman; and Rickman is the calm, slightly caustic control-freak in her life.
This scaled-down British version of Ghost tells the story of how Juliet’s character Nina learns to come to terms with the sudden death of her lover Jamie, played by Rickman. What makes it particularly difficult is that he returns to her several times in the guise of a ghost, accompanied by his friends from limboland.
The movie begins at Highgate Tube station and the long climb up the stairs from the underground tunnels into the wooded, slightly spooky exit. Nina is talking to herself: ‘If I’m frightened, then he’ll turn up,’ she reassures herself. ‘He always was forthright. I would have been feeling low and hopeless . . . and he’s there, his presence, and he’s fine. And he tells me he loves me . . . and then he’s not there any more. I feel looked after, watched over.’
This almost makes him sound like a Christ figure, except that the film has far too much humour for that. In fact, it exactly replicates Alan’s central role for his mates. ‘He’s an important figure in the lives of all his friends,’ says the playwright Stephen Davis. We realise that Nina is in fact talking about Jamie in this intense way to her psychiatrist. Then the camera cuts to Alan, feigning playing the cello (the sounds are not his). He frowns in concentration, his hair long, bleached fair and floppy and his moustache dark. The contrast suits him. The mourning Nina is surrounded by solicitous men who are desperately concerned about her: her language-laboratory boss Bill Paterson; a lovestruck, slightly mad and totally unsuitable Pole called Titus; Michael Maloney as the psychologist she meets in a café; and even the elderly oddjob man who has come to sort out the rats in her flat.
Indeed, Jamie is the only one who is never sentimental about her; and this is very much a Rickman characteristic.
‘He’s into the Tough Love Department,’ says Davis, who plays lead guitar in his own rock band and tells the story of how Alan told him to pull himself together during a panic attack for one gig. ‘I played live to an audience at London’s Pizza On The Park for three nights, and it was the most nerve-racking thing ever. I said to him, “This is killing me, I’m so nervous.” He looked at me and said, “No one’s making you do it.” We share each other’s troubles a lot. He says, “Don’t be negative”. But he is, too . . . and I listen to him. It’s a one-way street.’
Nina finds herself crying without warning, and they are real, uglifying tears that make her nose drip and her face flush red. This is very Juliet Stevenson. ‘I miss him, I miss him, I miss him, I miss him . . .’ Her pain is so raw that it hurts to watch. She’s angry with him for leaving her, a typical reaction of the bereaved. ‘I can’t forgive him for not being here.’
But this mood is counterbalanced by tantalising moments of fleeting happiness, such as when she is with her beloved young nephew. ‘You aren’t getting posh? Say bum and Trotsky twice a day,’ she teases him, joking but deadly serious at the same time.
Juliet is so committed that she was reported to have left the Labour Party in 1995 because she felt its modernist stance was compromising its politics. Alan, so far, stays firm.
Nina won’t give her nephew Jamie’s cello, however. It’s all she has of her dead lover . . . and she won’t let go. As she plays the piano, Jamie materialises behind her, playing his cello. He stands motionless as she cries, her face scarlet with grief. Then he hugs her as she weeps piteously. ‘I kept thinking,’ he says drily, ‘just my luck . . . dying of a sore throat. Maybe I didn’t die properly, maybe that’s why I can come back. Didn’t hurt.’ She gingerly feels him to see if he’s real.
‘Are you staying?’ she asks meekly. ‘I think so.’ ‘Can I kiss you? Your lips are cold.’ ‘This is a terrible flat,’ he grumbles. ‘And you’ve got RED bills. And you never lock the back door . . . driving me crazy.’
This is pure Alan, who keeps his flat in Westbourne Grove incredibly tidy and would lecture Ruby Wax about monitoring the central heating when they shared a flat together. ‘Thank you for missing me,’ Jamie says morosely, but not without lugubrious humour.
‘Your pain . . . I couldn’t bear that. The capacity to love that people have . . . what happened to it? I blame the Government. I hate the bastards,’ he ends with a growl.
‘You died and you’re still into party politics?’ she says, amazed. ‘I still attend meetings,’ says Jamie defensively.
He makes himself scarce as Titus arrives at the door and invites her to Paris for sex. ‘Now I’m depressed. I book tickets. Man with big emotion, big heart. I love you,’ says this ghastly character, a sexual harasser by any other name whom well-bred women are too polite to rebuff. When she comes back after tactfully getting rid of him, Jamie has apparently gone. ‘Who was that?’ he asks, emerging from underneath the bedspread and laughing almost evilly as she screams with fright. He warms his lips for her by breathing on his hand and then touching his mouth. They kiss.
They sing at each other, rather raggedly in that cracked, ironic way of close friends, droning their way through a Sixties/Seventies medley: The Walker Brothers’ ‘The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore’, Buddy Holly’s ‘Raining In My Heart’, Joni Mitchell’s ‘A Case Of You’ and Bob Dylan’s ‘Tangled Up In Blue’.
They play the childish games of lovers as they vie with each other to declare their passion: ‘I really-truly-madly-deeply love you.’ He pushes her away playfully then pulls her back imperiously into his arms.
Rickman plucks a guitar and sings again with that strangely musical cawing-crow voice of his, slightly reminiscent of the late Jeremy Brett, the definitive incarnation of Sherlock Holmes. Stevenson dances wildly. The rats have gone, perhaps terrified of his ghost – or their singing. Later he drips a glass of water on her face to wake her up and pushes her out of bed in his benignly bossy way. This is the essence of Juliet and Alan’s relationship; indeed, his relationship with everybody. He has tidied up and lit the fire for her. Jamie comes and goes with no warning. Nina’s handyman friend George, played by David Ryall, confides that he still talks to his wife who died in 1978. ‘And death shall have no dominion,’ he quotes sombrely.
Jamie next pops up in the most surreal way when Nina is in the bath with a face pack on; he appears over the edge of the bath. He pokes a plastic toy animal in her face, and it whirs as it sticks its tongue out at her. ‘Oh come on, don’t be coy . . . I know you shave your legs,’ he says, asking casually whether he can bring some guys back to watch videos. Bizarrely enough, the spirits turn out to be huge film buffs who wrap themselves up in duvets and watch Brief Encounter intently before taking a vote over whether to see Five Easy Pieces or Fitzcarraldo. Jamie huddles up in bed next to her: ‘You smell so nice.’ He even brings a string ensemble back to play a Bach suite. She fetches him a hot-water bottle because he feels permanently cold, the only sign of his otherness.
These quirky interludes are beautifully handled, though the contrasting ‘real life’ episodes with Michael Maloney have a slightly embarrassing whimsicality as he tries to jolly her along and bring her back into the land of the living. Rickman seems more real than any other man.
Nina briefly glimpses Jamie again, but it’s just another cellist on the South Bank next to the National Film Theatre. Her dead love is then discovered sitting by the fire at her flat again. Nina is driven to distraction by his disorganised friends, who are playing chess and generally causing mayhem. Alan is even taking up the carpet to expose slightly mildewed floorboards, just as he did in their relationship. ‘Could everybody just go?’ she finally says. They all waddle out like offended penguins in the John Smith beer commercial on TV.
She asks Jamie to remember their first meeting, and there’s a real intensity between them. ‘I want a life,’ she says; it is her bid for independence and freedom from his memory.
Suddenly you notice that Rickman is grey at the temples. ‘Do you want me to go?’ Jamie asks softly. ‘No, never, never, never,’ says Nina fervently, thinking she means it. But the fraternity of ghosts does go; and she is finally over him as she rushes off to Maloney’s class to meet him.
The rat is back; a pet one called Squeak, supplied by a company called Janimals. It’s a sign that the ghosts have truly gone. They come back briefly, with Rickman at their centre, to stare out of the window at the sight of Juliet kissing her new man in the garden.
Rickman has never looked more romantic than here, like some sulky Russian dissident artist, but he made the part an anti-romantic one. The tug of nostalgia is very powerful, but his astringent personality gives the ghost of Jamie solidity. By contrast, though Maloney’s character lives in the real world – and you can’t get much more real than someone who works with Downs’ Syndrome adults – he has a gentleness about him that offers Nina an enticing escapism. As ever, Rickman’s instinct is to play against the character he is given, to introduce surprise and tension.
By contrast, his next project was a big mistake. The low-budget Hollywood film Closetland was written and directed by a woman, Radha Bharadwaj; and, as with Kathryn Bigelow’s ultra-violent Strange Days, perhaps only a woman could have got away with it.
Rickman plays a Fascist interrogator trying to break the will of Madeleine Stowe, the nearest he has got so far to the kind of Torquemada figure that some fans crave. All the action takes place in one room, a gleaming, high-tech affair that bears no resemblance to the moth-eaten Gothic dungeons favoured by the Sheriff of Nottingham. The victim is blindfolded, so that Rickman’s voice, slipping into different parts, confuses her. His character, according to the Variety review of 11 March 1991, is no brute, however, but ‘a complex, highly civilised man who displays a range of emotions and talents’.
Stowe plays a children’s author whose work stands accused of feeding subversive ideas to infants in the guise of innocent stories. Rickman is an agent of the oppressive government. It becomes a contest of wills, with Stowe determined to awaken his conscience and Rickman trying to break down her resolve. Variety made the point that it is an essentially theatrical piece, difficult to sell to cinema audiences and perhaps better suited to TV. Amnesty International was the consultant and participated in the film’s marketing campaign, so it’s easy to see why Alan became involved.
Rickman was praised for his multi-faceted performance; but he was very unhappy with the end result. ‘He said it was awful after it was edited, and he told me not to look at it,’ says his old Latymer Upper English teacher Edward Stead. ‘He hoped it would never open in England.’
It had been a gruelling year. On the back of that disaster, he made Stephen Poliakoffs incest drama Close My Eyes, taking the part of the betrayed husband that Poliakoff created specially for him.
Poliakoff had first come across him in 1976 when Alan played one of two middle-class drug addicts in Stephen’s play The Carnation Gang. ‘I then ran into him at the RSC during his second time with them in the mid-eighties. I did a starry workshop with Alan, Tilda Swinton and Juliet Stevenson. I was interested in doing a play about dreams, so we did a workshop. He and Juliet were very compelling as a weird, dark couple: brother and sister. She was druggy, he was dragging her down into a dark spiral. Essentially it was a portrait of the 70s and the 80s.
‘I gave Alan quite a lot of space when I was directing him for Close My Eyes,’ adds Poliakoff. ‘I made him feel secure; and I got the impression that not a lot of people had done that. Actors are always being judged on their physical qualities, so they’re very vulnerable.
‘Alan has big vulnerabilities. He worries that people are doing the work intelligently, and he and Juliet are big smellers of bullshit. It was the combination of Close My Eyes, Robin Hood and Truly Madly Deeply that finally made him known to the man in the street. With success, he expanded enormously in terms of his confidence. For an intelligent man, it’s difficult to sell yourself. Improvisations for directors are very tough for someone who’s intelligent. At least a writer doesn’t have to sell himself physically to a complete idiot.
‘Alan didn’t make any suggestion for the dialogue in Close My Eyes, but he did suggest wearing a baseball cap in the garden-party scene. And some of his sister’s children played the kids running around. I offered him the role of the husband Sinclair before I cast the brother and sister, and he’s renowned for being one of the longest drawn-out yes-noers in the business. He came in halfway through the shooting, and Clive Owen was slightly terrified of him. Sinclair has an opinion on everything; that’s slightly true of Alan, too.’
Close My Eyes is a (very effectively) overheated tale of incest between a brother and sister, separated when young and only meeting later when both are grown up. Their grabby intensity could be taken as a metaphor for the Yuppie 80s, particularly as parts of the film were shot in the fashionable surroundings of Docklands London. Clive Owen plays the brother and Saskia Reeves the sister, married to Rickman’s watchful but enigmatic Sinclair.
He’s supposed to be a high-powered City solicitor, though Alan was careful not to include any detailed clues to the character.
Alan used his own artistic background to collaborate closely with the costume and production designer so that Sinclair could not be put into any rigid social pigeonhole, according to an interview with Sean French in GQ magazine. ‘I didn’t want people to learn anything about him through where he lived or who his friends were.’ In other words, he is creating an archetype in this morality tale for our times.
In his own quiet way, Sinclair is having the big adult breakdown while Owen and Reeves indulge in the screaming, shouting, childish melodramatics. He finds their relationship intense, but at first he doesn’t suspect . . . or doesn’t want to. At one point, we see him pushing a cart round the supermarket and questioning certain details that don’t quite make sense. Then he sits abruptly on the floor of the shop as the truth registers. It could almost be a scene from a Woody Allen film. There is another scene on a riverbank in which Rickman’s long look at Owen says everything he dare not quite admit to himself. It’s a devastating combination of suppressed rage and vulnerability.
As Sinclair’s suspicions fester behind that outwardly calm facade, the tension becomes palpable . . . as James Delingpole pointed out in the Daily Telegraph, ‘You suspect that at any moment he might be about to commit some monstrous act of violence.’ This is a one-dimensional reading of the performance, however. It is Sinclair’s tremendous restraint that impresses: you know he knows, but he’s holding back all the time and trying to be civilised, not just for the sake of his dignity but because he feels like a clumsy, helpless outsider between the siblings. He is powerless to intervene . . . in a kinky Greek tragedy. Anyway, who wants to admit that you’ve been cuckolded by your brother-in-law? Particularly if you’re as rich – and as suavely attractive – as Rickman’s well-heeled character. Indeed, the only surprise is that Reeves finds Owen more attractive.
On the BBC’s Gloria Hunniford show in 1991, Rickman said the film showed ‘how uncertain our lives are. It’s a story about Britain in the 90s, and my character is an arch-Yuppie.’ All the torrid sex is reserved for Reeves and Owen; Rickman admits to Gloria that he kept his knickers on and Saskia her nightie during a bed-scene. ‘I remember us all giggling a bit at that point,’ says Poliakoff. ‘I’ve done a lot of hopping in and out of bed naked, but this was my first actual sex scene,’ recalled Alan. ‘Saskia whispered to me, “Did I have any knickers on?” I did. I mean, God forbid there should be any real contact.’
The female screams and whistles from the studio audience when he made his entrance on Hunniford’s show suggested that perhaps the wrong guy got his kit off (not that anyone in full possession of their faculties would kick Clive Owen out of bed). Rickman took the homage with gallantry and humour; despite the explicit letters, he tries to be polite to his fans and always signs autographs at the stage door.
‘We hadn’t even had a conversation; we had only just met again; and suddenly Alan was in bed and we had to begin that scene. It often happens like that if you go into Makeup and then straight on to the set. So I said, “Sorry, I’ll keep my underwear on,”’ remembers Saskia Reeves, who first encountered him at a play-reading at the Royal Court Theatre back in 1988. So Alan decided to preserve a bit of decorum too.
‘I like being around him because he’s such an extraordinary individual. He’s calm and extraordinarily eccentric – so different to anyone else I know,’ she says. ‘He makes me feel very relaxed. He always brings out a cheeky side in me: I tease him to make him laugh. He was very sturdy and confident and helpful on Close My Eyes. He’s a great socialiser. I invited the cast over to my flat and we sat up till all hours. I was quite surprised: he stayed the distance for lunch the next day and left in the evening.
‘It’s nice to find a kindred spirit. He’s a latter-day philanthropist, he brings people together. He’s not a parent figure, he’s my playmate. I tease him. I think he’s great.
‘In many ways, I sometimes wonder if there’s a hidden agenda with Alan. He can be quite removed: he’s like a character in a Pinter play, where the strongest person is the one who says least. I do that childish thing of teasing and tickling him. I teased and tickled my granny’s dog and eventually it bit me on the chin. But Alan has never bitten me yet . . . I try to make him laugh. I try to give him what I see him giving to others. He has this huge support-network whereby he supports and looks out for other people.
‘Sinclair in the film was a calm, solid, eccentric, tender man, rather like Alan. I’m not shy of him. I have never found him intimidating; that’s Alan. He and Rima came to see me in Stephen Poliakoffs play Sweet Panic at Hampstead Theatre in 1996, and he’s the kind of person who always knows nice places to eat. That sort of thing fascinates me about him, though I couldn’t begin to say what he’s about. I always feel very positive about him; I never feel intimidated by him.
‘Sometimes I feel as if he’s playing a game of being aloof on purpose, but it’s just the way he is. Sometimes he takes his time before he’s worked out what’s going on.’
After wall-to-wall filming, Rickman was ready to head back to theatre with the Japanese play Tango At The End Of Winter, the story of an actor in crisis. His old friend Peter Barnes adapted it for the Edinburgh Festival and the West End stage, with the legendary director Yukio Ninagawa directing it.
Rickman played Sei in the Kunio Shimuzu play about a famous matinée idol whose wife urges him to go back to the stage in order to stay sane. ‘He has the usual actor’s madness,’ Rickman told Jessica Berens in the September 1991 issue of Tatler. ‘You know, the voices inside the head. The usual . . . this is terrible, why on earth are you doing this?’ What a prophetic question; and very appropriate in these circumstances.
His hooded eyes already looked the part; he was perfect for an Asiatic role. Unfortunately, even Peter Barnes’ adaptation couldn’t save this ponderous theatrical metaphor for life. Why did Alan do it? Because it was produced by his old friend Thelma Holt, who has been called ‘the last true impresario’ of the British stage. Like Alan, she’s a dedicated internationalist. But ultimately the name of Ninagawa, the Japanese Peter Brook, sold the project to Alan. There is a mystique about Ninagawa, as with Dennis Potter, whose own flawed script for Mesmer would later involve Alan in a major law-suit and creative stalemate for the first time in his career.
Amid much publicity about rehearsals stopping for Japanese tea ceremonies, one sensed a case of the Emperor’s New Clothes.
Rickman had seen Ninagawa’s Medea and thought: ‘This is what the word “unforgettable” means.’ Not everyone agreed: I remember a fellow critic muttering ‘This is the campest thing since Sunset Boulevard’ as he and I fled to file copy at the end of the show as though our trousers were on fire.
But Rickman rationalised it to himself in an interview with Peter Lewis in The Sunday Times in 1991: ‘If you have such an experience watching someone’s work and are then asked to work with him, you are not being true to yourself unless you do,’ he said. Usually he’s too analytical and too aware of his working-class roots to gush, but this appealed to his quixotic side.
‘It wasn’t an easy decision. But there’s a voice somewhere inside that eventually packs the suitcase. It said, “If you are any good in films, it’s only because of what you do in the theatre.” Hence the sideways move in what many have seen as a quirky career. But as Albert Finney once pointed out, actors don’t ascend a great golden staircase to the heavens – it doesn’t work like that.
Rather more prosaically, Ninagawa had chosen Rickman for the lead after seeing him in Die Hard – wherein he shot a Japanese tycoon in the head. He had also caught a preview of Truly Madly Deeply.
Ninagawa is clearly not cocooned from reality, even if he does issue such statements as: ‘The playwright is the mother, the actors are the father, and between them they bear the child called Theatre. As director, I am only the midwife.’
And the critics played King Herod. I reviewed the première at Edinburgh for the Daily Express: ‘Only the legendary status of Yukio Ninagawa can have persuaded Hollywood’s favourite British villain Alan Rickman to star in this empty domestic epic about a Japanese actor’s mid-life crisis. Yet even he flounders in a cliché-ridden play laden with pretentious symbolism.’
Yet Ninagawa had directed, in Japanese, an unforgettable world-class production of Macbeth, with the fall of the cherry blossom symbolising the death of the tyrant and a Samurai parallel with medieval Scotland’s war-like hordes.
Tango At The End Of Winter was Ninagawa’s first production with a British cast of actors. He didn’t speak English, so they communicated via an interpreter. Ninagawa did his own casting by making people talk about themselves at their auditions while he watched their facial expressions.
Tango was a popular hit in Japan in 1988, but the predominantly female audiences there worship actors. A play on such a subject was bound to succeed, whereas in the West we see it more as a self-referential indulgence. The action was set in the shabby auditorium of a defunct cinema, with tattered curtains fluttering at the entrance to symbolise the transience of life. Figures from the actor’s past appeared and reappeared as if in a dream, summoned by memory, as he struggled with his madness. Acting styles varied wildly, given the language barrier between director and cast. Sylvia Syms’ talented daughter, Beatie Edney, played Rickman’s mistress, having appeared alongside Alan on Broadway in Les Liaisons Dangereuses. Friends believe that Beatie had a big crush on Rickman; an impression strengthened by the fact that later she dated his lookalike, a morose young actor called Ronan Vibert who is frivolously known as ‘Moanin’ Ronan’. He has never quite forgiven the London Evening Standard for calling him the poor man’s Alan Rickman in the BBC bodice-ripper The Buccaneers. Ronan certainly has a piratical smile but not, as yet, Alan Rickman’s gracefulness and subtlety.
The elliptical Tango was not popular with either reviewers or public at the Piccadilly Theatre, at the time a somewhat jinxed venue that had had more than its fair share of flops (it has since recovered its fortunes with a string of hits).
David Nathan in the Jewish Chronicle wrote: ‘Sei’s plight is not gripping, especially as conveyed by Alan Rickman, who . . . declines from his usual melancholic lassitude into terminal lethargy.’
Benedict Nightingale in The Times thought it lacked coherence as Rickman reeled about, ‘filling the stage with his sardonic self-absorption’, in the role of the actor who goes mad because he fears he has lost his talent. Could this be a dry-run for Hamlet?
‘“This is embarrassing,” announces Alan Rickman halfway through, and the guy ain’t joking,’ wrote Lyn Gardner in City Limits. Jack Tinker in the Daily Mail found Rickman ‘languid to the point of torpor’.
Yet Michael Billington in the Guardian felt that ‘the play is a dense tissue of allusions to Hamlet, Six Characters In Search Of An Author, Casablanca, Limelight and an old Ronald Colman movie . . . Rickman exactly captures the Hamlet-like melancholy, the doomed romanticism, the exquisite narcissism of this falling star. It . . . makes me hope someone will cast Rickman as Shakespeare’s gloomy Dane forthwith.’ Someone did: Thelma Holt a year later.
Although the finale featured a beautiful transformation-scene, most critics, nevertheless, felt the journey there wasn’t worth the effort.
The lack of narrative drive made it a difficult vehicle for the West End, which at least demands a good story from its artier endeavours. So the production was a commercial failure, despite a strictly limited season that turned out to be something of a loss-cutting exercise. Alan’s old English teacher Ted Stead feels strongly about it to this day. ‘Alan was very disappointed with the reaction to Tango At The End Of Winter,’ says Stead, who took a party of schoolboys to see Alan’s performance. ‘Alan found eight performances a week very trying and demanding, and the reception was lukewarm. He was going to do Peer Gynt with the same director, but that never materialised.
‘I’m convinced it flopped because Alan wasn’t allowed to have star billing in the West End; it was the director who got the billing,’ argues Ted, who believes that the crowds would have come if Alan’s name had been prominently displayed. Certainly, Peter Barnes testifies to the enthusiasm of the Rickman fans that did make it to the stage door. But Thelma Holt explains: ‘Alan specifically didn’t want star billing. It was an ensemble company, therefore the billing was alphabetical.’ And Alan himself had gamely told the Sunday Times’ Peter Lewis on 4 August 1991: ‘I’m trying to make myself like an empty vessel, a piece of equipment labelled actor.’ This was test-tube theatre.
In Japan, Ninagawa is a god whose word is not questioned. For once, Alan didn’t argue; and he was also obliged to submit to the strict regime of the Taiwanese director Ang Lee on the film Sense And Sensibility five years later. All very noble in the cause of good global relations, but such self-effacing modesty just didn’t make commercial sense in the West End where Alan Rickman would have brought the faithful flocking to theatre’s equivalent of Eric Cantona, had the billing deified the right guy. Alan’s fans had to search for his name near the end of the list underneath the banner headline ‘The Ninagawa Company’. In retrospect, it was pointlessly purist of him. His talent and personality elevate him.
In a curious twist ten years later, the Texas frontwoman Sharleen Spiteri was to recruit him as her dancing partner in the video for ‘In Demand’ and thus enhance his street-cred even more. As she explained, ‘I thought it had to be someone who would rip your coat off and pull you into the tango, so I thought of Alan Rickman.’ Well, quite. Who wouldn’t? He does rather throw himself into these things, as Emma Thompson found out when he whirled her round the room at a Sense And Sensibility location party.
But the bold experiment in international theatre was not to be the last for Alan and Thelma. They had taken the hint about Hamlet.