Alan Rickman (10 page)

Patrick (Paddy) Wilson, now a theatre producer, was an acting ASM (Assistant Stage Manager) with Alan on their first job together at Manchester Library Theatre.

‘He hasn't changed over the years,' says Paddy. ‘There are no airs and graces about Alan. At Manchester, he played the Inquisitor in
St Joan
while I played an English soldier. As the Inquisitor, he acted everyone else off the stage. You got a sort of tingling at the back of the neck when he came on.' Indeed, the
Daily Telegraph
critic Charles Henn called him ‘superbly chilling'.

‘He was a very private guy: he was never one of the lads, going out to the boozer,' adds Paddy. ‘He took things very seriously – acting was his life and he worked very hard at it. I played the butler in
There's A Girl In My Soup
and Alan played the Peter Sellers role. I knew I would miss a cue line to come on with a bag of bagels . . . and I was two or three scenes too early. Alan was so funny about it – Bernard Hill [Paddy was his producer for a revival of Arthur Miller's
A View From The Bridge
] would have chopped my head off.

‘But Alan would discuss things if you've got a problem. He's never a frightening person.

‘Alan was bloody hopeless as an ASM – wouldn't know one end of a broom from the other. But stage management was obviously not what he was destined for. Bernard Hill said to me “I'm going to be a fucking star” and he meant it. With Alan, when you have someone that talented, their career is marked out for them. The jobs come to them.'

Paddy and Alan claim to have really bonded when they played chickens together in the panto
Babes In The Wood
, although their shared socialism obviously helped.

‘Alan is not a grand person; he's not on a star routine. There's no flashy motorcar. A lot of people change, but not him. He's just Alan Rickman. Bernard Hill has changed so much, and he was an acting ASM as well. When you first meet Alan, you think he's almost arrogant – there's an aloofness. He speaks very slowly: “Hiiiii . . . I'm Alan Rickman.” I talk nineteen to the dozen, and it took me a while to get used to his way.

‘You always feel there's something special about him. He had a fantastic presence on stage. I see him quite a bit still, and he's just
the same. We think alike politically; I'm the only socialist theatre producer I know. Everyone else in the business wants to be a member of the Garrick Club.'

The theatre director, Clare Venables, was also an actor in the same company. ‘I was St Joan to Alan's Inquisitor. We were never intimate friends, but he had a presence even then. Very calm, very much of a piece. He's changed remarkably little. I never got the feeling of him being grubby and stressed-out like most ASMs.

‘
Lock Up Your Daughters
was a terrible production. I did the choreography. Alan played an old man behind a newspaper and sat on the side of the stage like a Muppet critic. He came out with acid comments about what was going on. I don't remember him ever doing the drama-queen stuff that most people do.

‘There was something quite significant about him having had other irons in the fire, what with his background as an artist. He was someone who was looking rather quizzically at this profession that he'd entered.

‘Controlled rage is quite a trick, and he had it. It was always pretty clear that he was a one-off – which is a sureish sign that there's real talent there. He has a very clear, self-contained way of speaking. That, and his stillness are two great qualities.'

Gwenda Hughes was also an ASM at Manchester at that time, along with the actress Belinda Lang (who is still a friend of Alan's and lived for years in the next street to his in Westbourne Grove). ‘He was very clever – tall, brainy, talented and rather scary,' was Gwenda's impression of this aloof creature.

The tall, brainy and scary one moved on to two Leicester theatres, the Haymarket and the Phoenix, in 1975. There he made friends with a young actress called Nicolette (Niki) Marvin who is now a Hollywood producer. Both were late starters to acting, since Niki had trained as a dancer; and both became impatient with the empty-headed, unfocused time-wasters who didn't knuckle down to hard work. It was an obvious bond; and, if Rickman gets his heart's desire to direct a film in Hollywood, Niki Marvin will be his producer.

The two Leicester theatres were both run by Michael Bogdanov, later to be sued (unsuccessfully) for obscenity by ‘clean-up' campaigner Mrs Mary Whitehouse as a result of putting bare-arsed buggery on the stage of the National Theatre, though she claimed a moral victory.

He cast Alan as Paris in a production of
Romeo And Juliet
, with the classically beautiful Jonathan Kent (who went on to run London's fashionable Almeida Theatre with Ian McDiarmid) as Romeo. Frankly, Alan just didn't
look
like one of life's Romeos, though facial hair was to improve him no end in later years.

‘Alan wasn't actually very impressive as Paris,' admits Bogdanov. ‘He was very rhetorical and not very good at fights. But there was a strength and stillness and controlled passion about him.

‘We live in the same political ward. His lady and mine are very good friends. He's an absolutely natural person: there's no side to him. His own ego is not to the fore all the time; he has a sense of humour. The cult of “luvvyism” is vastly exaggerated; actors by and large are sober people.

‘He was very striking-looking at Leicester, but I can't say that I thought he stood out fantastically, because I had a wonderful company of extroverts . . . people like the director Jude Kelly and Victoria Wood's husband, Geoff Durham.

‘But Alan was a wonderful company member, supportive of everything that happened. He mucked in with simple chores, a very prized quality that is quite often in short supply. He was very focused, intellectually very advanced, so he was able to get to the heart of a problem very quickly. He did street work with children, too.

‘It was a very democratic company – even the cleaner had a casting vote for the programme. But after a while, I decided to abandon that because I thought being a dictator was good for the drama.'

A picture of Alan in a group shot for
Guys And Dolls
, directed by Robin Midgley and Robert Mandell, shows a Guy in long blond hair with designer stubble, flared trousers and plimsolls. Attitude is already his middle name. He's easily the most self-possessed of the bunch as he stares hard, almost challengingly, at the camera in a ‘You lookin' at me?' kind of way. Another tough-guy role followed as Asher, one of Joseph's bad brothers in the Lloyd-Webber/Rice musical
Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat
.

It was in 1976, when he joined the Sheffield Crucible, that Alan Rickman met an amusing mouth-almighty from Chicago called Ruby Wax. They shared a flat. He argued with her about the central-heating levels and all kinds of other domestic niggles; but she consistently made him laugh. She was not your average
repertory company player; she didn't really seem to be a jobbing actress, because the personality was too big to play anyone but herself.

It was Rickman who persuaded her to start writing comedy. And thus was forged a lifelong friendship . . . most of Alan's friendships are lifelong. Ruby, forever playing the stage American, reckons that Rickman gave her a class that she might otherwise never have had (oh, come now). For his part, he admired her ‘recklessness and daring'. In truth, she knocked a few of his corners off.

Alan needs funny friends to lift him out of the glooms; and the playwright Peter Barnes became another when Alan was cast in Peter's new version of Ben Jonson's
The Devil Is An Ass
for Birmingham Rep. Indeed, it's not too fanciful to see Peter, fifteen years his senior, as another surrogate father; he is certainly completely frank about Alan in the manner of a fond but plain-speaking parent.

‘I have done eleven shows with him,' says Peter. ‘We have been friends since 1976 and I've worked with him more than anyone else. 1976 was the first play, my adaptation of
The Devil Is An Ass.
He had a beautiful voice for the poetry and read it exquisitely. He told me, “I saw
The Ruling Class
on TV and it changed my life.” So I said to Stuart Burge, the director of
The Devil Is An Ass
, “Well, we've got to have HIM.”

‘Alan has a humour of his own,' insists Barnes. ‘He brings a great talent to comedy. The thing is that he's terribly, depressingly gloomy in rehearsal like other great actors of comedy – one thinks of Tony Hancock.

‘Joy is not a word that springs to mind of him in the rehearsal room. He's a bit of a misery-guts. I want to enjoy art, want other people to enjoy it. I said to him, “You bring the rainclouds with you and it rains for the next four weeks.” I have to be careful it doesn't spread; that's up to the director. But it springs from the best of motives: he's never satisfied and wants to get it right. Doesn't alter the fact that it's there. But Alan can laugh at himself,' adds Peter. ‘When we were working together on the revue
The Devil Himself
, I said to him, “I hope we are going to have a lot of laughs, dancing and singing, with this one, but is that really you, Alan?” He burst out laughing at my image of him going around with a raincloud over his head; I remember it vividly.

‘He's very “Keep Death Off The Roads”. I find his gloom very funny – it's “Eeyoreish” and endearing. People feel affectionate
towards his “Eeyoreish” personality, because they wonder what great tragedy lies behind it. He seems to have some private demons.

‘One goes through various stages with friends, blowing hot and cold, but one of the reasons I like Alan is that he has a very good heart under that curmudgeonly exterior. When Stuart Burge, who was one of my favourite directors, died at the beginning of 2002, Alan phoned me up and said he would like to go to the funeral,' says Barnes, who wrote the 84-year-old Burge's obituary in the
Guardian.
‘It was very touching when Alan came, and it's one of the reasons I hope I will always be his friend. There are certain lOUs you pick up in your life and you should always honour them. Stuart was the one who really got Alan into London from the provinces with my version of
The Devil Is An Ass
, because it went to Edinburgh and then to the National; that was Alan's first exposure to the West End. I think it was very good of him to remember what Stuart had done for him; I think it shows a very strong loyalty which I place very high as a virtue. He has integrity. Some like to think they did it all on their own, but Alan doesn't make that mistake.

‘Most actors have a feminine side. He manages to be feline without being camp, and does it very well. He designed the posters for my play
Antonio
in which he starred at the Nottingham Playhouse. I joked about the photograph of him as Antonio: “There you are, camping it up.” But in fact he's not camp at all.'

It's rather difficult to credit that, what with Alan's eyes ringed in kohl, his hair bleached and permed and that pout in place. He looks like a decadent thirtysomething cherub suffering from orgy-fatigue.

‘The vanity of an actor is endearing,' observes Peter. ‘Alan doesn't really like being recognised, but he doesn't like not being recognised either. If they aren't recognised, they don't exist. It reminds me of a story about Al Pacino who took great pains not to be recognised – and then complained when he wasn't.'

It was in that hectic year of 1977 that Alan and Rima, still an item after twelve years, decided to move in together.

Although he was doing the dreary rounds of theatrical digs in the provinces, they wanted to show their commitment to each other. So they rented a small, first-floor flat in a three-storey white Victorian terrace on the edge of upmarket Holland Park. It was a
quiet, private haven just minutes away from the gridlock of the Shepherd's Bush roundabout, a major west London intersection. Alan was to stay there for the next twelve years.

‘With actors, you are buying their personality so you do want to know a bit about their private life. With a writer, it's usually only the writing that people are interested in. There were hundreds of girls waiting for Alan at the stage door when he was doing my version of the Japanese play
Tango At The End Of Winter
in the West End. One of the fans recognised me as the adapter one night and asked for my autograph – but only one,' says Peter with a mixture of regret and relief.

Another old friend from those days is the director, Adrian Noble, who first met Alan in 1976 when Alan and Ruby joined the Bristol Old Vic, where Adrian was an associate director. ‘He was in almost the first play I ever directed, back in 1976: Brecht's
Man Is Man
. I stayed with him on a few occasions in an old town house that he shared with Ruby.

‘Then he came to Birmingham and did
Ubu Rex
. He played the multi-murderess Ma Ubu, Mrs Ubu, alongside Harold Innocent. Alan was a hoot. There's a side to him that's a real grotesque, and it was first seen as Ma Ubu. I still have a photograph of Alan as Ma, sitting on the toilet and soliloquising with a wig on. Though he doesn't normally like wigs.'

In Bristol, Alan found himself playing next door to Thin Lizzy, and later confessed in a
Guardian
interview with Heather Lawton in 1986 to being ‘knocked out by their high-octane excitement. I'm not trying to be a rock group, but there's got to be a version of that excitement – otherwise theatre is a waste of time.'

Rickman's association with Peter Barnes was auspicious from the start (
Tango At The End Of Winter
is, indeed, their only flop). Barnes' version of
The Devil Is An Ass
earned excellent reviews when it travelled to the Edinburgh Festival and the National Theatre.

Alan embarked on yet another drag role as Wittipol, the lovestruck gallant who disguises himself as a flirtatious Spanish noblewoman. The
Daily Telegraph
wrote from Edinburgh of the ‘Superb effrontery by Alan Rickman', while Alan's Latymer Upper contemporary Robert Cushman's succinct
Observer
review said it all: ‘Alan Rickman speaks breathtaking verse while in drag.' Well, he'd been to the right school for it.