Alan Rickman (2 page)

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.

I interviewed Alan Rickman over the telephone in 1982 for a feature in the
Daily Express
on his performance as the oleaginous supercreep Obadiah Slope in
The Barchester Chronicles.
This breakthrough role introduced him to millions and made women, in particular, aware of his perverse sexiness. In that role, he sulked for Britain. He sounded suspicious to the point of hostility until I started inserting a few jokes about Slope into the conversation to lighten the atmosphere. I could almost hear the Titanic-sized iceberg slowly cracking up and defrosting at the other end of the line as the voice relaxed.

Given that he was playing a woman-chaser with such slithery conviction, questions about his own domestic set-up seemed justifiable, especially since he had managed to reach the age of 36 without the ritual march to the altar. In appropriately churlish Slope mode, Alan refused to discuss his private life. Later, someone told me that he had lived with the same woman for a long time. Just how long, not even their best friends knew.

I was subsequently to discover that Rima Horton and Alan Rickman have been together since the mid-60s, an impressive record by any standards whether in or out of wedlock. He met Rima, a labourer's daughter who became an economist and politician, at Chelsea College of Art in 1965. They appeared on stage in various amateur productions when he was nineteen and she was a year younger. That early shared interest plus his exact
age – Alan is as vain as the next man – and his second name of Sidney were his most closely-guarded secrets. Not even Rima's friends knew that she was once an actress in the dreaded Ham Dram; perhaps she is too embarrassed to mention it in the same breath as Alan's career.

They are considered to have one of the strongest relationships in the business despite – or perhaps because of – the absence of children. It has survived the setting up of separate flats, when Alan decided he needed his own space and moved out of Rima's apartment to buy a maisonette.

Though the decision alarmed all their friends for quite a while, the arrangement seems to suit them both. So far they are as solid as ever. If he is a pessimist, she is an optimist. ‘Rima has a very sunny nature, she's very pragmatic with her feet on the ground,' says Peter Barnes. ‘It helps that she's not in the profession herself, a great help.' Espousing the easy-go attitudes of the 60s, they have never bothered to get married. Who needs a ring for commitment? Yet Peter Barnes, Alan's oldest friend after Rima, told me when I met up with him again over a plate of oysters in August 2002 that he had a gut feeling Alan and Rima would suddenly surprise everyone and tie the knot one day after all. ‘I'm expecting their marriage to happen; it's the old romantic in me. And as he goes up the aisle, I shall be laughing madly,' Peter added fondly. Such steadfastness is remarkable in Rickman's peripatetic profession, since he necessarily spends much of his time abroad on location. ‘Rima and Alan are like-minded people – it's a common-law marriage of true minds,' says the playwright Stephen Davis. ‘They were once in CND together. They argue a lot about politics.' Indeed, a fervent political discussion is their idea of a good night in.

Alan has acknowledged that the reason for their relationship's longevity is that Rima is ‘tolerant. She's incredibly, unbelievably tolerant. Possibly a candidate for sainthood.' And why, pray, does she need to be so tolerant? ‘Because I'm an actor,' he added, only too aware of the self-obsession and insecurity that his profession breeds. ‘I've never learned that trick of leaving business behind in the rehearsal room; I bring all problems home, I brood. But Rima just laughs and goes straight to the heart of the matter. No matter what problems she has, she puts her head on the pillow and goes straight to sleep.' Sounds like the perfect personality for politics,
an arena where only the calm (or thick-skinned) survive. Actors, on the other hand, can, and certainly do, use their neuroses in their work. As the film director Mike Newell was later to say: ‘Alan is neurotic but intense, incredibly focused and authoritative as an actor. All his insecurities as a person are completely healed by acting.'

Certainly it was impossible to imagine the mean-spirited, calculating Slope, forever in pursuit of rich widows and richer livings, as having a stable home life. Obadiah was anybody's, if they were wealthy enough. But Alan's remote air gives him an unattainable quality, which makes him a challenge; hence the intense female interest in him.

As the theatrical agent Sheridan Fitzgerald, his former leading lady at the RSC, remarks: ‘Women are always falling in love with the unattainable.'

‘Alan's too serious to be flirtatious,' says Jules Wright. ‘He's not aware of his attractiveness, which of course is what makes him really sexy on stage. He's very grunge to look at in his private life, he doesn't run around flashily at the Ivy,' she adds, referring to the famous showbusiness restaurant in London's West End.

Rickman slops around in blue jeans and polytechnic-lecturer jackets in real life, looking deliberately downbeat. With his hair brushed forward over his forehead, he is almost unrecognisable. There are times when he looks as if he shops at Oxfam, although Peter Barnes, whose only sartorial concession to his own success has been to grow a beard, playfully points out that ‘if he dresses down, he dresses down very expensively these days. But he's more or less the same Alan.'

‘You won't find Alan guzzling champagne in some nightclub or driving a fast car,' says another friend, drama-school principal Peter James. ‘He's like Bob Geldof – scruffy, yet asking serious questions.'

The forces of political correctness maketh the New Man, of course, and actor Christopher Biggins has the feeling that Alan is ‘. . . snobby. I often see him at dos and I think he looks like a maths teacher. He comes across as a sexual animal; you feel he's going to be brilliant in bed. But you wouldn't think he's an actor. There's no reaction. No sense of humour. Of course, he may be very, very nervous.'

(And with Mr Biggins – who has quite an edge to him under that jovial exterior – glowering at the apparent reincarnation of his least
favourite teacher, who can blame him? But Biggins was right about the sexual aura, if a later remark by Rickman himself is anything to go by. ‘Sitting around a table with good friends, some sympathy, nice wine, good talk, what could be better than that? Except sex? Or getting it right on stage,' he said, leaving us in little doubt how highly he placed sex as a priority. Because Rickman would never include any other leisure activity in the same order of importance as stage acting without meaning exactly what he said.)

‘There is a chip on the shoulder. It doesn't surprise me that he was brought up on a council estate; so was I. But you either have a chip or you deal with it,' says Christopher, who makes no bones about being a true-blue Tory. ‘These champagne socialists are very odd. I have a feeling that Alan surrounds himself with a close circle who are very protective. Some people don't want fame. They like it; but they don't want it,' he adds shrewdly.

Rickman's first property purchase back in 1989 was a spacious maisonette, part of an elegant Italianate terrace of Victorian houses in west London's fashionable Westbourne Grove. In 2001, he sold up and moved on to an even larger flat nearby. When he can, he pops over to France to a holiday cottage.