Alan Rickman (3 page)

Until his mother's death in 1997, he lived just three tube stops away from her neat council house, only a few streets from Wormwood Scrubs prison with a bingo palace, DIY superstore and snooker hall nearby. His mother and younger brother Michael bought this trim semi-detached home together under the Right To Buy scheme introduced by the Tories and deplored by all Old Labourites. Alan visited her regularly; he has always had a good relationship with his family, even though he keeps those two worlds separate most of the time.

Though he would always see his mother, he seems to find it diffficult to come to terms with his background, to fit his family into his life as an actor.

His elder brother, David, works for a graphic design company and Michael is a professional tennis coach. They live quiet and modest lives far away from showbusiness circles, though they get on well with the famous member of the family.

‘Class has been a bizarre accident that happened to Alan,' observes Stephen Davis. ‘We were the post-Beatles generation: we invented ourselves. Alan's background is a major influence on him, though. He moves in a privileged world but refuses to forget his
past. He wants to be sure that he's not confused in his own shaving mirror about who he is.'

Peter Barnes has a different perspective: ‘My own feeling is that Alan has created himself. The persona has created him; the mask becomes the face. His family look very different. Actors have created themselves, they know exactly who they are. I haven't got the same confidence he's got on the phone, but then everyone recognises his voice because most actors have distinctive voices. Whereas I always feel I have to introduce myself by saying, “It's Peter, Peter Barnes.”'

Another friend, Blanche Marvin, agrees: ‘Alan likes to feel he's his own creation.' In other words, this fiercely independent man won't be beholden to anyone.

In some ways Rickman is a man born out of his time: there's a dark and disturbing retro glamour about this saturnine actor that really fires up an audience's imagination.

He's the antithesis of the bland boy-next-door with an Everyman persona, with whose unthreatening ordinariness millions of movie-goers will identify. And costume roles particularly suit Rickman because of that air of patrician superiority. It goes with the sometimes frightening looks that recall a well-known portrait of the writer, scholar and intriguer Francis Bacon whose unblinking gaze was once likened by a contemporary observer to the stare of a watchful viper.

In an age that lets it all hang out, Rickman is famous for giving audiences more fun with his clothes on. And this despite the fact that, back in 1983, he let it all hang out in a nude scene for Snoo Wilson's play
The Grass Widow
, later recalling, ‘It was a very strange thing to do. You have to pretend that it's not happening to you.' Because of that very public early lesson in the vulnerability of standing on stage with no clothes on, he is a past-master at portraying the art of sensual anticipation and sexual control. In fact, Rickman's Valmont, a role for which he seemed to have been waiting all his life, was carefully based on a seventeenth-century rake he had played on stage with the disconcerting name of Gayman.

‘He looks like a Russian Borzoi dog, one of those silent wolfhounds with a long neck and silky white coat. You always wonder whether you should speak to a Borzoi, as well . . .' says Peter James. ‘It's his frame and physical look, a quality of stillness.
It reminds me of some astonishingly aristocratic faces I saw in Russia, who looked as if they came from a different race.' How appropriate, then, that he should later take on the role of Rasputin.

Yet, for all his air of seigneurial self-control, he has big vulnerabilities. Alan was born with a tight jaw, hence the slightly muffled drawl: it must be one of the sexiest speech defects in the business. ‘He doesn't have an active up-and-down movement of his jaw,' says Blanche Marvin, a former drama teacher.

‘It's the way that he's generally physically co-ordinated: he has a lazy physical movement and a lazy facial movement. He's big-boned, and it's hard for him to move in a sprightly way.' Hence his lifetime's obsession with trying to move with the fluidity of a Fred Astaire.

Despite the working-class upbringing, that honeyed-buzzsaw voice was perfected at private school: Latymer Upper in Hammersmith, also Hugh Grant's Alma Mater.

Rickman, a clever child, won a scholarship there at the age of eleven. The process of reinventing himself, of keeping his past at arm's length, began as English teacher Colin Turner became his mentor, much as the playwright Ben Jonson, stepson of a bricklayer, was ‘adopted' by his teacher Camden. Alan was only eight when his father died of cancer, and Turner filled that gap in his life.

Latymer Upper has been almost as great an influence upon his life as Rima continues to be. He is emotionally attached to the place that gave him such a superior start.

In the autumn of 1995, this former star pupil had a minor falling-out with his old school when he refused to allow his photograph to be used in a recruitment drive. His political convictions simply wouldn't allow him to publicly endorse a private, fee-paying education. Rickman melodramatically asserts that he was born ‘a card-carrying member of the Labour Party', but he only finally joined in 1987 after he and Rima had enjoyed a relatively frivolous youth in CND.

Rumours attach themselves like barnacles to Alan Rickman, who is famously economical with the facts about himself. There was once a wild story that this friend of former Cabinet Minister Mo Mowlam and millionaire Labour supporter Ken Follett was a member of Vanessa and Corin Redgrave's Workers' Revolutionary Party. Yet Rickman is far too straight and astute to get involved
with the lunatic fringe. He is an idealist, but he's also startlingly pragmatic.

Rima, an economics lecturer at Kingston University (formerly Polytechnic) in Surrey, who took early retirement in 2002 at the age of 55, is a Labour councillor and former prospective parliamentary candidate for Chelsea, the safest Tory seat in the country . . . hence her defeat in the 1992 General Election.

She subsequently endured the indignity of losing another battle. Despite the fact she was selected as Labour's candidate for the Mayoral elections in Kensington and Chelsea in 2001, friends now believe she is no longer looking for a safe Labour seat in Parliament but has forced herself to be philosophical. She still looks young enough to stand for election; Rima and Alan are a striking couple who could pass for a decade younger than they are. Not having had any children probably helps; so, too, does Rickman's thick, dark-blond hair, which for years he wore slightly long.

It is Rima who dictates the political and intellectual agenda. This is borne out by Peter Barnes, who recalls Alan deferring to his girlfriend's greater judgement when the two men met up at the funeral of the director Stuart Burge. After the service, Peter started raging on about the ‘iniquities' of Tony Blair's New Labour government, but Rickman refused to take the bait. ‘I'm very Old Labour and I think Alan is. At least, I hope he is. But he got very defensive at that point,' remembers Peter, ‘and said that it was more Rima's area.' Alan, who graduated from two art colleges with diplomas in art, design and graphic design, is the creative one; Rima is the academic one of the two.

Rickman is very far from being the humourless grouch that his famously cross-looking demeanour suggests. Always droll, he has mellowed a lot over the years as success has given him more confidence. His sense of humour alone would have kept him out of the paranoid ranks of the WRP, which seemed to expend most of its energies on slagging off other far-Left groups.

‘He's a bit of a Wellington with his ironic bon mots and his raised eyebrows,' says Stephen Poliakoff. ‘He's self-critical and he doesn't have a naturally sunny disposition. But he's very life-enhancing, despite the pessimism: it's a curious combination. People find his dangerous wit attractive. He's quite lugubrious, but he's also quite teasable. Some people find him intimidating, but he just has to be provoked out of a pessimistic view of the world.

‘Acting is very serious for him, but he's more relaxed now. He loves to talk. He likes to feel things are controlled; he doesn't like to feel too exposed.'

In his fifth decade, at times Rickman resembles the late Frankie Howerd, especially when his large, crumpled face is split by a great pumpkin-head grin.

One of the more endearing aspects of Alan Rickman, who is not an immediately cuddly person, is that he has never bothered to get his crooked and discoloured bottom teeth fixed. When he became a Hollywood star at a relatively late age, it didn't go to his head (or his teeth).

‘He was never one of the lads,' according to his old friend, the theatre producer Patrick (Paddy) Wilson. Alan has no interest in the stereotypical male pursuits of pubs and sports, hence his vast number of close female friends.

‘New writing and politics are his life. He has no car, no interest in sport,' says Peter Barnes, although Alan watches Wimbledon out of loyalty to his tennis-coach brother Michael. ‘He's interested in politics and the wider world,' says Stephen Poliakoff.

All this may make him sound like the career woman's ideal consort, yet he surprisingly admits that he had to have male feminism knocked into him; he was once a primitive model.

Now, surrounded by a seraglio that includes the actresses Juliet Stevenson and Harriet Walter, the comedienne Ruby Wax and the impresario Thelma Holt, he is everyone's theatrical agony uncle. ‘He's got the widest circle of friends and acquaintances I have ever known,' says Peter Barnes. ‘In the theatre, he unites opposites – because he knows so many people.'

‘The only person I know who has more friends than him is Simon Callow,' says Jenny Topper, Artistic Director of London's Hampstead Theatre and a friend of Alan's since 1981.

‘It feels nice to be around him. He has a very loyal group of female friends: not a harem, but very intense. Alan is very loyal, very protective and very kind. He has strong views. He listens: he has that concentration, hence the female friends. He's also very proper: he cares about fans at the stage door and those who seek his advice and support.

‘That gliding movement of his is almost balletic,' adds Jenny of the man who would be Fred Astaire. ‘He's a great comic actor: the secret is timing. But his humour is very dry: he doesn't suffer fools gladly.'

‘I associate him with complete integrity,' says Harriet Walter. ‘He is a central figure in a lot of people's lives. He's not a guru as such; I don't think of him as a saintly, priestly person. It's not all grovelling at the feet of the effigy. He just makes you laugh. He's like a good parent . . . there's a feeling that Alan won't let you get away with things.

‘He can be intimidating, though he doesn't realise how much. But there are precious few people whose judgement you trust, and he is one of them. I do argue with him; we don't always agree. He has pretty tough standards, but he's a very good listener. He takes you seriously, you feel encouraged.'

‘Actors are always being judged on their physical qualities, which makes them very vulnerable,' says Stephen Poliakoff. ‘And Alan has big vulnerabilities.'

‘This business gives you the impression you have to be a pretty boy and be successful before you're thirty in order to succeed,' says Royal Shakespeare Company head Adrian Noble. ‘Alan Rickman was never a pretty boy and was not successful before he was thirty.

‘He never courted success, but his success now gives people hope in a society that adores youth in a rather sickening and dangerous fashion. It's very good news for those who are not the prettiest people in the world. It gives people hope, that Alan was a play-reader at a tiny Fringe theatre like the Bush and all those other things, before he became famous.

‘He has a good mug: that big nose. You need a big nose and big hands to be a good actor: look at Michael Gambon. And in the Green Room, Alan is always surrounded by women.'

Ah, yes. One can't get away from the women in the Alan Rickman Factor. When he played a licentious Caesar in Peter Barnes' 1983 radio play
Actors
, Rickman received more ardent letters from teenaged girls than for any of his other roles.

However, it was the Vicomte de Valmont that first made his name on both sides of the Atlantic, establishing that all-important, crowd-pleasing quality of sexual danger.

Lindsay Duncan, his co-conspirator in
Les Liaisons Dangereuses
, said wryly to Allison Pearson in the
Independent on Sunday
in 1992: ‘A lot of people left the theatre wanting to have sex, and most of them wanted to have it with Alan Rickman.' Of all the original RSC cast in Howard Davies' famous, much-travelled production, Rickman is the only one to have made it on the world stage. He was
nominated for a Tony award, as was Lindsay; and it rankled heavily with Rickman when he lost the role in the 1988 film version
Dangerous Liaisons
to the younger (and balder but heavily bewigged) John Malkovich.

Instead, the real turning-point for Rickman came when he was offered the role of the German terrorist leader Hans Gruber in the Hollywood big-budget thriller,
Die Hard.
Alan's frightening degree of menace, allied to a fastidious humour, marked out a major stylist who outshone the film's star, Bruce Willis. Rickman became an international name overnight as a result of his first-ever movie, since when he has conducted a dangerous flirtation with screen villainy.

He could see himself falling into the trap of being typecast and deliberately changed pace with a performance of tremendous warmth and sensitivity as the mischievous returning spirit of Juliet Stevenson's dead lover in Anthony Minghella's 1991 low-budget hit,
Truly Madly Deeply
.

It became Britain's answer to
Ghost.
And Rickman's wry, doomed romanticism in the role eventually led to his casting as Colonel Brandon in the highly successful, Oscar-winning
Sense And Sensibility
.