Alan Rickman (11 page)

In the
Glasgow Herald
, Christopher Small thought he looked like ‘Lady Ottoline Morrell' – something of a mixed compliment, unless you're a tiresome Bloomsbury groupie.

‘Alan Rickman is handsome, graceful and inventively funny as Wittipol and a couple of ladies!' noted another writer in the
Observer
of 8 May, while John Barber in the
Daily Telegraph
admired ‘Mr Rickman's capital scene when, disguised as a Spanish lady, he imposes himself on society and reels off a wonderful recipe for painting the face.'

‘Alan Rickman caresses Anna Calder-Marshall with the most honeyed, erotic words imaginable,' wrote the
Sunday Telegraph
in a ferment of lather. A photograph in the
Coventry Telegraph
proves that Alan looked more like Charley's Aunt than a Spanish lady, although the
Guardian
kindly compared him with Fenella Fielding.

The previous year, Alan had also played Sherlock Holmes for Birmingham Rep, still looking like an overpromoted schoolboy under the deerstalker. ‘Although looking a little young for the part, he catches just the right combination of
fin de siècle
cynicism and scientific curiosity,' opined the
Birmingham Post
.

The
Sunday Mercury
was almost orgasmic over this new discovery: ‘Holmes is played with superb coolness and languid authority by Alan Rickman in a performance which interweaves touches of melodrama with masterpieces of understatement in such an absorbing and funny fashion that it dazzles the audience. Others on stage therefore look grey and we have the odd phenomenon of a one-man show with a cast of more than 20.'

Castle Bromwich News
also rhapsodised: ‘The play is worth seeing for Alan Rickman's superb tongue-in-cheek portrayal.' But the
Express & Star
was vitriolic: ‘Alan Rickman's Sherlock Holmes behaves like a supercilious prefect, whose deductions are one-upmanships more than shrewd observations. His most common expression is a smirk, which one longs for David Suchet's bald domed Moriarty to wipe off his face.' (Temper, temper!)

Yet
Redbrick
, the Birmingham University paper, knew a man who could wear a deerstalker when it saw one: ‘Alan Rickman's brilliantly funny performance as Holmes . . . rightly dominates the stage and keeps the subtle humour flowing.'

All of which was most encouraging, so he took the logical next step up and auditioned for the Royal Shakespeare Company at a time when, as Adrian Noble recalls, ‘. . . it was an odd year, a fantastically competitive one'.

In 1978, Alan joined the RSC, and Ruby went too for a series of small roles that she was later to describe as ‘chief wench'. It was a period in his life that was to prove disastrous for his development and very nearly led to him leaving the profession for good. Alan Rickman does not thrive on gladiatorial combat against other actors; an uncompetitive soul, he withdraws broodily into his shell instead. That passive aggression comes out when he retreats into his citadel as if he were playing life as a game of Chinese chess.

In 1994 he told his former Leicester colleague Jude Kelly at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in front of an audience of 750: ‘I was miscast very quickly in national companies. I was unhappy very quickly and I ran very quickly! Within four years of leaving drama school, I ran away from the Royal Shakespeare Company and found the Bush Theatre and Richard Wilson, a wonderful theatre director who taught me stuff I needed to know.

‘You go to places like Stratford and learn how to bark in front of 1,500 people. You're taught that talking to people on stage isn't very valuable and that what you should do is shout. I met Richard Wilson and he was my saviour.'

It was at the RSC that Alan first met Juliet Stevenson. She has since become such an inseparable friend and collaborator that the playwright Stephen Davis mischievously calls Rickman and Stevenson ‘the Lunts of our day' after the rather grand Broadway actors Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, famously despised by anti-hero Holden Caulfield in
The Catcher In The Rye
.

‘Alan was always rather intimidating,' Juliet told
GQ
magazine in 1992. ‘We first met when Ruby and I were playing Shape One and Shape Two in
The Tempest
with plastic bags over our heads.

‘I was quite frightened of him, but he was very kind and sort of picked me up in a non-sexual way. He had a talent for collecting people and encouraging them.'

He went there with what he called ‘a burning idealism' and was inevitably disappointed. One RSC director told James Delingpole in the
Daily Telegraph
in 1991: ‘When he first came to Stratford, it was terribly embarrassing. There was one season when he was so awful that we had a directors' meeting and we asked each other, “What are we going to do with him?” Then he just grew up and suddenly everyone wanted this wonderful new leading man.'

Clifford Williams, his director for a notoriously jinxed production of
The Tempest
in which Alan played the rather forgettable part
of Miranda's suitor Ferdinand, remembers all the problems with a polite shudder.

The lasers broke down on the first night and Sheridan Fitzgerald, who played Miranda, cut her nose very badly on a piece of jutting scenery. The stage looked like an abattoir as a result.

‘Alan was difficult in rehearsal; he even found difficulties in lifting logs,' admits Clifford. ‘But there were problems with the production. We got on well, though.

‘Mind you, I also thought I got on very well with Michael Hordern, who played Prospero. Then I went into Smiths to buy his autobiography and in it he had referred to me as “that boring man” – it was such a shock.

‘I recall distinctly that Alan was very meticulous, anxious to rehearse everything inordinately. We ran out of time. I got rather impatient at the time, I must admit. He had terrific charisma, slouched about and had this deep slurred voice. He was always examining things. He questioned rather more than the part of Ferdinand warranted, frankly.

‘This was the 1970s, yet he wasn't at all the hippie type. He was a contradiction in terms: extremely acute and questioning, and sometimes appeared almost antagonistic.

‘But physically he was very relaxed, almost
louche
, slouching, with a slurred voice. He was an odd paradox. He struck me as a rather modern actor, by which I mean he questioned, he was his own man. He was not quite part of some RSC tradition.

‘I think he was of the Jonathan Miller school: not keen on projecting. In the RSC's Royal Shakespeare Theatre at Stratford-upon-Avon, you have to push it out. It's not an intimate theatre. Eventually he was extremely good, though the production wasn't. I'm afraid it wasn't,' allows Clifford, ‘the cat's whiskers. And Alan seemed to lack energy in rehearsal. But I couldn't be unaffectionate about him, though I certainly could about some other actors whom I won't mention.

‘I think he was being deliberately laid-back: he wanted not to get too quickly involved in things, he was trying to pace himself. But you realised he was not relaxed at all. Yet he struck me as always totally sincere. I never felt he was playing tricks to conceal anything, as some do.

‘He would make an extremely good Prospero now – he has the weight and the clarity,' adds Clifford.

‘I remember him as always hitching up his jeans with his sweater hanging down over it, standing with hands on hips and looking out front and saying, “Weeeelll . . .” He was rather reserved. I have a feeling that he wished he wasn't there – he was not entirely happy. There was something in the environment of the RSC that didn't suit him. He was a bit in check, holding back. He certainly behaved in a professional way, but he was a bit stiff.

‘He was uncertain, insecure. It's a
sine qua non
of their profession. Actors are dealing with their emotions, so perhaps they tend to get worked up more. They are cast on their physical appearance, no matter how one tries to avoid it. So they don't always get to play the parts they feel are within them. It's the Fat Hamlet syndrome.'

Peter Barnes offers another insight into that production: ‘I remember him and David Suchet laying into the director of
The Tempest
in David's narrow-boat. Alan asked me for tips for stage business for Ferdinand, and I suggested picking up a really big log in the fuel-gathering scene. Clifford Williams cut it out. So I then suggested going to the other extreme to make a point and fastidiously picking up a tiny twig!

‘Most theatre directors are arrogant and incompetent,' adds Peter, who has directed many of his plays himself. ‘Over 50 per cent of the plays are directed by the actors. The arrogance and ignorance of directors is astonishing. Most of them come from the universities. Alan doesn't like directors either; he's diplomatic, but underneath he's as venomous as I am.'

Sheridan Fitzgerald left the acting profession to become a theatrical agent and has never regretted it. She traces her disenchantment to that season with Alan at the RSC and vividly remembers their unhappiness at playing such mismatched lovers.

‘I didn't enjoy the role of Miranda, but I would never be a Juliet, either. That natural innocence is not me . . . I'm something of a practical beast. I went off to do a bit of TV afterwards, but I wanted to grow up. You have to remain a child for ever as an actor. It's a very victim position to be in. As an agent, I can grow old at my own pace.

‘Acting is very vocational. I didn't have that vocation, and at first I wondered whether Alan did either. He was miscast the first time round at the RSC. I thought the place was like a boarding-school. I looked at him, and thought. “THAT'S my Ferdinand??!” He just wasn't a romantic young leading man.

‘You can do Ferdinand if you come on looking like a dish. Alan, bless him, did not look like a dish.

‘At first he looks quite evil' (and with Sheridan, this is meant as a compliment). ‘So there he was, looking evil, and Miranda is supposed to be a complete innocent. Frankly I felt that his Ferdinand and my Miranda were heading for a shotgun wedding.

‘It was a jinxed production: Clifford Williams had a motorbike accident shortly after we opened. And then an actress called Susannah Bishop tore an Achilles tendon, so Juliet Stevenson had to step in.

‘A lot of egoes were crashing around in that production. Ian Charleson was sulking because he was trying to play the sprite Ariel as a political figure.

‘Alan announced he didn't like playing young lovers. He tried to bring out the humour instead, and I developed my gallows-humour as a result,' says Sheridan with a wry laugh. ‘I was never part of the wining, dining, clubbing set at the RSC that he seemed to be part of. He immediately took to Ruby Wax and Juliet Stevenson – I thought they could easily play brother and sister, or husband and wife. I was not part of Ruby's circle: they would punt down the river, do anything that was fun and vibrant.

‘In fact, there was something slightly withdrawn about Alan. He was not part of the bridge-game clique. I had the impression that the girls were cheering him up and he was appreciating their qualities, especially Ruby. No one could see what she was doing at the RSC. So it was an almost charmed circle.

‘Ian Charleson was another friend, they had the same political perspective,' adds Sheridan of the actor who went on to make his name in the Oscar-winning film
Chariots Of Fire
but later died, tragically young, of an AIDS-related illness. ‘The common denominator with Ruby, Juliet, Alan, Ian and also Fiona Shaw is that they were all risk-takers. I remember when Juliet took over from Susannah at short notice. She was playing a part in the masque, and suddenly we realised she had something.

‘That drawling university articulation in Alan's speech was not unfriendly, but I would never have guessed that he came from the working classes. I can't imagine him as a juvenile in rep. There was always a certain amount of maturity in him. I could never imagine him as a silly young man.

‘He certainly had the capacity to be brilliant, but he was totally miscast as Ferdinand. He would have been a very funny Trinculo
instead. Bless him, he tried. I think he knew he was miscast, but I think he felt he still had to try.

‘And of course you have to learn to shout with the RSC. With Ciss Berry (Cicely Berry, the famous voice coach), you put five inches on your rib-cage.

‘Alan's voice goes with his body-language – slow-moving. The arrogance that says, “I will not be hurried . . .” There's an impression of arrogance. I found that arrogance quite threatening, but I remember his moments of gentleness too. His drawling voice and languid body seem contemptuous, but you eventually find that he isn't.

‘It could have been a defence mechanism. Actors have to put on so many shells . . . if they're allowed to keep their clothes on, that is. One of the first questions I ask new clients these days is, “Now how do you feel about nudity?”

‘But Alan realised I was unhappy at the RSC, and we would go off together to try to make things work out. His whole voice changed then; he lost the actor's drawl and he became far more friendly.

‘He had a lot of wit about him. He was into intelligent conversation, a wicked sense of fun. I came more and more to the idea of Alan really liking women: he likes their minds, and he had a big female coterie around him. He admires women's minds; so many men just want you for your body. He recognises talent; and he has a soft side. It's enormously flattering to Rima that he's interested in women's minds, because he's so witty and dry.

‘It was mentioned that he had a steady girlfriend, but it was never overloaded into the conversation. It was just understood that he was spoken for. But none of the other men came into the Green Room or the dressing-room for long chats in the way that he would. There was this appeal about Alan. He would flirt, but in a non-threatening way. In an enormously flattering way. His moral code, his fidelity to Rima, is a grown-up side to him; so many actors remain children.