Alan Rickman (15 page)

‘I could see the potential danger that, after playing it, I'd never be offered any other sort of part. But in the end, it was too good to say no. There's one part which comes along and opens a door. Antony Sher was working brilliantly for years before he did
The History Man
– and zappo! It's the same with Bernard Hill playing Yosser Hughes in
Boys From The Blackstuff
.'

Slope opened not so much a door as a Pandora's Box. And thus began Alan Rickman's lifelong Faustian contract with the devil, playing the kind of deliciously evil character of whom he fundamentally disapproved. You could call it therapy, or just magnificently ironic fun. Maybe it's an exorcism. They're all raging sexpots into the bargain; he has never played, indeed, could never play, the kind of person who is dead from the neck down. He is a very physical being.

‘I was rather surprised by the Obadiah Slope effect,' says RSC Artistic Director Adrian Noble, trying not to sound missish. ‘I had an opening night in Tunbridge Wells that year for the opera
Don Giovanni.
Alan and Rima came down for it. There was a real frisson about him, especially among women of a certain age, and it was all because of Obadiah Slope.

‘Rima was always fantastically philosophical about it; she found the female attention funny. I don't want to be sexist about it, but his Slope was fantastically charming and believable. There was a real sexual tension with Alan: he did keep you constantly wondering whether Slope does sleep with some of the women he flirts with, such as the Signora.

‘As a result, it was the most extraordinary evening. All those Tunbridge Wells ladies definitely wanted to be misled by Alan Rickman.'

IN NOVEMBER 1983,
Alan Rickman embarked upon his first nude scene with all the surface aplomb that one would have expected of him. He and Tracey Ullman were the leads in Snoo Wilson's marijuana play
The Grass Widow
in a Royal Court production by Max Stafford-Clark, a skilful director no more noticeably encumbered by inhibition than Snoo himself. All these years later, this dangerously funny play can now be seen as a precursor to
Sexy Beast
, the gangster film that begins with Ray Winstone lying in a heat haze next to a pool. Except that Winstone (the wuss) wore swimming trunks. Rickman opened the play by sunbathing in dark glasses and nothing else, delivering the first of many jolts to a startled audience. Later on in the same scene, his character Dennis clambered up on the roof of a house and perched there buck-naked except – as Snoo's stage directions helpfully pointed out – for his binoculars. Such completely matter-of-fact nudity, quite without the coyness that creates prurience, sent out a very efficient signal that anything was possible in a play which administered such early shocks.

‘Alan was a perfect Dennis; he understood the humour,' recalls Snoo. ‘And there's a quality of fastidiousness in Dennis's character which is very Alan. He did the nudity very well: there was no trouble at all, no stuff about wanting towels and so on. It makes a good stage picture to begin with nudity; people say if you are a leading actor you should be in full shot early on so that people can establish an idea of your character. So the character was completely starkers to begin with. And Alan was very much a pin-up anyway; there was already a bit of a buzz about him.'

Yet that cool which Snoo remembers was just a front: the only way Rickman could get through the nude scene was to pretend it wasn't happening to him. Years later, in
Antony and Cleopatra
, he was to envy Helen Mirren's ability to seem completely unaware of the audience – even when she went topless in the death scene.

‘One casting director spent years arguing Alan's case, because a heterosexual director had said, “He's not sexy”,' says the writer and director Stephen Poliakoff. ‘Alan flowered when he got confident.'

Fellow playwright Stephen Davis has an interesting perspective on Rickman's fatal attractiveness for women.

‘He is incredibly aware of his sexual charisma professionally. He has hordes of women writing to him, and there is evidence that it gets in the way. He wants to avoid being cast for it. He's not an exploitative person. In his private life, he's not in the remotest a sexual predator. He's incredibly vexed by this image.

‘He has a matinée idol hold over the audience. But he has enormous self-control in his life – unnervingly so – and he's tried never to play a role where his sexual charisma is the ticket money.'

Somehow the roles of the Vicomte de Valmont, the Sheriff of Nottingham, Mesmer and Rasputin have slipped through the barbed-wire. Snoo Wilson is keen for Alan to play that uninhibited occultist Aleister Crowley, the self-styled Great Beast and ‘the wickedest man alive', in a film Snoo says he has spent ‘a lifetime' trying to get off the ground. Rickman has already agreed to lend his name to the project. Can we have Satanism without the sex? I think not. It would be such a waste.

Sylvia Plath caused a sensation with the posthumously-published poem ‘Daddy' when she claimed that women craved the discipline of the fascist iron heel. The piece was a complex and belated response to the early death of her father, a German entomologist who had died when she was eight. With its incantatory rhythms, this was a dark and disturbing fantasy about the tyrannical power of a male parent with the prerogative of punishment. She breaks taboo after taboo, mocking the marriage vow as an incitement to violence and identifying herself with a Jew on the way to a Nazi death-camp. Despite its obvious ironies, the poem remains so controversial that I was refused permission by Plath's literary estate to quote from two stanzas.

This incestuous work was addressed to Hitler as a father figure. Plath was exorcising the fascist impulse, but the daring sentiments were still seen as an appalling lapse of taste and she would never have got away with voicing those uncomfortably sharp insights today. Even as they endorsed the attack on an aggressive male sex, feminists deplored the wallow in morbidity that accused the entire female sex of masochism.

Plath had caused an even bigger sensation when she killed herself by putting her head in the gas-oven. Her death was an accident, the last in several suicide-bids that were never intended
to be successful. The man downstairs, who was due to knock on her door at a regular time, went to sleep because of the soporific effect of the escaping gas. And a returning home-help got caught in a traffic-jam. For all her rhetorics, Sylvia wasn't quite the masochist she made herself out to be. Her words, however, continued to resonate.

Certain roles do tap into disturbing undercurrents in the psychic electricity and turn some people on like a light-switch. There was to be nothing kinkier, or indeed funnier, on screen than Alan Rickman's black watered-silk costume as the Sheriff of Nottingham in the 1991 film
Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves.
It was straight out of a domination-master's wardrobe at a suburban S & M party.

The tone was playful, not intended to be taken seriously, although Rickman was to throw himself with his customary gusto into the part. This became the performance that turned him into a worldwide sex-symbol.

A Peter Barnes TV play was to have an important influence in shaping the Sheriff, although Rickman was not among the cast.
A Hand Witch Of The Second Stage
, transmitted on BBC TV in 1989 as part of Barnes'
Spirit Of Man
trilogy on the pursuit of faith, God and the devil, set a medieval witch-trial in an underground torture-chamber. It was full of Peter's usual comic-grotesque conceits, with much savage humour. It was the black-clad torturer, who talked lasciviously about ‘having my old master in the tight clamps', who was to prove an inspiration for the demented Sheriff, since Peter Barnes played a vital role behind the scenes of that film.

Alan Rickman's wonderfully suggestive drawl alone seems to wire some of his fans up to the National Grid.

‘There are two piles of letters in his flat: one that he answers and one that he throws away,' says Rickman's old teacher, Ted Stead. ‘Some letters are absolutely obscene: there's talk of him being in leathers, and so on.

‘One woman was actually following him around. She sat in the front row of a play he was in and brought her son or nephew around to the stage door to ask for acting advice. He spent a few minutes with her and the boy, talking to them. He then got this abusive letter from her, saying he hadn't spent enough time with them. She sat down in the front row again for another performance of the same play, and he told me, “I don't know what to do.”' Although Peter Barnes has been badgered by the occasional
over-zealous fan, he remains grateful for a writer's relative anonymity; as he points out, ‘Actors get the worst of it because they get the very sick people.'

‘His sexual charisma doesn't do anything for me,' quips Stephen Davis. ‘I think he's rather embarrassed by all the letters. He has a very puritanical attitude towards the triviality of his profession. Look at how many people are destroyed by success; you'd think people would be more likely to be destroyed by failure. He doesn't like the notion of stardom, but he's fallen into it four-square because he has the gift of projecting his personality.'

Stephen Davis wrote his BBC play
Busted
, recorded in 1982 some months before
The Barchester Chronicles
and transmitted on 28 January 1983, for Alan and co-star Michael ‘Mickey' Feast. It begins with a post-coital bedroom scene after Alan, playing a sulky-looking lawyer called Simon, has rung an old girlfriend up to suggest some lunch-time sex.

He's living with a manipulative child-woman called Roxy, well played by a fey Sara Sugarman, who never listens to a word he says. So Simon is really in need of a sympathetic ear rather than a touch of the other. ‘I'm a bit fed-up,' he glooms to his old flame.

Rickman is still wearing his medieval pudding-basin haircut, which makes him look rather like an overgrown schooboy. As ever, he is sexy and intriguing despite himself.

Simon is a barrister, a Chancery law specialist in tax whose rebellious past comes back to haunt him. He receives a midnight call for help from a Dave Spart character: his old friend Macy has been busted. Simon and the scapegrace Macy were socialist activists together, Treasurer and Secretary of ‘Soc Soc' at Oxford University. The police have found Macy's Derringer pistol on a spot street-search in a visit to an off-licence. ‘You were always so bloody childish,' snaps Simon, exasperated by this unreconstructed rebel without a pause.

Simon leads a rather empty, unfulfilled life and envies Macy his primitive certainties. He discovers that Macy was planning to try to rob the off-licence, hence the gun. On a romantic, quixotic impulse that's very much at odds with his training, Simon does a Sydney Carton (after the example of Dickens' self-sacrificing anti-hero) and swaps clothes with Macy in his cell to enable his old brother-at-arms to escape. ‘They will bust you right back to the ranks,' warns Macy. Yet there's still an element of risk-taking left in Simon, which is what gives the drama tension – and also release – at the end.

He settles back on the cell bunk to await discovery, a smile of relief on his face. He has thrown off his Establishment shackles and found freedom – of sorts.

Simon's air of self-containment suited Alan admirably, yet he also identified completely with that mad, quixotic urge.

‘Alan is a bit of a gravitational force – the universe tends to shape itself round him,' says Stephen Davis. ‘I thought that the activists, the student radical Trotskyite Left, were superficial and half-baked when I was at Cambridge University. I was a sceptical leftist in the middle with Jeremy Paxman on the right wing of the Left – if you see what I mean.

‘I think that Simon would have been rescued by the Lord Chancellor in the end as a good man gone slightly bonkers. I was trying to write about that uncomfortable margin between ideologies and the various times of one's life, about characters whose sense of themselves is confused.

‘There are nuances of distinction between Macy and Simon: Macy is a Manchester Grammar School type and Simon is Harrow. Essentially Simon is a Max Stafford-Clark type, very much in control.

‘A certain element in Alan's success is genetic. If he didn't have that timbre of voice . . . Actors are dependent on what nature gave them, that's what they find out.'

Despite the bedroom scene with the old girlfriend (who was rather jeeringly known as Sociology Sara), Simon was hardly an overtly sexy character. He was one of those men that you would have to work hard to arouse, so overwhelming was his sense of ennui. On the other hand, women do respond to a challenge.

The seductive voice got the biggest reaction of all: it made him a radio star. Alan told Peter Barnes that he received more letters from teenaged girls for the role of a decadent Caesar on BBC Radio than for any other performance. Proof at last that the hypnotic drawl was working its caustic magic.

The work in question was Peter Barnes' free and witty adaptation of the Spanish playwright Lope De Vega's drama
Lo Fingido Verdadero
, translated as
Actors
– or
Playing For Real. Actors
was recorded in 1982 and transmitted on 3 April 1983. It began in the reign of the Roman Emperor Aurelius, the year AD 257. The cast was led by Denis Quilley, Timothy West, the late Harold Innocent. Alan's old RADA chum Tina Marian and Peter Woodthorpe.

Alan was cast as Aurelius's older son Carinus, a vigorous debaucher of senators' wives and vestal virgins (he particularly liked to defile property that was out of bounds). Lucky for him that lightning burns Aurelius to a crisp during a storm; he is found with his face blackened and his finger-ends still smoking.

So Carinus becomes the new Caesar, despite the fact that his life's work is ‘Lust, sir, lust'. As he says disdainfully, ‘Keep me from older women.' He goes only for the young ones in order to make absolutely sure he is soiling the goods.