Alan Rickman (19 page)

‘Alan was very militant about that and attacked the Schubert Organisation's Gerald Schoenfeld about
Les Liaisons
' sell-out business. There was talk of Glenn Close taking over from Lindsay Duncan as the Marquise de Merteuil, but Gerry Schoenfeld uttered the immortal words: “Glenn Close means nothing on Broadway.” This was just before
Fatal Attraction
was about to open . . .'

Glenn Close, of course, played Merteuil opposite John Malkovich's Valmont in the Hampton/Frears film version,
Dangerous Liaisons
. Close subsequently enjoyed great Broadway success as that other legendary vampire, Norma Desmond, in Andrew Lloyd Webber's
Sunset Boulevard
.

‘I don't think anyone came close to Alan's performance as Valmont; and I don't think that Juliet Stevenson has ever given a better performance than she did as Tourvel, either,' says Hampton. ‘Alan did it for six months in the West End and five months on Broadway. I think it was murderously difficult for him to adapt from the intimate Ambassadors to the Music Box on Broadway. I remember finding him in tears in his dressing-room from the enormous strain of the project in that big theatre. We only had three or four previews, but he was wonderful. Wretched Frank Rich of
The New York Times
insisted on going to an early preview. The night he came, Lindsay Duncan caught a panel in her dress on a nail and had to play a scene with her back to the wall. Howard insisted on turning off the air-conditioning because it was making a noise. So the audience was perspiring in the heat. When I saw a drip of perspiration on the tip of Jackie Kennedy's nose, I thought, “We've overdone it”.

‘But Alan really flowered in New York; and in this play, it's the man that does all the work. But although he and Lindsay were nominated, we got shut out of the Tonys – August Wilson's
Fences
won everything.'

Then came the greatest disappointment of Alan Rickman's career. Having made the role of Valmont his own, he was passed over for the film version. The story of how the screen role slipped through his fingers is yet another illustration of how timing means everything in this rackety business.

‘We were able to use Glenn Close for the film version, and I slightly backed into casting John Malkovich,' says Hampton. ‘The thing is that there was a tremendous battle over the film rights. I took a lower offer from the production company Lorimar in order
to retain more control. I said we should rethink the whole thing and start again; and I said I thought we should have Alan Rickman. Lorimar said “Start again”. Alan had made
Die Hard
by that stage, but it hadn't been released . . . and of course no one knew it would make such a huge difference to his career. And Lorimar wanted someone with a profile. The director Stephen Frears came on board at a late stage, and he was keen to do it with American actors.

‘Another factor was the rival film
Valmont
, so we had to move with tremendous speed. I had seen Malkovich in the play
Burn This
. I know Alan was very, very upset over it,' admits Hampton, ‘but it didn't affect our friendship. We were in New York one evening, on our way to the theatre. Alan had told me that people kept coming up to him in the street and saying, “It's terrible you didn't get to play Valmont on film, I don't know what to say to you.” As we left the play, a woman came up to him and said “It's terrible you didn't get to play Valmont on film . . .” Alan just pointed at me and said “Ask him!” I think it was a very hurtful thing for Alan, but it's rare that a British actor could ever reprise a role in America; I think only Nigel Hawthorne has managed it with
The Madness of King George.
And I just didn't have the clout. But Alan's performance was unmatchable.'

Inevitably, playing an evil intriguer night after night had a terrible effect on Rickman's psyche. After a lifelong commitment to socialism, he belatedly joined the Labour Party in 1987 as if to distance himself from this degenerate aristocrat. Valmont was not a pantomine villain; that would have been easy to live with. It was his Byzantine intelligence, his insidious understanding of human nature and finally his moral despair that made the part so depressing for someone with such staunch principles. What made it even worse was that Rima had become a Labour councillor in 1986 for St Charles Ward in the Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. There's still a large element of puritanical working-class asceticism, the old Methodist hair-shirt tradition, in the Labour Party, as if you have to renounce all sins of the flesh – apart from eating mushy peas – in order to be taken seriously. With one or two exceptions – ‘Gorgeous' George Galloway springs to mind – the Tories have always had the best sex scandals. As Rima embarked on a political career with a public profile for the first time in her work as an educationalist, her long-time boyfriend was seducing women on stage every night and finding himself buried
under snowfalls of fan-mail. Of course, Rima appreciated the subtle joke and took it in her stride; but the contrast still made Alan uncomfortable. No wonder Valmont nearly gave him a breakdown. Those tears that Christopher Hampton saw had been just the beginning. ‘It stopped being a play in a way, and became an event – especially on Broadway,' he told Sean French in
GQ
magazine in 1991.

‘People came with such high expectations that a mountain had to be climbed every night. You are up there manipulating the audience in the way Valmont manipulates the characters. And when you're playing someone as self-destructive as that, night after night, it can't help but get to you to some extent. The body doesn't always know when it's lying. You know from the neck up, but you send the rest of you actually through it.'

The following year, he told the same magazine: ‘You are really brushing evil with a part like that, you're looking into an abyss and finding very dark parts of yourself. Valmont is one of the most complicated and self-destructive human beings you would ever wish – or probably not wish – to play.

‘Playing him for two and a half hours for two solid years eight times a week brings you very close to the edge. Never again. Never ever again. By the end of it, I needed a rest home or a change of career.'

He also told the
Guardian
: ‘It's a part that ate you alive.' There's a story that he gave Howard Davies a hard time during rehearsals for
Les Liaisons
; but I'm inclined to think that it was more likely to have been the other way round. ‘Howard is very cold and self-contained,' says Poliakoff.

Nevertheless, losing the film role to Malkovich was still an incredibly depressing experience for Alan. ‘He became very withdrawn and broody, though he never said a word. You felt terribly sorry for him,' says a friend.

‘It would be untrue to say he wasn't put out,' says Stephen Poliakoff judiciously. ‘In 1989 I bumped into him on the street in Notting Hill; I had just seen
Die Hard
. He told me he had not gone to see
Dangerous Liaisons
; and out of solidarity, I hadn't either.' Stephen Davis goes further: ‘He was terribly hurt.'

‘I prefer Alan infinitely,' says loyal friend Theresa Hickey. ‘Malkovich is this self-obsessed guy in Kung Fu slippers, whereas Alan is genuinely interested in people. He's very generous-spirited.
And he's so filmic: he would have made a wonderful Valmont on screen.'

For Alan, stage fright was the ever-present malignant monkey on his shoulder. In 1992, he told
GQ
that he had to ‘struggle to find the character every time I walk on stage'. And the pressures of playing the vampiric Valmont, who must instantly dominate, only added to that.

Christopher Hampton's excitable view of how
Les Liaisons Dangereuses
had to fight for long-term survival against an intransigent, bureaucratic Royal Shakespeare Company makes a colourful story which is, of course, completely refuted by the RSC.

Adrian Noble, at that time associate RSC director, does admit that there was a problem with the transfer of
Les Liaisons Dangereuses
to the West End.

‘The context of that year was that it was a truncated season. Trevor Nunn wanted to open
Les Miserables
and also
Nicholas Nickleby
in London in the Christmas of 1985, so all Stratford shows were cut short. The cast in a repertory system are cross-cast across different productions. The year we did
Les Liaisons
, Alan, Fiona Shaw and Juliet Stevenson were all in
As You Like It
as well. To free up all that cast – and Lindsay Duncan was also doing
The Merry Wives Of Windsor
– you have to wait for the shows to end in the repertoire, otherwise productions would be asset-stripped of their actors. Actors do prefer rep rather than doing the same thing eight times a week. So yes, there was a problem with the
Les Liaisons
transfer to the West End: endless problems with hoicking actors out of the rep. I don't know if Ben Kingsley, the star of
Othello
, was hacked off or not by all the attention
Les Liaisons
was getting. That's all speculation.

‘As for the film rights, the RSC is always diligent about protecting the film rights of any production. We strike as good, and as hard, a bargain as we can.'

When I contacted the RSC's General Manager, David Brierley, he elaborated on that complicated transition to screen and the RSC's alleged delay. ‘When we enter into a contract with a writer, part of the contract is to do with potential film rights.

‘We negotiate a share of the sale of film rights that goes back to the original stage-producing company, which also gets consultation rights. Christopher's agent, the late Peggy Ramsay, was the best agent ever for ferociously protecting her authors. She did the deal
and didn't consult the RSC. She was in a hurry because of the competing film
Valmont
, so it was a bit of a race to the tape. Plus Christopher's rights to be producer of the movie were also part of the deal.

‘James Nederlander was by then the American producer of
Les Liaisons
. Peggy had cut us out – both the RSC and Nederlander. We asked her if she had the right deal, the best deal. We thought there wasn't necessarily a competitive approach here. At this point, Nederlander found a competitive offer. Christopher and Peggy were anxious not to accept this, because they had gone a long way down the road with Lorimar – who eventually produced Christopher's film version. But we said, “You can't just do the deal if there's a better offer. We can't approve of this deal until we have explored the competition as much as possible.”

‘So Lorimar upped their offer in cash by 50 per cent. Finally the deal was done with them, but the process had been slowed down. Chris had been willing to take a lower offer in order to have a position as a producer.

‘The RSC and the Nederlander Organisation managed to up the ante in the end, but I think Christopher has never forgiven us,' says Brierley. ‘It was a bit naughty of Peggy to go ahead without the RSC. Nine times out of ten, she would have done a good deal – but in this case, we helped secure a better one.

‘James Nederlander is the commercial rival to the Schubert Organisation that owns the Music Box, the theatre where
Les Liaisons
played on Broadway. These are the two great theatre-owning organisations over there. Unusually this production brought the Schuberts and the Nederlanders together, so the RSC engineered a shotgun wedding. Normally they're like the Montagues and the Capulets. Nederlander thought the Music Box would be big enough. When we came to New York, our courage had grown and we wanted a bigger theatre – even though it only went on for 20 weeks.'

Trevor Nunn, then the RSC's Artistic Director, emphasises: ‘Certainly no opposition to the work having an extended commercial life ever came from me. I saw Howard's production in both London and Stratford and thought it one of the best pieces of intimate theatre I had ever experienced. But I never had anything to do with the selling of the film rights, which I imagine had been retained by Christopher.'

‘Everyone knew
Les Liaisons
would be a hit,' Adrian Noble insists. ‘I don't remember Howard Davies being dubious; in fact, I can remember him fighting off the idea of anyone else directing it. I was pash [passionate] about Alan rejoining the RSC for
Les Liaisons
and I did have a say in that, although ultimately it was Trevor's decision. But it was because I've known Alan ever since he did
Man Is Man
for me at Bristol.'

With Valmont, as with Slope, Rickman had demonstrated the supreme art of showing the vulnerability in a multi-faceted villain. As Michael Billington wrote in his
Guardian
review of
Les Liaisons Dangereuses
: ‘It is easy to say that Alan Rickman, with his air of voluptuous languor, is superbly cast as the Vicomte: what is really impressive is his ability to register minute gradations of feeling.

‘He stiffens visibly as the Marquise de Merteuil denies him sex, literally shrugs an eyebrow at the news that people live on
56 livres
a year, allows his hand to hover over Cecile's body as if exploring a relief-map.

‘But the keynote of Rickman's enthralling performance is growing self-disgust at his own destructiveness: he becomes a seductive Satan with a stirring conscience.

‘Alan Rickman seems born to play the Vicomte. He endows him with a drawling, handsome languor and a genuine sense of spiritual shock at discovering he may be in thrall to love.'

Irving Wardle in
The Times
wrote: ‘Alan Rickman, elegantly dishevelled and removing his mask of amorous melancholy to reveal a mirthlessly grinning voluptuary, carries the mask of death.' John Barber in the
Daily Telegraph
thought that ‘languid, darkly handsome Alan Rickman makes a perfect Vicomte: plausible, cruel'.