Alan Rickman (20 page)

Charles Spencer in the
Stage and Television Today
was ecstatic. ‘Alan Rickman gives a performance of hypnotic brilliance as Le Vicomte. Fleshy and reptilian, languid yet prone to sudden bursts of feverish energy, he oozes charm and danger in equal proportions, an amoral predator who finally finds himself the prey of a stronger woman and the incomprehensible stirrings of his own soul.'

Only Barry Russell's review in
Drama
magazine's spring issue of 1986 dropped the classic clanger by questioning ‘the casting of Alan Rickman as the scoundrel of the piece. He is too engaging an actor to play a “nasty” with much credibility'. (Oh yeah?)

In short, it was one of those reviews that you spend the rest of your life living down; though Russell at least noticed Rickman's ‘endearingly unkempt quality, more fitted for Fielding's Tom Jones than for the aristocratic Vicomte de Valmont'. But surely that was the point: he was a wild animal in the boudoir . . .

Michael Coveney in the
Financial Times
gave ‘thanks chiefly to Alan Rickman's predatory, dissolute Vicomte de Valmont, a languorous, squinting agent of destruction'. Sheridan Morley in
Punch
wrote of ‘the silkily splendid' Rickman's ‘elegant decay', although the late Kenneth Hurren was less convinced in the
Mail On Sunday
. ‘Though Alan Rickman has been widely praised as the jaded vicomte, I feel he lacks something of a plausible seducer's practised charm,' he wrote.

Perhaps it was the glimpse of the conscience that Rickman's Valmont carried around with him which inspired so many women to write lovelorn letters to him. It's that potential for redemption and reformation which presents the ultimate challenge to female zeal.

Before Rickman's Valmont transferred to the West End and thereafter to Broadway, the RSC repertory system had given him the chance to play another Faustian character who had sold his soul to the devil. Rickman took the lead in Ariane Mnouchkine's didactic epic drama
Mephisto
, based on the Klaus Mann novel. As the actor Hendrik Hofgen, he found himself becoming the darling of the Nazi gods in pre-war Germany. The tale of how this former radical becomes Hitler's protégé is the story of an entire country's corruption.

Mark Lawson in
Time Out
considered that Rickman ‘consolidates his status as a new RSC star', though some other reviewers expected a more grandstanding performance, finding him far too gloomy and depressive. Perhaps that old blood-sucker Valmont had sapped his energy; certainly it was crazy to play both in swift succession.

‘Mr Rickman is merely bitchy when he ought to be demonic, pettish when he ought to blast everyone in sight or hearing with his rage,' wrote Francis King in the
Sunday Telegraph
. The
Daily Telegraph
's Eric Shorter thought Alan had ‘a compelling line in languid disdain and slimy hauteur', but others felt his heart didn't seem to be in this story of the Nazi rise to power and the equivocal attitude of the people.

Of course the voice, never to every drama critic's taste, came in for a hammering. Kenneth Hurren wrote in the
Mail On Sunday
: ‘The chief focus is on a star actor and political renegade, played with enervating vocal monotony by Alan Rickman.'

As for Michael Ratcliffe in the
Observer:
well, he didn't like Alan's performance. Again. ‘There are some attractive and truthful performances . . . all these sustain an evident humanity, but Mr Rickman chooses not to.

‘Having frequently been accused in the past of camping it up, he has on this occasion put on sober attire and elected to camp it down, a dispiriting decision which leads to lugubriousness of voice and feature suggesting complete disillusion with past, present and future instead of a driving ambition to succeed at all costs. There isn't so much as a whiff of Mephistophelian sulphur all night.'

Barney Bardsley had written in
City Limits
, ‘Mephisto is about the devil in us all.' But by this stage, the puritanical Alan was becoming revolted by the devil in Mr Rickman. Valmont was his darkest hour; his great film villains were tap-dancing scallywags by comparison.
Time Out
's theatre editor Jane Edwardes pointed out in a 1986 interview for
Mephisto
that Rickman had become one of the hottest actors around by playing the coldest of bastards.

He took it all terribly seriously, as usual, and saw his character in
Mephisto
as a dire warning to those consumed by ambition. ‘It's about how big a trough you can dig for yourself,' he told the
Guardian
.

Rickman had lost the battle to play Valmont on film and, in retrospect, it may have saved his sanity. Nevertheless, he was to win the Hollywood war in a strange and quite unexpected way, rediscovering his sense of humour in the process. His performance as Valmont on Broadway had brought him to the attention of a film producer who wanted a charismatic, intelligent, sophisticated baddie for his next action movie. Someone, in short, who would put up a truly satisfying fight, who would enter into mortal combat with a die-hard . . .

Despite having given us the definitive Valmont, Alan Rickman still felt as if he were a misfit outsider with a muffled voice in the snobbish caste system of the British theatre. It was to be in the more democratic medium of film, paradoxically enough, that he would be able to exploit his extravagantly theatrical roots. He had to go away in order to become truly honoured in his own country.
One is reminded of the famous brick dropped by John Gielgud when he talked about a very talented British stage actor called Claude Rains, who had been a West End star in the 20s. ‘But he threw his career away,' said Gielgud plaintively, shaking his head sadly. ‘He went off to Hollywood and completely disappeared. I wonder what happened to him?'

In Alan's case, he staged his ‘disappearing' act in a sulphurous cloud of Mephistophelian smoke.

ONE SUNNY DAY
towards the end of the twentieth century, Alan Rickman found himself being avidly stared at by a waitress while he and Peter Barnes were having lunch at a restaurant near their respective homes. They were sitting outside at a table on the pavement and the woman kept looking at Rickman, who maintained his customary Garboesque cool and pretended not to notice the kind of attention that had become an everyday occurrence in his life. Eventually, when Barnes went inside to pay the bill, the puzzled waitress said to Peter: ‘I recognise your friend from somewhere, and I can't think where.' When Peter said, ‘You might have seen him in
Die Hard
on TV recently,' she gave a tiny shriek of excitement and said, ‘Of course, of course – it's Bruce Willis!'

‘It's a great story about the fleeting nature of fame,' adds Peter. ‘But Alan was just amused by it when I went back outside and told him; some people wouldn't be amused, of course.

‘Actors don't like you saying this, but Alan's present fame is a matter of luck. There are crossroads in everyone's life,' points out Peter. ‘If he hadn't had
Die Hard
, it might have taken him much longer.' Barnes has a particular fellow-feeling for Rickman because both had slogged away for years until one film completely transformed their fortunes. With Peter, it was his screenplay for
Enchanted April
. ‘I had struggled for twenty years until
Enchanted April
opened the doors for me. It did huge business in America and was nominated for the Best Screenplay Oscar.' Later Peter finished a massive epic for Warners about the Medici ruler of Florence, Lorenzo the Magnificent; when he was asked his take on it in script conferences, he said, ‘You should do it as
The Godfather
in tights.' He's learned the Hollywood pitch. These days he works like a demon, writing seven ‘highly lucrative' American miniseries in just five years. Yet there's no danger of Peter living in an ivory tower: he impressed Alan by swapping his regular writing venue at the British Museum for the Leicester Square branch of McDonald's, much as the
Harry Potter
author J.K. Rowling first created her boy hero on scribbled notes in an Edinburgh coffee shop.

With Alan, it was the make-or-break movie
Die Hard
that changed his fortunes. It made his career – and it broke a cartilage
in his knee after he performed eleven takes of a jump from a ledge on to uneven paving stones on his very first day on set. ‘This torn cartilage is my souvenir of Hollywood,' he said afterwards, sounding like someone who didn't expect to be invited twice. For Rickman, always wary of getting carried away, had sternly told himself to regard the job as no more than a once-in-a-lifetime working holiday of the kind that never even happens for most British actors. He also took a Californian driving licence away with him as another souvenir after passing his test on his second attempt; he was failed on the first one for driving too cautiously through a green light. ‘I think maybe that is a metaphor,' he told Karen Moline in
Elle
magazine, laughing at his own inhibitions.

‘He's much loved by actors because he has a profound sense of irony,' says the RSC's Artistic Director, Adrian Noble. ‘He can do trash and elevate it. Somehow he can keep above the shit. It's a deal with the devil. All actors have to do it. You have to do trash to survive, but he can send it up. Great Hollywood role models are so macho; but most people are not like that at all. Alan isn't macho at all.

‘I was thrilled for him when it went so well in films. In many ways, he's an old-fashioned actor who can hand in a star performance – he has the intelligence and cut to create some of the great parts. He's very big, with a big voice.'

Die Hard
producer, Joel Silver, preoccupied with casting his new movie, caught Alan's Valmont in
Les Liaisons Dangereuses
on Broadway. Rickman reeked of decadence, of course, and Silver professed himself duly asphyxiated. ‘He was staggering. I was bowled over by the theatricality of how he played that role,' he told BBC2's
The Late Show
in November 1994. (Well, it was in a theatre.) ‘For
Die Hard
, we were looking at conventional heavies . . . when we got Alan, it set the stage for a new evolution of the bad guy.'

In fact, it was all part of the long-established George Sanders and Basil Rathbone syndrome, in which suave British actors carved out a niche for themselves as the cads of Hollywood. (The fact that Sanders was half-Russian need not detain us.)

Claude Rains, of course, was clever enough to extend his range and make even the politically ambiguous police chief in
Casablanca
seem craftily sympathetic as he uttered the immortal ‘Round up the usual suspects.' Even so, if you possess sharp features, narrow eyes and a drawling English accent, you are bound to be typecast thus.
Jeremy Irons won his Academy Award for the gallows humour of his performance as that suspected Bluebeard, Claus Von Bulow, a class act if ever there was one. Interestingly, Irons was later to play Rickman's vengeful brother in
Die Hard With A Vengance
.

American xenophobia has been blamed for the lazy habit of casting foreigners as the bad guys; but the preference for the theatrical disdain of those silky British scoundrels also betokens an inferiority complex on the part of a bedazzled Hollywood. It is as if they have to send out for their very best badduns, because they think they can't get them at home.

‘When I was working in Hollywood, I got a call from someone saying he was a friend of Alan and that he had a script,' remembers the director Simon Langton, who had cast the then-unknown Rickman in
Thérèse Raquin
eight years previously.

‘Alan, being a mate of this person, said he would meet me in a well-known bar in LA. It was an ultra-modern place, full of gleaming marble surfaces. He looked completely at home in the LA bar, but utterly English: rather
louche
and laid-back.

‘We had a couple of beers and then he lounged back in his seat and said, “I have got this ridiculous Hollywood movie. It's called
Die Hard
and I play some crazy East European fanatic. It's non-stop explosions – the actors won't get a look-in. And I'm appearing with Bruce Willis! I play the lead baddie . . .”

‘He was very self-deprecating and very friendly; almost too laid-back. I'm sure he doesn't suffer fools, though. He hadn't changed a great deal, he was physically leaner. That haughty-looking exterior had become even haughtier: hooded eyes, aquiline nose. I don't think he quite understood what was going to happen. He was quite unfazed by the enormity of it all, and yet this was his first-ever picture. Normally, you disappear in a cloud of burst fumes and flames when the film bombs, but this one didn't . . .'

After playing Valmont solidly for two years, your man was just about ready for the funny farm.
Die Hard
was, he confessed to
GQ
magazine in 1992, ‘a great big present, with eight lines to learn every two days and a lot of Los Angeles sunshine. It was like being offered a glass of ice-cold water when you have been in the desert.

‘I had never been in a movie before,' he told Catherine O'Brien in the
Daily Mirror
in 1992. ‘Suddenly I found myself on a set in the middle of Los Angeles, surrounded by hundreds of people at 10 o'clock at night.

‘It dawns on you that millions of dollars are at stake and everyone is watching and waiting to see if you balls it up.'

It was certainly a wonderful consolation prize for not winning a Broadway Tony for Valmont and for losing the film role to his imitator, John Malkovich.
Die Hard
was a huge success whose fortunes at the box office surprised everyone. It propelled the former television actor Bruce Willis into the supernova league and pushed the unknown Rickman to the very forefront of inventive screen villainy.