Alan Rickman (38 page)

‘It's true that I asked Alan to write an essay on his character,' Ang Lee told me. ‘Alan was able to bring out the tragic depth and
hidden righteousness of Colonel Brandon to make him an attractive character.

‘I wouldn't say that I “warned” Alan not to overact; one doesn't “warn” British actors not to overact,' he added humorously. ‘Instead I encouraged him to act less and make Colonel Brandon a genuine man. Alan Rickman is a brilliant performer. His portrayal of life as an actor is maybe too good to be true to modern life, yet brilliant is brilliant.

‘His voice possesses a musical quality that produces a lyrical line-delivery. He can read off a telephone book and make each entry sound important, special and attractive.

‘He possesses an outstanding look. His presence is so impressive, and so unlike the character portrayed in the novel, that at first I thought casting him would be a risk,' the director admits. ‘Alan, however, downplayed the inherent passive and unattractive characteristics of the character, as suggested by the novel, to make his Colonel Brandon an attractive man; in essence, he gave a real boost to Austen's character.'

Neither was Rickman's own directing experience an issue, according to Ang Lee. ‘Alan's directing experience on stage has nothing to do with his performance as an actor,' he explains. ‘Acting and directing aren't related. As a director, you watch people. As an actor, you are watched. Though the two may co-exist in one person, they are definitely two different, separate creatures. I only know him as an actor.'

In one of the most prolonged pieces of foreplay between an actor and the audience in the history of the cinema, it seems an age before Rickman's slow-burn Brandon makes his move and eventually gets the girl. ‘He's the sort of man that everyone speaks well of, and no one remembers to talk to,' sneers Greg Wise as Brandon's spiteful rival Willoughby at one point. That's the one line which doesn't ring true with this casting: on the contrary, Rickman's Brandon has far too much presence to be ignored.

Brandon's air of mystery is second nature to Rickman; and he can also make the memory of grief still seem raw. ‘As Alan puts it,' wrote Emma Thompson in
Sense & Sensibility: The Diaries
(published by Bloomsbury) on the making of the film, ‘it's about a man thawing out after having been in a fridge for twenty years. The movement of blood and warmth back into unaccustomed veins is extremely painful.'

Nevertheless, there are still flashes of Alan's old asperity (i.e. attitude) here and there. Brandon stirs himself out of his lovesick reverie when he stares challengingly at Willoughby, with that curdled look of jealousy which Rickman does so well. There is also one early scene in which Brandon immediately endears himself to his lady love's young sister by satisfying her curiosity about the mysteries of the East Indies. In the kind of intimate gesture that is peculiar to Rickman, he leans forward and whispers sibilantly ‘The air is full of spices' with one of his hot hisses. It's a variation on the technique he uses to intimidate a screen enemy: far from being coldly aloof, he's the ultimate in-your-face actor.

Rickman's on-set composure even discombobulated Emma Thompson, as her
Diaries
records. ‘Sometimes Alan reminds me of the owl in Beatrix Potter's
Squirrel Nutkin.
If you took too many liberties with him, I'm sure he'd have your tail off in a trice.' Since Old Brown the owl held the impertinent rodent by the tail in order to skin him alive, that's quite a menacing role-model. You can even see a distinct physical resemblance to Rickman in Potter's illustration of Old Brown's narrow amber eyes.

It was a remarkably apt analogy. She drew it after a sopping-wet Greg Wise had ‘bounded up to Alan and asked, with all his usual ebullience, how he was. Long pause, as Alan surveyed him through half-closed eyes from beneath a huge golfing umbrella. Then, “I'm dry.”' Indeed, ‘dry' just about sums him up.

Thompson's description of her own character Elinor – ‘a witty, Byronic control-freak' – in fact fits Alan exactly. If you want romantic gravity, you reach for Rickman. As Emma gushed in a BBC2 documentary
Sense And Sensibility: Behind The Scenes
, ‘Colonel Brandon is the man of all our dreams: the wounded older man who's a river of compassion and love and strength and honour and decency.' For Ang Lee, ‘Colonel Brandon was the only solid man, the real man in the movie.'

Thompson's
Diaries
recalls how she and Alan talked seriously about the rigours of theatre over lunch in his trailer: ‘He was as much put off by two years in
Les Liaisons
as I was by fifteen months in
Me And My Girl
.'

But much of the time on set, he earned his keep as the king of the wry one-liners. When Thompson's co-star Kate Winslet complained, ‘Oh God, my knickers have gone up my arse,' Alan's reply was: ‘Ah: feminine mystique again.'

ET was consequently much impressed by Rickman's mature mixture of gallantry and irony. ‘He was splendid, charming and virile . . . (At) the party on Saturday, Alan nearly killed me, whirling me about the place.' (As with many big men, he doesn't always realise his own size and strength.)

‘Alan's very moving,' she later recorded. ‘He's played Machiavellian types so effectively that it's a thrill to see him expose the extraordinary sweetness in his nature. Sad, vulnerable but weighty presence. Brandon is the real hero of this piece, but he has to grow on the audience as he grows on Marianne . . . Finish scene with Alan. Me: Oh! I've just ovulated. Alan (long pause): Thank you for that.' She marvelled later about how ‘Alan manages to bring such a depth of pain' to what is, in effect, the plot of a penny dreadful.

But the old tartness, thank God, was never far away. It's a relief, in the middle of all these eulogies, to read his reaction to a trespassing moggie.

‘Very nice lady served us drinks in hotel and was followed in by a cat,' Emma's journal chronicled. ‘We all crooned at it. Alan to cat (very low and meaning it) “Fuck off.” The nice lady didn't turn a hair. The cat looked slightly embarrassed but stayed.' Perhaps he was under strain from being so nice all the time . . .

The chance to play against type was a huge relief for Rickman.
Sense And Sensibility
also reunited him with an old mate, the actress Harriet Walter, who was on brilliantly malignant form as the snobbish Fanny Dashwood, the nearest that Jane Austen got to a traditional wicked step-sister.

After Brandon's nuptials to Marianne, he follows the custom of throwing a handful of coins in the air. One hits the frightful Fanny, and the film ends with a glimpse of her backwards collapse into a bush, a piece of comic business she and Rickman invented.

‘We are the envy of other countries because we have the identification with the theatre. It's a heartbeat. In America they really envy it. And for me, Alan is one of the forces of gravity in theatre,' says Harriet.

‘It's not to do with throwing a lot of parties. He had that effect on people long before he was famous. He has high standards and he takes you seriously – you feel elevated, you think that someone out there is looking out for you. He manages to keep that interest in other people going.

‘You endow people like this with power, but of course you need to be critical yourself. It's up to you to be grown-up. I don't always
agree with him, but we are aiming at the same centre. He has pretty tough standards, and I might rebel for a day or two.

‘But he's a very good listener. He takes you seriously, you feel encouraged. That's why we have kept up as friends for so long.'

Movie-making is a schizophrenia-inducing business, however, and Colonel Brandon remains one of Alan Rickman's least interesting parts even though he did his damnedest with it. He went straight from playing the nice guy to portraying that practitioner of the political black arts, Eamon de Valera, the man who is popularly supposed to have ordered the assassination on a lonely country road of one of the great Irish heroes. The career of Eamon de Valera forms a direct trajectory to the career of the current Sinn Fein president, Gerry Adams.

BY 1995, RICKMAN'S
old friend Peter Barnes was telling me: ‘Alan is now on a rocket to the moon – we are just waving to him from the launch pad. He has risen into the stratosphere.'

And talking of space-travel, the role of
Dr Who
could have been tailor-made for Rickman. Even as late as early 1996, there were recurring rumours that Steven Spielberg still wanted him for the part. Mind you, they said the same thing about Eric Idle.

The truth is that Alan Rickman's name is flung into the ring whenever a producer wants to add tone to his project. It's rather like the story of the drama critic who, when asked why his newspaper employed someone to write play-reviews, replied: ‘To add tone to the paper.'

In fact the American enthusiasm for making a television movie about the eccentric British hero with two hearts, thirteen lives and a virginal girl companion came from Philip Segal, a self-confessed
Dr Who
nut and Steven Spielberg's head of production at his former company Amblin. Eventually Paul McGann assumed the Einstein hairstyle and Regency dress sense of the latest Time Lord incarnation in 1996.

On the advice of his agent, Rickman is wary of cutting himself down to size for the small screen: it seems a retrograde step. He did, however, make two exceptions for American television. The production values of
Murder, Obliquely
had been particularly high; and
Rasputin
was premièred on American television in March 1996, although its makers Home Box Office also hoped the film would have a theatrical release in the cinema when they sold the distribution rights. So far as British television is concerned, however, Rickman remains aloof, much to the chagrin of Jonathan Powell and other moguls at home. He was even suggested for the new incarnation of the dandified John Steed in a remake of the ultimate secret-agent spoof,
The Avengers
, but bowler hats don't exactly become him. As his former co-star Sheridan Fitzgerald says, ‘The face is its own statement.' In retrospect, it was just as well that he didn't play John Steed; despite Ralph Fiennes in the role, the big-screen version of
The Avengers
was a flop.

‘I had the impression Alan won't do television at the moment because his agent thinks he should be available for film,' says the playwright Dusty Hughes. To Dusty, this is a shame.

‘Maybe it's because I'm writing more and more for TV these days. But the situation is changing: the status of TV is going up in America, with series like
ER
. Quentin Tarantino directed one episode: there's much more kudos about television out there now.

‘I absolutely adore the theatre, have done since I was fourteen. Alan is the same. I think he'll always do theatre and also directing, if he can: he loves it all. I think he wants to direct films.

‘But one of the dangers with people who do stop being actors pure and simple is that they might completely stop acting one day.'

With Rickman in so much demand, there seems little chance of that. There's so much he has not done that one suspects the best is still to come. His Hamlet and Antony were very belated assaults upon the great Shakespearian roles, though he did briefly consider taking the offer of Oberon, king of the fairies, in a film version of
A Midsummer Night's Dream
.

Just as he was never one of life's Romeos, so he would not make an ideal Henry V. On the other hand, he would surely make a magnificent Macbeth; and, of course, Prospero. His maverick talent is best suited to slightly off-centre parts.

The real truth is that this fascinating oddity is a natural lago, the second-in-command who steals the limelight from Othello. Or a Cassius, upstaging Brutus. He is the hidden agenda who surprises us all, who emerges from the shadows. There is a lot of sense in what Peter Barnes says about villains being good stand-bys if you want a long career, a canny piece of advice that seems even cannier after Alan's doomed attempt at playing ageing heroism in the National Theatre's
Antony and Cleopatra
in 1998. But Dusty Hughes argues: ‘He can do the villains standing on his head – and probably yours too. Knowing Alan, he'll always try to do the things that aren't easy.'

The year 1995 was another exceptionally busy year for Rickman. He went straight from the
Sense And Sensibility
set to Dublin for director Neil Jordan's new picture
Michael Collins
, shot that summer.

Liam Neeson played the martyred Republican hero Michael Collins, ‘The Big Fella', with Rickman cast as his calculating adversary Eamon de Valera. At least, that's the simplistic view.
Rickman reverted to type, yet he still retains that ability to startle us out of our seats.

The myth of Collins is that he was the bluffly heroic reincarnation of Finn MacCool, Cuchulain and other legendary Irish supermales. The Big Fella was a shrewd manipulator of men, with the devious silver tongue of an Irish Lloyd George. And Collins came up against that other Celtic smoothie when he entered into negotiations with Lloyd George over the establishment of the Irish Free State.

Wily and ruthless though Collins certainly was, he cultivated a hail-fellow-well-met persona that made him an immensely popular folk-hero.

By comparison, Eamon de Valera seemed a cold, charismatically-challenged figure; but Alan Rickman was determined to find the latent passions in this rather clinical, fastidious character. De Valera was a paradox, not only in having dual nationality – he had a Spanish-American father and an Irish mother – but in being an almost frigid intellectual among the poets and playwrights of the early republican leaders. He was a mathematician with ecclesiastical ambitions who involved himself in the passions of a nationalist uprising. He even dressed like a clergyman, with his long coat and hat. His lengthy tenure of office had as much to do with the clerical control of Ireland as the very priests themselves: he became the church-in-state. Historically, he was the Robespierre and Collins the Danton of Ireland. De Valera escaped the firing-squad after being condemned to death for taking part in the Easter Uprising; the British reprieved him, for devious reasons that have never been fully explored. He became the spokesman for the republican movement, just as Gerry Adams is today. De Valera made a speciality of touring America, whipping up support, holding out the fund-raising begging-bowl and meeting statesmen. Here, then, was an inscrutable strategist with a curiously contemporary appeal who cloaked himself in mystery; Rickman was in his element.