Alan Rickman (43 page)

Yet his social conscience had not been allowed to rust; it simply manifested itself in other ways. In September 2000, he agreed to do his pastoral bit for his profession by holding a Masterclass, a well-established annual event at London's Theatre Royal Haymarket in which prominent playwrights, actors and directors share the secrets of their trade for free with an audience of drama students and schoolchildren. Rickman remains one of the biggest names ever to commit to Masterclass. Although, unlike some of the other Masters, he refused to allow his contribution to be filmed for television, he honoured his commitment despite still being fogbound from a dose of flu caught while filming the first
Harry Potter
film,
The Philosopher's Stone
, in Durham Cathedral. Dressed down in his trademark black for the Masterclass, Alan perched on a Dave Allen chair on
stage (later one irreverent student was to characterise the afternoon in almost Beckettian terms as ‘a man on an uncomfortable chair') and established an immediate rapport with the front stalls for what he saw as a conversation rather than a Masterclass, unhindered by ego. Once again, he had stepped out on stage without visible nerves, though he was to admit that the problem of stage fright gets worse, rather than better, with age.

Later that year there was also a further development from the Burma UK benefit in June. That had made public the mutual admiration society between Alan Rickman and Victoria Wood; and Wood, who likes to use actors in funny roles rather than comedians in order to shake up our expectations, asked him to be a guest star in a costume-drama spoof alongside Michael Gambon, Richard E. Grant and Robert Lindsay in her BBC1 Christmas Day comedy
Victoria Wood with all the Trimmings
.

So much for Rickman not doing any television these days; he certainly does parachute in for the odd guest appearance. But for an actor at a certain level in his career, film and theatre remain the most prestigious art-forms; in Hollywood, there's a snobbery about television which means that A-listers rarely do more than the odd guest spot, such as Brad Pitt dropping in on an episode of
Friends
to have a screen spat with his real-life wife Jennifer Aniston.

And Alan wanted to go back to the theatre, where, despite his fear of that nightly ordeal, he could prove himself as an actor more than in any other arena. Once a play opens, the show belongs to the actors to improve or impair it. Film is a director's medium in which the actors are pawns to be spliced and sliced in the editing suite, as Rickman discovered on
Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves
and even on
Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone
.

Plans were brewing among West End producers for the perfect project for Rickman's theatrical comeback: an RSC Class of 85 reunion – of Rickman, his
Les Liaisons
co-star and old friend Lindsay Duncan and their director Howard Davies. Yet they were taking risks with the
Antony and Cleopatra
jinx, by using the same designer, Tim Hatley. The plan was for a revival of Noël Coward's
Private Lives
, which would, like
Les Liaisons
, rely upon the sexual chemistry between the two leads – with rather less fatal results. And Alan himself was suffering from cold feet about even being in a Coward, as he was later to admit on American TV in
The Charlie
Rose Show
: he might be a mannered actor in some people's eyes, but he wasn't
that
mannered.

In the event, Hatley's perspective-defying sets were as imaginative and daring as the production and the performances proved to be; everything came together. It opened at London's Albery Theatre on 4 October 2001 to ecstatic reviews. An immensely confident and radical reading of the play it rescued Coward from the usual stylised archness and dwelt very specifically on the excitement of sexual violence between two sparring partners; Alan's early years of work with Peter Barnes, in tapping into those dangerous but undeniable undercurrents in the chaos of human behaviour, had not been wasted. Rickman and Duncan told the
New York Times
that Davies – who made a point of saying he had never read
Private Lives
until he got the job of directing it – wanted them to say the lines ‘without any of the usual stuff that comes with Noël Coward, to make these people real'.

As a result, the smack Rickman gave a hysterical Duncan was only too audible, the passion behind it only too believable as they fought each other on the sofa, unable to live with or without each other. Rickman's Elyot, after all, is the man who declares at one point, ‘Women should be struck regularly like gongs', a line greeted with a collective intake of breath from the audience at the matinée I attended. Rickman delivered it scornfully, implying that it shouldn't be taken seriously, that this was just Elyot's bullshittery in the battle of wills with an imperious dominatrix, but he certainly followed the threat up in the struggle with Duncan. They were evenly matched and she gave as good as she got, but Rickman also had the wit to capture the needy uncertainty, the neurotic vulnerability and, most importantly, the self-awareness that gave his Elyot unexpected depth.

There were those – Peter Barnes among them – who thought Rickman was robbed when he lost out as Best Actor in the Tony Awards (to Alan Bates for his role as Zuzovkin in the Turgenev play
Fortune
's
Fool
) after
Private Lives
had transferred triumphantly to Broadway in April 2002, though the production itself won a Tony and Lindsay Duncan was named Best Actress. ‘She was sexy, but so was he – and funny as well,' argues Peter. Nevertheless the critics went mad for both of them, with Clive Barnes writing in the
New York Post
of ‘a surprising, electric
Private Lives
done jungle-style; this Elyot and Amanda have the heady scent of an entire zoo
of predators . . . Rickman feral and unsatiated'. As with the Vicomte de Valmont, he was the wild animal in the boudoir, the man who put the kick into Coward, defying expectations and playing against type once again.

His old friend Peter Barnes had been pretty creative himself, this time on the family front by becoming a first-time father at the age of 69 – his daughter Leela was born in the year 2000. ‘I did things back-to-front,' admits a sheepish Peter, who then found two years later that his wife Christie was expecting triplets in November 2002 – the same month that the second
Harry Potter
film was released. ‘My friends can't imagine me being a father, they just think of me as a writing machine. A producer friend of mine went to see Alan in
Private Lives
on Broadway in the summer of 2002. I told him to tell Alan about the triplets but, when he arrived backstage and said he was bearing the latest news from Peter Barnes, Alan said to him, “Don't tell me, I already know,” and started roaring with laughter. His reaction was very similar to lots of people's, and you could almost hear his shrieks of laughter across the Atlantic. I don't know who told him, but he knows everybody, he's so gregarious; sometimes I wonder how he gets the time to do it, but he always has been like that.'

Far from belonging to the W.C. Fields school of thought – that would like to see little people lightly fried – Rickman, despite his sometimes daunting presence, is a child-friendly man.

Barnes was particularly impressed that Rickman made time to come along to his little girl's second birthday party in May 2002. ‘Alan is tall and that can be a little intimidating for tiny tots, so Leela was slightly intimidated by him at first. But actors usually get on with kids because they can express fantasy. He brought her a present of an animal alphabet, which she has over her cot; she loves it. It's a big silkworm with lots of pockets containing a letter of the alphabet and an animal.'

Stephen Davis, who has often had Alan's nieces Claire and Amy to stay at his home in the Cotswolds, regards Rickman as a ‘virtual godfather to my children Natalie and Zoë. Over the years we raised them in company with Alan and Rima; Ruby Wax and her husband Ed have raised their three children in his company, too. The reason he's not an official godfather is that Rima told us we needed Roman Catholics as godparents because my wife Jane is Roman Catholic. But I've always been sorry,' adds Stephen, ‘that I didn't go against
the Pope on that one. Alan would have made a great dad; I suspect the reason he and Rima don't have children themselves is that they came late to the idea of parenthood because of career reasons.'

To those who know Rickman well, it came as no surprise that he agreed to do the
Harry Potter
movies – which meant filming one a year – after having read the books first. Being a ‘virtual' godfather is one thing, but the childless Alan Rickman was to discover another way of enjoying those childhood pleasures vicariously by joining an all-star cast for the big-screen realisation of the most successful children's stories ever written.

THANKS TO THE
success of
Private Lives
on both sides of the Atlantic, Alan Rickman had proved he was back in action as a leading man. And Hollywood was watching; movie producers are always looking in the shop window of Broadway, which is how Alfred Molina landed the role of a lifetime as Frida Kahlo's painter husband Diego Rivera in the film
Frida
after starring in the New York transfer of
Art
.

Yet, because of Rickman's commitment to projects by independents and his reluctance to sell his soul back to the major studios, his film career had taken a decidedly eccentric turn by the beginning of the 21st century. He not only dreamed of directing again, but also of becoming a producer in order to develop scripts himself. Having arrived at his mid-50s, he was learning to conquer his neuroses and owning up to his control-freak tendencies: ‘I suppose it's the director in me,' he admitted disarmingly to a group of drama students before adding: ‘But I'm getting better at letting it be.'

At the Brussels Film Festival in 1998, he had argued that ‘there have always been actors who have become directors. You only have to think of Orson Welles, Robert Redford, Dennis Hopper . . . I think that we simply want to “write”. Working as an actor in many films allows you to observe directors. It's like taking a film-school course.' Or, as he put it much more trenchantly on another occasion to a group of students: ‘You learn fastest if, on the second day of filming, you realise, “It's another idiot.'” No wonder some directors fear him. Yet, despite this nagging ambition to take over the show, he will never give up performing. ‘Acting is a compulsion,' as he puts it.

‘Tides of banality and callowness have washed over society over the last ten years, and Alan has not budged a bloody inch,' said the writer Stephen Davis, making his friend sound like some cranky old sea-god when I invited him to reassess Rickman in the summer of 2002. ‘His livelihood is in the celebrity business, but his integrity towards personal publicity and promotion in this New Labour age of cult celebrity and superficiality is an absolute bloody beacon. Of all the people I know who come from a generation
where we were highly idealistic and optimistic, he, along with some of my old college contemporaries, has not wavered or diluted his values. Even when he does Noël Coward . . .

‘He doesn't take himself as seriously as other people think he does. Above all, he doesn't confuse the illusion with the reality in what has become a virtual reality society. He's aware there's something more significant. He's not looking for the quick payday, the smash-and-grab raid on the BAFTA awards; he doesn't care. He is indifferent to those things, and I think that's fantastic. He's a Bronze Age standing stone,' adds Stephen, who in 2001 became the first person in a century to discover such a stone. Part of a pagan worship site, the 4,000-year-old, 6-foot-high stone was 300 yards away from Stephen's house in his back garden. (He hasn't yet decided whether to nickname it Alan – even though it's the same height.)

Considering that Rickman fears the ageism of the business more than most because he made his name relatively late, his incorruptibility shows no little strength of character. He knows what he's up against as a middle-aged actor: ‘You are on a shelf with a sell-by date on your forehead. You are in a profession where you are constantly judged.' Yet he has joined the ranks of the movie immortals, celebrating his 57th birthday in February 2003 in the knowledge that he has now become a household name to millions of children around the world for his role in the
Harry Potter
films. And that meant getting into bed with a major movie studio again.

As with Steven Spielberg's
Indiana Jones
series, the first two
Harry Potter
films,
The Philosopher's Stone
(known in America as
The Sorcerer's Stone)
and
The Chamber of Secrets
, reverted to that sure-fire formula for success of going back to the future, with movies that recreated the old-fashioned excitement of movieland's melodramatic past but repackaged it for modern audiences with the cutting-edge special effects of today. After all, that was the whole point of the books themselves, the secret of their success. And the movie realisation was exactly the kind of project that suited Rickman's retro appeal, which harked back so effectively to a more glamorous age where silken villains prided themselves on a deadly wit and chutzpah.

Yet some argued that Alan had not been showcased to his best advantage in
Harry Potter
, since he had to share screen space not just with Dame Maggie Smith, Richard Harris, Robbie Coltrane and
Zoë Wanamaker but also myriad special effects of the kind that can blow a mere actor away. He had feared the same with his very first movie,
Die Hard
, but at least that had no fire-breathing dragons or hobgoblins hogging the limelight – only Bruce Willis.