Alan Rickman (22 page)

‘Life goes round like a wheel: what we have done once, we do again,' he says doomily.

Kitchen's anti-social skyscraping plans are leaked to the papers by Alan via Harriet. Alan goes to live in a derelict house in the middle of the redevelopment area, squatting there.

‘Welcome to the war,' he snarls at the visiting Flynn and fires off an angry monologue to camera. ‘I see in you a little of the bleakness I have in me,' he says provocatively to her. ‘That's why you don't like me.'

He's menacing, shaggy, sexual, insinuating: a natural subversive and tinpot urban guerrilla. It is to Frayn's credit that he is not so obvious as to allow Alan and Barbara's characters to end up in bed together, but it's a natural conclusion to draw.

‘Don't scrape the sky, just sweep the streets – a whole philosophy of government in eight words,' Alan says, using his headline-writing skills. But, by the end, this vulnerable malcontent is drily reflecting: ‘We had all kinds of supporters by this time – but not all of them had heads.'

Nevertheless, he becomes famous as a spokesman for the campaign and attacks ‘North London cultural imperialism'. He even survives two attacks by boiling brown stew from the hysterical Harriet, which would have scalded anyone with a thinner skin. Eventually Flynn fixes him up with a new job, while Kitchen's practice withers in this nicely cynical but over-long piece.

So much for the revolution, indefinitely postponed. It was in 1989 that Alan Rickman became a member of the property-owning classes. He was 43. After half a lifetime in the theatre, it was the first time that he had been able to afford a property. He and Rima had shared the rent on her Holland Park flat since 1977, but
Die Hard
had made a significant difference at last to his finances. Rima stayed put because she was required to either live or work in the borough of Kensington and Chelsea in order to remain a councillor.

Though he was worried about how Rima would feel if he moved out, Alan bought a maisonette near a garden square just over a mile
away from Rima. They lead such different lifestyles that it's hardly surprising they find it difficult to share; but it was his burgeoning film career that made the real difference.

Once you start playing the Hollywood game, you have to make yourself available to work around the world at very short notice. The restless Rickman is forever on the move, while Rima is permanently home-based by virtue of sitting on no less than ten council committees, not to mention her governorship of Barlby Primary School and her involvement with a canalside project and a community centre. Her speciality is education, despite, or because of, not having had any children of her own.

‘We were all very worried about them at first when Alan set up on his own, but it seems to have worked out,' says the close friend.

Indeed, there is a longevity to all his loyalties. Alan said no to several overnight movie offers on the back of
Die Hard
and returned to Britain and his old mentor Peter Barnes for three remarkable BBC projects: two period television dramas and a disturbing radio play,
Billy And Me
. He believes in causes, and he certainly found one in
The Preacher
.

The latter was the third of four Barnes monologues under the series title of
Revolutionary Witness
, based on eyewitness accounts of ordinary men and women caught up in the French Revolution.

Alan played Jacques Roux, a radical priest who officiated at the execution of Louis XVI and organised food riots in 1793. This was – and still is – the most passionate performance he has ever given, laying his emotions bare in a wonderful fusion of head and heart.

Roux is standing in a pulpit in an apparently deserted church, with his dog Georges at the foot of the pulpit as his only audience, apart from us. He is a true terrorist from history; this is the real thing, as opposed to Hans Gruber's entertaining ersatz version.

‘God created rich people first and then showed them the world they would own,' he says through clenched teeth. He has wild hair and looks incredibly unkempt, the epitome of the turbulent priest. ‘Your slavery is their liberty,' he adds in a spell-binding incitement to righteous violence, based upon Roux's own writings. ‘The church offers fear and punishment for ever and ever. Religion is a liar and a cheat. Mad Jacques, Red Roux, sower of sedition, subverter of all law.'

His first sermon in a new parish is being preached in this ruined church. He goes before the tribunal tomorrow, charged with
revolutionary excess. ‘It seems I'm too revolutionary for the revolution,' he says with a bitter smile. ‘Do not forgive me, Father, for I have not sinned.'

His own father had twelve children; Jacques was the cleverest. He was a priest at the age of fifteen years and became a professor of philosophy. Eventually he was arrested, he tells us, for a crime he didn't commit. ‘This is how fires are kindled,' he warns menacingly. For he was not given a trial.

‘Revolutions must be violent . . . the only way to end the greater violence,' he says, banging his fist on the pulpit. As the title of one South African film put it,
Death Is Part Of The Process
.

He lives, he tells us, with a good woman and is now a pamphleteer; she sells them. They adopted a son, Emile. The close-ups reveal Rickman's sensual, well-defined lips, the upper one slightly lifted in that characteristically animalistic way. ‘Don't be fooled by those who set themselves above you. Look at the bill they present you with. It's not my purpose to be popular. I am here to sting.' As Rickman himself is; he's not a beige personality.

‘To stop me stinging, the Assembly hired me to write the report of the King's execution . . . the rich we will gobble up, tra-la-la,' he sings. He tells us how ordinary people die in the mud and calls King Louis a toe-rag.

‘We must appropriate the land and money from the rich, who have it in excess. We have to push the revolution as far as it will go and then further . . . and that's never enough for me.'

He tells us he wrote a pamphlet condemning the revolutionaries for banning women from power; so he's a male feminist as well as a socialist. ‘I shun fame . . . it costs too much,' says this passionate, ruined romantic in his last confessional. Not Alan Rickman's own words, but certainly his sentiments. ‘Making love or making revolution . . . but with a revolution, you have to be right.'

He waves a sword in the pulpit and says he will strike himself down if he's condemned by the tribunal. ‘Living well is so much harder than dying well,' he says of the friends that he expects to ‘move on' when he is dead. ‘I have tried to create a people who are sceptical, rational, critical.

‘We are of the generation that so transformed the world that it can never be the same. One last word . . . the revolution is not complete. Don't sit back. Act. For God is an active power. We do his work in fighting.' Roux committed suicide in 1794. You could
almost fall in love with such a man, as conveyed by the Rickman brand of full-blooded romanticism that finally gives the lie to the image of this actor as the archetypal cold fish. Roux knows he's condemned, but he has no self-pity. His friends will move on because they have the difficult task: to live. It's a barricade-storming performance that sets out to change lives, just as he swears his was changed by Peter's play
The Ruling Class.
‘Alan's Roux was Lenin and Danton rolled into one. He was too left-wing for Robespierre, who had to get rid of him,' says Peter Barnes.

The radio monologue
Billy And Me
was the familiar story of a ventriloquist who is taken over by his dummy, yet Rickman played it very effectively on a rising note of hysteria.

‘Yes, of course it's my wife . . . would I have a maid so ugly?' went his patter, very much in the spirit of Archie Rice in John Osborne's
The Entertainer.
He proved an unexpected virtuoso at the music-hall innuendo; as with all great actors, Rickman has a strong vulgar streak of the grotesque in him. ‘I'm depressed. I feel so dull, I can't even entertain doubt,' he moaned; Alan's natural lugubriousness is well employed here. Master Billy Benton is the creepy schoolboy dummy who exercises a sinister control over him. The ‘vent' has had a nervous breakdown and becomes a schizophrenic as a result. He starts having visions and gabbles wildly about a row of dummies all singing Handel's
Messiah
, as camply funny as it's frightening.

However, it was the third Peter Barnes project, the TV drama
From Sleep & Shadow
in a Screenplay trilogy entitled
The Spirit Of Man
, that was to provide a fascinating foretaste of his performance in
Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves.
Rickman often cannibalises himself: here, in this playful madman, is the genesis of his barn-storming Sheriff of Nottingham.

‘Peter Barnes is our most Gothic of writers,' as Rickman's co-star Nigel Hawthorne pointed out to me. ‘
From Sleep & Shadow
was a very complex religious thing, but we had a great deal of fun doing it and laughed immoderately throughout – which I don't suppose was totally proper or totally what was expected of us, but it was certainly very good fun.'

Alan was cast as a seventeenth-century Ranter, one of those travelling demagogues who sprang up in vast numbers during the apocalyptic New Age turmoil of what the Marxist historian Christopher Hill termed the English Revolution. The Ranters were
a primitive branch of ultra-zealous Methodists who split from the prim ranks of the Wesleyans; most of them were barking mad, and there were many great pretenders among the sane ones.

Rickman made his flamboyant entrance in twentieth-century sunglasses; it still amuses Peter Barnes that no one has ever spotted this camply anachronistic detail. ‘For the Ranter, the costume was made up from bits of different countries. I believe historical accuracy is not as important as dramatic accuracy, though some of the dialogue was from the pamphlets of the time.'

Hawthorne played the right-hand man of the regicide Oliver Cromwell. He is mourning the sudden death of his beautiful young wife Abegail, played by Eleanor David. Now a pastor, he questions his faith. ‘This is God's revenge for some unknown sin.'

Upon which cue, Rickman bursts in like Monty Python's Spanish Inquisition. ‘You sent for me and I am here . . .' he says excitedly. ‘I'm naked before women . . . proclaiming the word of God.'

Whereupon this extraordinary figure has a seizure, spluttering that Hawthorne had him whipped out of Southwark for enjoying bawdy mixed dancing and wearing shaggy hair and a hat during prayers. Hawthorne upbraids this lunatic upstart. ‘I'll still rant with the best of them,' shouts Alan, leaping around the room as if the bugs are biting his bum.

He is Israel Yates, a tatterdemalion mountebank with a witty and paradoxical turn of mind. He mesmerises Hawthorne with his mad staring eyes, urging him to believe in faith-healing and telling him that Abegail is in a cataleptic coma. With his jigs and capers, it's a preposterous but beguiling performance of enormous charm.

‘Curing carbuncles and haemorrhoids, capering up and down in the gutters of the world,' is how he describes his vocation. He produces a quartz stone on a chain and waves it above her, a gesture that is very Mesmer. He sweats, and that quiescent hazel snake-eye suddenly becomes bright and human. Unfortunately, he's brought the wrong woman back to life – Abegail is possessed by the spirit of Hawthorne's first wife Sarah.

Rickman is a cunning charlatan with a touch of genius, not quite in touch with his gift. Again, very Mesmer. He shouts in Abegail's ear, playing the voice of God, and then kisses her violently on the mouth. She faints. Then she comes back to life, restored by the sheer randiness of this apparent exorcism. Brother Israel-of-the-ten-tribes-Yates
then boasts: ‘We Ranters who cling to the bright lights of liberty and love.' He exits, but then suddenly bursts in again with a thought for the day. ‘There can be no happy glad-man compared to a madman.' He sings and dances on the table. ‘I'm shaking off melancholy soul-dust, sister.' And the three of them form an all-singing, all-dancing, table-top chorus line.

After this strange BBC interlude, Alan went straight back to Hollywood, but his inexperience made a bad mistake in choosing
The January Man
as his second foray. This lethargic and whimsical thriller about a serial killer might have worked if Rickman himself had been the murderer. Instead, he was the artist friend of Kevin Kline's ex-detective-turned-fireman, who is reinstated by his police commissioner brother, Harvey Keitel, in order to find the murderer.

Rickman was attracted by the cast – Susan Sarandon played Keitel's wife, on the rebound from Kline – and the prospect of portraying an artist once more was such an easy gig that he nearly did it in his sleep. Perhaps he followed Sarandon's advice rather too literally, for he later recalled, in a
Los Angeles Daily News
interview, how she had advised him not to think about it too much after seeing him agonise and pace back and forth before doing a scene. As he rationalised it, ‘You have to let the animal part of an actor have its head.' Eventually Rickman was to patent a peculiar animal magnetism of his own, but in
The January Man
he was more of a good-humoured sloth than a prowling panther.

The first scene recalled Vidal in
Thérèse Raquin
ten years previously. Rickman is an eccentric bearded painter with a dilettante air whose studio has a lush nude model installed on a sofa. ‘Just languish there, darling, don't molest anything,' he instructs her. Kline offers him a job. ‘I resent the fact I need money,' Alan sniffs, and spends most of the movie squinting at a computer: ‘. . . trying to get the hang of this'.

He is supposed to be Kline's assistant, offering mumbled insights here and there. To add to the insult, he's dressed like a kooky clown – baggy check trousers, violently clashing neckerchief. He looks like a German artist with his spikily-cut, shaggy hair, beard and moustache. But he makes much of raising a lone eyebrow and producing goodies from a hamper with a sardonic flourish – Alan always manages to manifest signs of humour somewhere.