Alan Rickman (23 page)

‘I'm an artist, I watch the women,' he jokes heavily when he declines to enter the murder apartment. As if to mean business,
he's now clad in a leather jacket that makes him look like an East German dissident with the faintest echoes of Hans Gruber. Essentially, he was paid to hang around as a spare part that became an embarrassment to him, judging by Alan's inert performance. The film was a box-office disaster.

It seemed that his Hollywood career was over before it had really begun until the Australian Western
Quigley Down Under
, released in 1990, rescued Rickman's fortunes.

‘On
Quigley Down Under
, I hear he was so hysterical and anarchic that they loved him and he took over the film as a result,' says theatre director Jules Wright.

He had recovered his energy and intensity for another great scene-stealing performance in a movie that he took only, so he disingenuously maintains, to ‘visit the Outback'. Later he would talk about the ‘pull' of the Australian desert landscape, the so-called red centre whose mysterious vastness would attract anyone raised in Acton. Movies are often chosen by actors for their location alone, but in this case Rickman chose the right vehicle. Its politically correct perspective was an obvious attraction for him; but he couldn't resist the subversive urge to jazz it up.

Quigley Down Under
has to be the slowest Western since
Dances With Wolves
, which was made the same year. Rickman gives it a giant jolt of electricity as the guy in the black hat, the psychopathic land baron Elliott Marston. He has shaved off the beard but kept the Valmont moustache and tuft under the bottom lip, which makes him look rather like Eli Wallach at his most weaselly.

His artistic eye insisted on changes immediately. ‘When I arrived in Australia, they had me dressed in a purple jacket and white trousers as this indolent ne'er-do-well who sat around drinking glasses of wine,' he told the
Guardian
in July 1991.

‘I didn't see Marston like that. He lived in squalor. He might drink wine, but from a dirty glass. My idea was to have him dressed all in black, which turned out to be a good choice but a hot one!' The result was a rather sexy character straight out of a maverick spaghetti Western.

Elliott has hired Tom Selleck as the finest long-distance marksman in the world. He wants him to wipe out all the local aborigines, for whom Marston has conceived a pathological hatred after the massacre of his parents. His mother, he reveals on a note of rising hysteria, was even butchered while holding her sewing.
English hunting-parties did in fact conduct a campaign of genocide against the aborigines of nineteenth-century Tasmania; it remains an appalling blot on Australia's human-rights record.

Quigs, a fine, upstanding Wyoming cowboy of no little sensitivity and nobility, is so furious at this churlish commission that he hurls Elliott out of the nearest window. That's another fine defenestration Alan's agent got him into . . . And this after Elliott has even tried to make friends by offering Quigley ‘mint jelly on your lamb – it's my own creation' over a chummy meal. Every reasonable person would agree that Elliott has no choice thereafter but to leave Quigs plus leading lady Laura San Giacomo stranded in the broiling heat of the Outback desert as punishment, and none too soon so far as she is concerned. As the childish heroine Cora, Ms San Giacomo is seriously embarrassing . . . as well as being half Tom Selleck's size. Only his gentlemanly upbringing makes him put up with this prattling circus midget when most of us would have dumped her in the Outback ahead of schedule; it makes one speculate wistfully about the rather more hilarious sparring partnership that the irascible Elliott would have had with the brat.

When Quigs and Cora escape, Elliott's men make the mistake of breaking the news to him while he's being shaved at the barbers. Hence another entertaining outburst of peevishness from Rickman, who – be he never so villainous – makes a point of observing the proprieties. ‘Don't bother to knock, will you? Oh SHUT up,' he snaps.

‘He's going to spring something on us during the night – all right, nobody sleeps,' he snarls.

Quigs, however, is captured and dragged back to base on the end of a rope pulled by a horse. ‘Good of you to drop in again,' is another example of Rickman's exquisite sarcasm. But Elliott is such a shameless showman that he insists on organising a duel with two Colt guns, which he mistakenly assumes Quigs has never used before.

The excitement of the occasion makes Elliott wax philosophical, another endearing trait in Rickman's laterally-thinking villains.

‘Some men are born in the wrong century. I think I was born on the wrong continent. Oh, by the way, you're fired,' he barks with superb delayed timing.

That's his last word on the subject – or any subject. He is dispatched with indecent haste, and the film ends with a scene that
pays self-conscious homage to
Zulu.
An endless line of aborigines, armed only with Stone Age spears, appears on the horizon. This magic circle surrounds the hostile British soldiery and provides Quigley with a safe passage.

‘No animals were killed or injured during the making of this film,' say the credits at the end of the most right-on B-movie ever made (if you count
Dances With Wolves
as an A-movie).

The life goes out of it when Elliott finally catches that bullet, but Alan Rickman had now established himself on the movie map as the definitive die hard. Twice.

BEHIND THE SCENES,
Alan Rickman takes pains to behave like a real-life Robin Hood. He quietly gives away proceeds from his rich films to poor theatre projects, an orphanage in Romania and other pet causes such as Glenys Kinnock's One World Action campaign against poverty and Children On The Edge. When he secretly agreed in 2001 to voice the Genie of the Lamp in Philip Hedley's production of
Aladdin
at the Theatre Royal Stratford East on a strictly-no-publicity basis, Alan recorded it at RADA where he has long been quietly involved with fund-raising for his old theatrical alma mater. Yet his sharp looks made him a natural Sheriff of Nottingham.

Everyone in the business has fallen for the rumour that Ruby Wax rewrote Alan's dialogue for the Sheriff in the Kevin Costner movie
Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves
. Nearly every person I interviewed for this book muttered conspiratorially, ‘Did you know that Ruby . . . ?', so it's travelled a long way. It's a great story, save for one thing: it's not true. To be fair to Ruby, she herself has never claimed the credit; instead it was claimed on her behalf by friends and/or admirers who made the logical deduction: ‘The dialogue is funny, Ruby is Alan's friend, Ruby is funny, so . . .'

The real truth behind the Gothic humour of such bravura lines as ‘Cancel the kitchen scraps for lepers and orphans. No more merciful beheadings – and call off Christmas' is that Alan's old friend, Peter Barnes, was the author.

Alan called him in to help as a script-doctor. A downmarket Greasy Spoon caff in London's Bloomsbury was the improbable operating theatre as Alan spread pages of the script over the table and Peter rolled up his sleeves (very characteristic of Peter, this) and set to work.

‘I wrote the dialogue for the Sheriff,' Peter confirms. ‘Alan and I have been friends for twenty years. I used to work a lot in the Reading Room of the British Museum. There's a working-men's café nearby and we went through the script together, because Alan said it needed some work on it.

‘So there we were: I said, “Look at us, we've ordered egg and chips and we're working on the dialogue of a $40 million movie!” Alan, slightly misunderstanding me, said “Don't worry – I'll pay for the egg and chips.” And he did.

‘I made it more speakable. Kevin Costner was clonking around because his dialogue was a bit heavy-going. It doesn't trip easily off the tongue. Alan is a mixture of Claude Rains and Basil Rathbone in the role. There was something about a teaspoon in the middle of one speech – cutting a heart out with a teaspoon. It was a bit oddly positioned, so I made it work. In an action movie, everybody kicks in with the dialogue. The poor old writers are very much relegated.'

The results of that barnstorming session in a Greasy Spoon were such choice witticisms as ‘I had a very sad childhood, I never knew my parents, it's amazing I'm sane', ‘You – my room at 10.30 tonight. You – 10.45. And bring a friend' and ‘Now sew – and keep the stitches small' to a physician.

The year 1991 was Alan's
annus mirabilis
. Four Rickman films were released, and only one of them – the little-known
Closetland
– was a flop.
Truly Madly Deeply; Close My Eyes
; and
Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves
all enhanced his reputation to an extraordinary degree, so much so that influential film critic Barry Norman named him British Actor Of The Year. All three films were in the Hollywood Top Ten.

It was
Robin Hood
most of all that caught the imagination, though to my mind Rickman has never bettered his performance in Stephen Poliakoff's
Close My Eyes
. Therein he gave a cuckold – that traditional figure of fun – an unprecedented dignity and complexity.
Truly Madly Deeply
completed the Top Ten triumvirate, remarkable for its raw emotional intensity. Few people know that it is also the story of Alan: the man you see on screen is his real self (save for the fact that he's not a ghost and he hasn't had an affair with Juliet Stevenson).

Of course his mad, ranting, glam-rock Sheriff of Nottingham was a huge popular hit, and so completely upstaged Kevin Costner that there are stories circulating to this day about how Costner removed Rickman's best scenes from the final cut in the editing room. What's left is so wonderful anyway that one hardly needs to bitch about the missing bits.

Kevin Costner didn't really know who Alan was – the name meant nothing to him. But when filming started, Costner realised
what a formidable actor Alan was. Costner has a reputation in Hollywood for being incredibly physically well-endowed. That's why he didn't wear the traditional tights in the role of Robin of Locksley; they made him a pair of breeches instead. However, Alan Rickman still upstaged him with his wonderful roguish quality and powerful presence.

Rickman's single-minded intensity responded to the need for speed in filming the £25 million project. ‘The film lacked enough time. We were filming at the time of the year in England when you only have light until 3.30 p.m., so it was very difficult to get everything done,' he admitted to Jeff Powell in the
Daily Mail
in 1991.

Yet his Sheriff almost never happened. ‘He turns a lot of things down, fussing a lot,' says the playwright Stephen Poliakoff.

‘He tends to be a bit of a pessimist; he has mellowed a lot in the last year or so. He's very honest; he sees the pitfalls perhaps a bit too much. He doesn't bullshit and he's very self-critical. And he said to me gloomily that he was about to ruin his career by signing to play the Sheriff of Nottingham in a new film about Robin Hood. I said to him, “Is Prince John in it? No? Do it!”'

So he did, persuaded only by an offer of some control over his lines with help from Peter Barnes. And the preview audiences at early screenings cheered for Rickman, not Costner, hence the notorious cuts in the editing suite.

‘At first I thought “Robin Hood – again?” I just turned it down flat. Then I started to hear of some of the names involved and I could see the way forward for having fun,' Alan told
People
magazine in 1991.

And have fun he most emphatically did. ‘I tried to make him certifiable and funny – a cross between Richard III and a rock star,' he explained to the
Daily Mail.
It was that Thin Lizzy Crotch-Rock memory again . . .

Director Kevin Reynolds, who had manifold problems in getting Robin Hood to the screen and lost the friendship of his old chum Costner in the process, wisely gave Rickman his head.

Closetland, Truly Madly Deeply
and
Close My Eyes
were in the can by then. ‘So it felt okay to go back into the primary colours and just stride about in two dimensions for a while and have fun,' Rickman told the
Sunday Express
in 1991.

For someone who is popularly supposed to be politically correct, Rickman has a lot of subversive humour. He's one of the few actors
who could turn the Sheriffs attempted rape of Maid Marian into an absolute hoot without making it tasteless. ‘It has to be treated with humour,' explained Alan. ‘You give it a particular tone, so that it's one of the more fun scenes. The only difficulty, to be honest, was getting out of the costume.'

Dressed in black, with sprouting ebony wig, beard and moustache, his Sheriff looked like the proverbial Bluebeard. ‘I thought about Richard III and a rock guitarist and I said, “Let's make [his costume] raven so you know who's coming,”' he told Ann McFerran in an
Entertainment Weekly
interview. ‘It was a cartoon . . . I didn't want the film to disappear into all that historical business.' Once again, as with Elliott Marston in
Quigley Down Under
, Alan instinctively understood that the Man in Black always won the style wars when it came to imposing your presence on screen. Would you ever catch Cruella De Vil in verdigris or Darth Vader in violet? I rest my case.

But Rickman's Sheriff made his first entrance as a wolf in sheep's clothing, as it were, by posing as a masked, white-cowled monk on a horse, confronting Brian Blessed's Locksley Senior with the snarl ‘Join us or die' and a quick flash of his shark-like sneer.

The monks close in on Blessed with a pincer movement, their costumes and burning tapers deliberately evoking the Ku Klux Klan for the benefit of Middle America. Poor old Costner wears a duvet (known as a pelerine cloak in medieval times) and bird's-nest hair. Needless to say, he doesn't stand a chance in comparison with Rickman's lacquered glamour. Nottingham Castle is depicted as Dracula's lair; the horizon is studded with shrieking bats. Rickman is discovered nuzzling a girl's body as if chewing ruminatively on a chicken-leg. His head is cocked bird-like on one side at an interruption, a typical pose for him. His chest is bare but casually framed with black fabric: the effect is very kinky and straight out of a bondage shop. ‘I trust Locksley has visited his manor and found the home fires still burning,' he says suavely.