Alan Rickman (35 page)

There is a mob at the gate: the rabble invade the house and Mesmer meets them on the stairs, saying like the man of destiny he
is: ‘I'm the one you seek.' They have all come for healing. The halt and the lame follow Mesmer down stone steps for an experiment in electrical impulses. He tells the crowd to join hands in a charmed circle: this is the scene that used real inmates from an asylum.

‘You poor people,' he says compassionately. ‘Poor, sick, pitiless world. Where shall we end the abuse and cruelty?' He goes round the circle, strengthening the force between them. ‘This force needs pain, and pain will resist.' There is much agonised crying and lamentation when he uses the cane as a kind of lightning rod. They break the circle and all have fits. He hugs some of them, trying to pass on his energy. They quieten down. ‘The storm has passed over you. Each of you has gone some little way towards harmony,' he says; perfectly on cue, we hear the music of the spheres.

Then the clamour begins again: they berate him, because their illnesses are still there. ‘You have to look in,' he says defensively, but he is assailed by self-doubt.

Back in his study, Mesmer encourages Maria Theresa to be tactile. He clasps her face and asks her to breathe, his lips very close to hers. His wife bursts in, as wives tend to do, and accuses him of kissing his patient. This is a moment of pure farce, clumsily introduced. It's a pity that we see so little of the volatile home life of the Mesmers, apart from the laying on of threatening hands around her neck as he says sarcastically, ‘Light of my life, leave us.'

The sexual tension is almost tangible as he meets Maria Theresa in the gardens for a Braille version of sex. Her fingers travel over the prominent Rickman lips, getting to know him. Back in his study, he runs his hand along her neck; she (and by now presumably half the audience) is almost brought to orgasm. ‘No, father,' she suddenly blurts . . . and her secret is out. Her father has been molesting her.

‘Don't be ashamed,' he whispers, hugging her. Mesmer shows tremendous restraint, but it's clear that he's overpoweringly attracted to her. He runs a silk scarf across her throat in an intimate gesture and then blindfolds her with it.

Days later Mesmer takes off Maria Theresa's silk bandages; she still insists that she sees only darkness. ‘What is to be is out of our hands,' he insists. ‘We make our own lives.' He is trying to make her assert her will-power.

A lucky fall, somewhat unconvincingly choreographed, restores her vision. The pains in her head have gone. ‘Now my head sings instead.'

There follows a scene of extraordinary erotic intensity, all the more powerful for the way in which Rickman carefully reins himself in. ‘I knew before I met you,' he says, as if this is their destiny, and their kiss creates the most exquisite frisson. He has awakened every one of her senses. Mesmer knows he is falling in love, but the erotic pull of the universe is irresistible. ‘Oh let it go, let the arrow fly,' he says testily to a stone Cupid with its bow poised to strike at human hearts.

The character is instinctively gallant, which must be a first for Dennis Potter. Seeing Francesca molested at a window by his sly stepson Franz, Mesmer rushes up the stairs in order to fling Franz down them. As he explains venomously to his wife, ‘I'm cleaning the house.' But alas, it's chucking-out time all round. The action moves forward to his expulsion from Vienna, when Mesmer and his baggage are flung out of a coach. ‘You know the orders . . . keep out of the city.'

‘This is a day of infamy and outrage that shall long be remembered,' says an outraged Alan Rickman, his moon face so caked in mud that he looks like a B-movie monster from a very black lagoon. It's a great moment of unintentional hilarity which rather undermines all the self-conscious Romanticism that has gone before.

And so on to Versailles in the Dennis Potter time-machine, where Mesmer has developed a reputation for curing paralytic fits. An over-ripe beauty asks him to cure her backache. She says that it hurts ‘at certain times'. ‘Your nerves are out of alignment,' he says smoothly, extricating himself subtly from a tricky situation.

He asks a group of ladies to form a circle. ‘The force in me comes flowing into your flesh, your nerves, your bones.' They are asked to clasp a series of rods suspended over a large barrel of water. There is a chorus of ladylike moans as he puts his hands on naked shoulders, telling them to place the rods upon whatever part of the body ails them most. ‘It surges,' he says, and the group groan. ‘Your body is now a battlefield.' There is a cacophony of orgasmic shrieks.

This is the infamous scene of mass hysteria, straight out of Ken Russell. One woman writhes on the floor in a fit, while another's
head plops foolishly into the barrel of water. It's absurd and grotesque. Are we supposed to assume Mesmer, the misunderstood idealist, has now become a cynical charlatan? The film sends out conflicting signals, unable to make up its mind.

‘I cure the sick because I can reach into their souls . . . This is just play-acting,' he tells his friend Charles. ‘One day we shall come to acknowledge that our emotions and our bodies are not separate.'

There are sounds of civil insurrection outside, presaged by that film-maker's cliché: a runaway horse. ‘When society is sick, all its members are too,' Mesmer says to the medical assembly that is about to denounce him.

‘Gentlemen, you are in the veriest danger of losing your lives,' continues Mesmer, who appears to have extraordinary extrasensory perception, aware that the mob are approaching with their lighted tapers. Is this the first stirring of the French Revolution? We are never told.

Maria Theresa has lost her faith and is back in the darkness again. ‘You abandoned me,' she says. ‘I cannot see.' ‘Do you want to see?' he asks her rhetorically.

Mesmer dreamily relives his boyhood; Potter is forever rewinding the tape of life. ‘When I was a boy, I could see from one horizon to another. Everything was in harmony, in balance, except human beings. And I could not bear to do nothing about it.'

The last shot shows Mesmer and Maria Theresa, side by side but apart, in an abandoned hall from which everyone else – horse, mob, fellow physicians – has vanished. On balance, even anachronistic Sarajevan helicopters might have helped.

No wonder the project ended in frustration for all concerned. It's a fragment, a tantalising might-have-been that provides little more than a sumptuous showcase for Rickman's sexuality.

Nevertheless, Alan Rickman's performance as Mesmer did win him the Best Actor award at the 1994 Montreal Film Festival. And at Dennis Potter's memorial service in November of that year, Alan kept faith with the writer's memory by reading from the script of
Mesmer.
It seemed as dead now as Dennis.

THE CELEBRITY OF
an actor, hired to recite other people's words, is a source of agonised embarrassment to Alan Rickman. Not only does he long to direct more, but he is acutely aware that the writers don't get the credit that the performers do. Actors should be the servants of the writers, as he once put it, but they get promoted over the heads of the playwrights instead. As Peter Barnes wryly remarks, ‘A lot of people haven't grasped that actors are not making up the words as they go along.'

Stephen Davis once told me how Alan had stood up at an awards ceremony while dishing out the acting prizes and said, ‘Can we please spare some thought for the writers?' Davis added: ‘It is extraordinary that we are such a visualising culture that we are now living in the cult of the actor. In Hollywood, they are the ultimate royalty; and Alan is embarrassed at the amount of publicity given to actors. I think he is very conscious that he is an actor who profits greatly by success and fame and charisma but who is very careful that he doesn't use people as a grandstand for his career, because he's a man of very high principles. But it does cut both ways: you create a tremendous amount of mystique by being Garboesque. It's a win-win situation to be in.'

Alan Rickman routinely rejects so many roles that Ruby Wax says she feels sick every morning at the thought of the amount of money her purist friend is turning down every single day. Dusty Hughes' story of the ceiling-high piles of script in Rickman's flat suggests a crazy paper factory. No wonder Alan has to be fanatically tidy. He is famously faddy and principled, but that doesn't stop him being offered first choice on countless projects. Perhaps that hard-to-get quality simply whets producers' appetites: they know he's not to be bought for any price. Indeed, you could dine out for years on revelations about the major roles that Alan Rickman has declined. Nevertheless, he is contrary enough to moan about the parts he doesn't get.

When he reached 50, Alan Rickman found himself at a crossroads whose three-fingered signpost behaved like a demented
weathervane according to mood. One direction pointed to continuing film stardom, another to heavyweight theatrical roles and the last to directing.

He risked typecasting in the first, he was often too busy to pursue the second and he was a relative newcomer so far as the third option is concerned. No wonder he was frustrated. He had never been more in demand for major movies; yet Alan Rickman faced a quiet mid-career crisis.

Before the Rivergate controversy drove a wedge between Rickman and his old colleague Jules Wright in 1993, he complained to her one day that nobody asked him to go on stage anymore. ‘The problem is that people become inhibited about asking him and assume that he's not available. Maybe Alan is lost to the theatre now, like Gary Oldman,' said Jules to me in 1995.

This exasperates all those who would like to see more of Rickman in what they say is his natural habitat on stage: ‘He is the most complete man of the theatre I know,' insists his old RADA contemporary Stephen Crossley.

‘I ask Alan Rickman every year to rejoin the RSC; I ask him to name his parts,' Adrian Noble told me in 1995. ‘But it's difficult when you enter the film game to find the time; with film, it's not only the actual filming that takes time, but the hanging around beforehand while they find the money.

‘Once you move into film seriously, it's very hard to carve out the time to do more theatre. It's much more risky – you stand to lose more.'

Peter Barnes agrees. ‘It's difficult to return after you leave the theatre, because theatre is hard. And you get more exposure in movies, so theatre becomes something you do only for yourself. I have always done movies to finance my theatre work. With theatre for actors, it's very much a case of working for yourself.

‘He's obsessed about not playing villains. I can understand why he doesn't want to do them, but for a long career it's pretty good to have a stand-by like that. You will never be too old to become a villain. He's more a character star than a star star. And Gene Hackman doesn't go out of fashion.

‘Alan turned down the Lytton Strachey role in
Carrington
before Jonathan Pryce was offered it. He's since moaned to me about turning that down plus the role of the baddie Scar in Disney's
The Lion King
, which then went to Jeremy Irons. He had second
thoughts, but it was too late. He was too proud to admit it, when he should have done it.'

Indeed, it's tempting to conclude that Alan had his regrets only after Pryce and Irons were seen to have made such tremendous successes of Strachey and Scar; a dog-in-the-manger attitude is only human, after all. After much humming and haaing, Sir Anthony Hopkins finally agreed to play Richard Nixon on film only after director Oliver Stone craftily asked him what he thought of Gary Oldman for the role. ‘I think Alan is much better than Tony Hopkins, who has never been the same since he gave up drinking,' is Peter's opinion. ‘One doesn't wish for artists to self-destruct, but in giving up one must be brutal and say they lose something.'

‘I certainly discussed the role of Lytton Strachey with him,' says Christopher Hampton, writer and director of
Carrington.
‘When he came with me to the screening, I think Alan was upset that he hadn't taken it. He said, “Oh my God, what have I done!”'

‘He was also offered the role of Peron opposite Madonna in the movie version of
Evita
, which then went to Jonathan Pryce,' says Barnes. At this rate, Pryce – yet another friend of Rickman's – will be learning to read Alan's fingerprint profile on every script he's sent.

‘Alan was also told that he was second on the list after Anthony Hopkins to play Hannibal Lecter in
Silence Of The Lambs.
If Hopkins had decided not to do it, then Alan was the next choice,' explains Peter.

‘The funny thing is, Alan said that that one couldn't be turned down, that it would make him the biggest and most powerful star in Hollywood. It would have been a stellar leap. I think Alan would have been extraordinary, though I can't understand why it didn't go to Brian Cox – who played Hannibal Lecter originally in the film
Manhunter
.'

Silence Of The Lambs
did finally make Hopkins a British superstar in Hollywood. He won the Oscar for Best Actor and was also awarded a knighthood, though many felt that the Queen's honours system should not have rewarded an actor for playing a serial killer who disposed of the bodies by eating them.

Still, it was a testament to the sheer size of the part, which Hopkins seized with tremendous relish. ‘But it was a one-note performance,' said one film critic in exasperation. One can only sadly speculate on the insidious power of Alan Rickman in the role.

‘I think Alan is much better than Tony Hopkins, who has never been the same since he gave up drinking,' is Peter's opinion. ‘One
doesn't wish for artists to self-destruct, but in giving up one must be brutal and say they lose something.'

Some of the stories about the scripts on which Rickman has first refusal are almost farcical, though not particularly funny, of course, for the actors that unwittingly took his leavings. ‘In
The Last Action Hero
, the villain was played by Charles Dance. He agreed to it after seeing an early script. Then he happened to see a later script with the words “Alan Rickman” in brackets after the name of his character . . . !