Alan Rickman (42 page)

Rickman had been contacted early in 2000 by Glenys Kinnock, the wife of the former Labour leader Neil Kinnock but prominent
in her own right as a Member of the European Parliament. The Kinnocks were theatre buffs and had long since become friends with Rickman, a kindred spirit in socialism; Alan is also heavily involved in the charity One World Action, of which Glenys is the president. As organiser of a fund-raising benefit in support of Burma's imprisoned pro-democracy Opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, Glenys had asked Alan if he would join a celebrity cast for the show at the Royal Court in June that year.

Philip Hedley, Artistic Director of the Theatre Royal Stratford East, had a long record in directing such events. He, after all, was the man who had once persuaded the great Peggy Ashcroft to make her entrance by riding a bike on stage while John Gielgud was delivering Prospero's final speech from
The Tempest
: ‘Our revels now are ended'. She was, Philip recalls, all of 73 at the time. Ashcroft had rushed from the theatre named after her in Guildford, Surrey, where she was doing a one-woman show, to reach the Court for the final minutes of a fund-raiser for The George Devine Award; Hedley suggested a bike as a prop to make a joke of her mad dash. That was an historic occasion, and not just because Peggy got on her bike; Laurence Olivier shared the same stage as Ashcroft and Gielgud that night.

Yet many people on that same stage for the Burma UK benefit in 2000 came from, as Hedley puts it, ‘a different world' to him and wouldn't have known that Philip the Radical could also direct these mega-starry evenings with aplomb.

Both he and Alan found themselves in the same boat on this occasion: each had been stereotyped by their peers, some of whom didn't know how much either man was capable of. ‘I know Alan and Richard [Wilson] from various fundraising theatrical dos and dinners with the usual suspects,' says Hedley, ‘and they happened to be standing together and talking to me after the Burma benefit and saying to me, “That was really good.” And they're not naturally effusive people. There was a sense of “I didn't know you could do that” – and yet Alan was getting the same reaction as well from his fellow actors. He seemed so secure in the character. And people there like Miriam Karlin were very impressed by that, because they hadn't known that it was part of his range.'

‘Although Alan is very chatty and agreeable when you meet him, I had the cliché in my mind of the highly serious actor,' admits Philip. ‘He had phoned me up about the choice of material before
the show: he gave me, as director, a choice of three pieces – and the other two were much more serious. He actually auditioned over the phone, going through each piece. I very much liked the idea of the Bronte guide being wonderfully pompous and unknowledgeable about the Brontës, saying “Mind the bike” when visitors were tripping over it while trying to get round the museum. The character was wonderfully ungracious without meaning to be rude; he was down-to-earth, he didn't know how crass he was being. So I was attracted by the idea of Alan doing that.

‘I can claim no credit at all for how good it was, because he just did it; there wasn't a run-through. We were not aware he could play a working-class character. This was a very unimaginative man, worthy of a Mike Leigh play; and Alan could do that difficult thing of playing the character genuinely, not patronising him, but also being enormously funny and adept at the same time. He pressed all the right buttons.

‘If you had a play with that character in it, you wouldn't have thought of approaching Alan to play it. That's why it was brave: he wasn't using the tools you could fall back on when you're lazy. He obviously went back to his working-class roots in some way; he would have known that kind of man. But,' Philip adds tellingly, ‘how many people in any position of power know he can do that?'

How many, indeed? Rickman has fought against typecasting all his life; and it would seem that he had reinvented himself just a little too successfully all those years ago at Latymer Upper. With a background like his, this was the ultimate paradox.

But with so many film offers coming his way, he didn't have time to brood for long about making a proper return to the stage. Invariably he opted for character roles in indie movies, in which he wouldn't be dictated to by a major studio and where his name – that real-life Robin Hood tendency again – could help to raise the finance for struggling film-makers. In a transformation that recalled Michael Douglas's turn as a bespectacled ordinary Joe in
Falling Down
, Rickman was almost unrecognisable in menacing horn-rimmed glasses and pinstripes for the role of a burnt-out, but still fully fanged, executive in the corporate comedy
The Search For John Gissing
, which co-starred Juliet Stevenson and which won the Critics' Choice Award for Best Feature at the 2002 Sarasota Film Festival. Actor/director Mike Binder played an American businessman who arrived in London with his wife, played by Janeane
Garofalo, to take over final negotiations for a big merger with a German firm. He was replacing chief negotiator John Gissing, played by Rickman with all the venom and passive aggression of one passed over for the job and determined to sabotage his successor at every stage of the game. It was the kind of satire on the corporate ethic, or lack of ethic, that American film-makers do particularly well.

He followed it with
Blow Dry
, which, according to the end credits, was curiously only ‘based on' a screenplay by the acclaimed writer of
The Full Monty
, Simon Beaufoy. Rickman played an equally burnt-out, but by no means extinct, hairdresser. The Yorkshire accent was deployed again, with Rickman getting top billing in this uneasy and uneven tragi-comedy about a crimping contest. It was the second time Alan had played a cuckold, here losing his wife Natasha Richardson to an over-the-top Rachel Griffiths in one of the least convincing lesbian relationships portrayed on film. Talk about subverting stereotypes: the hairdresser was the straight guy for a change. Even for a Yorkshireman in a backstreet barber's shop who charges £2 extra ‘if it wants washing', Rickman seemed unusually dour in the role and, though he acquitted himself with panache in the final scissor-sharpening moments, the film was not his finest hour. All one can say with conviction is that at least he had the hair for it. Rickman defended the film to the
Irish Times
, revealing that he had wanted to work with the director Paddy Breathnach after watching his sublimely funny gangster film
I Went Down.
Paddy was a loquacious Kevin Smith, only funnier – except, unfortunately, in
Blow Dry
.

Funniest of all was Alan's voiceover for a power-crazed pilot fish in the animated feature
Help! I'm A Fish
, which Rickman imbued with his insinuating brand of cartoon menace. Rickman's pilot fish drank a potion that gave him a human voice and an overweening desire to rule the ocean, which is how he managed to upstage the great white shark in his territorial ambitions. It is left to three child heroes, who have been turned into fish by the same magic potion, to defeat him and save the day. More than one reviewer remarked on how the pilot fish's newly acquired vocals resembled the sinister tones of Rickman's Sheriff of Nottingham, who had been something of a cartoon character himself in human shape; here Rickman was really letting rip and enjoying himself in an animated feature whose sophisticated visuals, as
The Times
observed, paid tribute to
Busby Berkeley, Fritz Lang's
Metropolis
and even the Beatles' psychedelic period. But there was no doubt who was the star: as the
Guardian
pointed out,
Help! I'm A Fish
‘flags a bit when Rickman's superbly wicked character isn't on.'

Strangest of all was the part of Man in the twenty-minute
Play
, that reunited Rickman with Anthony Minghella, the writer-director of
Truly Madly Deeply
, for one of Channel 4's most ambitious commissions: all nineteen of Beckett's plays to be screened between 2001 and 2002.

The sight of a landscape populated entirely by despairing talking heads in pots, with the camera focusing on the front row of pots, could have been designed by Hieronymus Bosch in one of his visions of an adulterers' hell. Trapped in an eternal triangle, Rickman, Juliet Stevenson and the lovely Kristin Scott-Thomas were buried up to their necks in gigantic urns with mud-caked faces as grey as the vessels they had been poured into. There was to be no sitting or slouching and slacking in these pots, as Beckett's religiously followed stage directions make absolutely clear. Despite a fleeting resemblance to the unfortunate, mud-covered Mesmer after he had been tipped from his coach, Rickman was oddly compelling and hypnotic as he and his women chanted the tale of their
ménage à trois
from their earthenware prisons in just fifteen bleak minutes. John Hurt had already made an acclaimed West End comeback in
Krapp
's
Last Tape
before filming it for the Channel 4 season; getting Alan Rickman to stand upright in a pot with a face smothered in muck was an equal coup.

Yet there was a perception in some quarters that
Antony and Cleopatra
had, for a short time, created a blip, a bit of a career-falter; and the media abhors a vacuum, longing to fill it. Somehow the rumour spread that Rickman, long since tired of playing the villains that kept resurfacing in endless television reruns of
Die Hard
and
Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves
, might want to play the would-be good guy in real life and put his money where his socialist mouth was by following a political career instead.

Neither would the edge that Alan Rickman brought to everything disqualify him. When the spin doctor Peter Mandelson was asked who he would like to portray him in a film of his life, he famously replied, ‘Alan Rickman – because he is not afraid to play the hard guy.' Being a Labour politician didn't necessarily mean being a softie, as Mandelson, that alarming charmer credited with turning
the Labour Party into a ruthless, election-winning machine, had proved only too conclusively.

Because he is a political animal with strong views and a good grasp of policy debate, some of Alan's friends had long speculated about whether he would enter politics. Others pooh-poohed the idea. ‘Rima is a very substantial intelligence, but I think there are too many lies and too much dissembling that has to go on in politics for Alan to enter it himself,' Peter James told me back in 1995. Maybe Rickman is just not diplomatic enough.

But an opportunity for the rumour-mongers suddenly presented itself when Michael Portillo was mooted as one of the candidates for the safest Tory seat in the country, Kensington and Chelsea, after the sudden death of Nicholas Scott's successor Alan Clark. With the blow-waved Portillo still giving all the Tory ladies a thrill even after (or, some mischief-makers suggested, because of) revelations in
The Times
about his homosexual experimentation at university, it was reasonable to speculate that Labour needed an equally glamorous ‘star' – or at least one with just as much hair. Speculation about Rickman turned into a story in the
Sunday Times
, followed by a furious rebuttal from Rima Horton on the front page of the local
Kensington And Chelsea News
in September 1999. ‘Why on earth,' a sarcastic Rima was quoted as saying, ‘would Alan give up his highly paid and extremely highly respected career as an actor for the unglamorous and frankly hopeless job as a candidate?' Well, if she must put it that way – quite. ‘At first Alan was bemused and then perturbed by the sudden interest in this,' she added, ‘but he now treats the whole affair as something of a joke.'

The
Sunday Times
had pointed the finger of suspicion at Margaret McDonagh, then the General Secretary of the Labour Party, for wanting to sprinkle some show business stardust at the Party conference that year. The story claimed that discussions were believed to have been held at the highest levels in the party between McDonagh and Alastair Campbell, though the paper acknowledged that Alan had already proved somewhat off-message as a ‘renegade' Labour supporter by joining Tam Dalyell, to protest against Government action on Iraq, and Vanessa Redgrave in sending messages of support to the newly formed Emergency Committee on Iraq.

But it still seemed a long leap to make from the undeniable facts: that Alan's partner had parliamentary ambitions and that Rickman
had been a guest at a Number 10 Downing Street party held by the chancellor Gordon Brown shortly after the election, along with Rickman's old mates Bob Hoskins and Richard Wilson and the actress Helena Bonham-Carter. He was also a guest at the election night party held at the Chalk Farm home of the QC Helena Kennedy to celebrate Labour's 1997 landslide victory, but so what? That didn't necessarily make him MP material; it just meant that Helena Kennedy knew a lot of actors. Despite Rima's emphatic denial that the story had any substance, some people remained convinced that there had been loose talk at Labour's Millbank HQ. In August 2002, I phoned Margaret McDonagh at home to ask her to put on record for the first time the truth about her alleged involvement in wanting Rickman to run for Parliament. The story was, she told me, absolutely not true, and she remains as puzzled as anyone over how the rumour started. ‘I had no discussions whatsoever with Alastair [Campbell] about the Chelsea by-election,' McDonagh told me. ‘I've never known Alan to articulate that he wanted to be an MP. Besides,' she added, ‘unless there's some problem, it's up to the local party to choose its candidate.'

Two years after the story had first run and had been rubbished by Rima, Alan finally denied it formally in an interview with Tim Sebastian of BBC News 24. ‘I think they tried it on,' he said, not naming names, ‘because somebody in a press office somewhere thought they're not going to let Portillo have all the publicity without any challenge. I have no political ambitions in that way anyway, so it was complete nonsense.'