Baddie who made women weak at the knees
RICH, sonorous, fruity, hypnotic . . . many adjectives have been deployed to describe the voice of Alan Rickman. But none has adequately conveyed its unique resonance, or the way he used it, to frighten and seduce, often at the same time.
It was always his most powerful weapon as one of the greatest, most charismatic of screen baddies, from Hans Gruber in Die Hard to Severus Snape in the Harry Potter films.
But it was his unforgettable performance as the Sheriff of Nottingham, opposite Kevin Costner’s disconcertingly Californian Robin of Locksley in the 1991 film Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves which woke up more than a few Hollywood producers to the fact that British actors make the best villains.
The battalion of British baddies in Hollywood movies over the ensuing quarter of a century owe much to Rickman’s ruthlessly vindictive but riotously camp sheriff, who memorably ordered his minions to: ‘Cancel the kitchen scraps for lepers and orphans, no more merciful beheadings, and call off Christmas!’
And when Disney cast his near-contemporary Jeremy Irons as the voice of Simba’s wicked uncle Scar in 1994’s The Lion King, it was no accident. A 2008 experiment by a linguist and a sound engineer at Sheffield University found the ‘perfect’ male voice, in terms of conveying self-confidence and generating trust, was a hybrid of those of Irons and Rickman.
Of course, Rickman — whose fruity vowels belied his working-class West London roots — had much more in his armoury than a great voice.
He was a wonderful actor, with tremendous physical presence, and he cared deeply about the roles he took. Despite accepting the part in Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves, he agonised about the feebleness of his dialogue, which did not initially include that marvellous line about cancelling Christmas.
So, in a branch of Pizza Express of all places, he invited a friend, playwright Peter Barnes, to come up with something better.
Rifling through this substandard script and getting pizza topping all over it, Barnes came cross a scene in which the sheriff was charging along a passageway. He suggested it could be improved by having a couple of wenches in a doorway, with the sheriff barking at one: ‘You! My room! 10.30!’ then turning to the other and saying: ‘You! 10.45!’
Rickman was delighted with this, and persuaded the director Kevin Reynolds to include it, though not before another friend, Ruby Wax, had looked at the lines and added: ‘And bring a friend!’
BY THE time he made the Sheriff of Nottingham so gloriously his own, Rickman had also played the haughty master-criminal Gruber in Die Hard (1988), a role he was said to have been offered just two days after arriving in Hollywood in pursuit of a film career, after many distinguished performances on stage.
He was 41 by then, big and brave enough to stand up to the powerful Hollywood producer Joel Silver, who wanted Gruber to wear full ‘terrorist gear’.
No, said Rickman, he should wear a suit. Silver was outraged by such audacity, from an actor starring in his first Hollywood movie, and told him, doubtless in rather saltier terms, that he should jolly well do as he was told. But when Rickman received a revised script, he found that he had got his way.
But it was another baddie, or perceived baddie, that propelled him to genuinely global fame. If Die Hard and then Robin Hood had bestowed stardom upon him, the Harry Potter films took it up a dozen notches.
In 2011, when the publishers of the Potter books, Bloomsbury, conducted a worldwide poll to find fans’ favourite character, it was, by a country mile, the apparent villain who actually turns out to be a hero: Severus Snape.
Without the slightest doubt, this owed much to Rickman’s screen interpretation, into which, once again, he ploughed plenty of his own ideas. After he had been offered the part, he phoned the author of the Potter books, J.K. Rowling, who offered him one small but vital piece of information about Snape — information that would only be disclosed in later books — then swore him to secrecy.
He always refused to share what Rowling had said, but it is safe to assume, with only three of the books published by then, that it concerned the eventual revelation that Snape had been protecting Harry all along.
This was more than even the films’ directors knew, but in subtle ways, it repeatedly informed Rickman’s performance.
Also, as with Hans Gruber’s suit in Die Hard, he had firm ideas about Snape’s costume, once revealing in an interview with the New York Times that he had asked for very tight sleeves and lots of buttons, so that Snape might be buttoned up physically, just as he was emotionally.
Yesterday, his Harry Potter co-star Daniel Radcliffe praised Rickman’s loyalty, which was echoed by the Oxford undergraduates who late last year, through a mutual friend, asked him to narrate a short YouTube video of a tortoise eating a strawberry, in aid of Save The Children.
‘We went to his home and he couldn’t have been lovelier,’ one said, though it is plain from listening to his voice on the video that his health was failing by then.
Rickman lived in West London, not so far — though in rather grander style — from the council estate in Acton where he grew up, the son of a housewife and a factory worker. After primary
school, he won a scholarship to Latymer Upper School where he became involved in drama, before going on to study at Chelsea College of Art and Design and the Royal College of Art.
He began working as a graphic designer for the radical newspaper the Notting Hill Herald before opening a graphic design studio with two friends. But, three years later, he decided to pursue acting full time. He was awarded a place at RADA, leaving in 1974.
His politics were always Left-wing, indeed you might say he was the quintessential Labour luvvie. His long-time partner, Rima Horton, was a Labour councillor, in the London Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, for 20 years.
They met in 1965, in their teens, and Rickman revealed in an interview last April that they had got married in 2012, after living together for 35 years. They had no children.
It was a life of apparent monogamy distinctly at odds with those of many of the characters Rickman played. Among them was Harry, the outwardly respectable managing director of a design agency in the 2003 Richard Curtis film Love Actually, who is planning to cheat with his secretary on his doting, long-suffering wife Karen, played by Emma Thompson.
HE was even more scheming as the predatory, unprincipled Vicomte de Valmont in a famous mid-Eighties stage production of Christopher Hampton’s play Les Liaisons Dangereuses.
One review memorably described Rickman’s Valmont as slipping ‘sly and inscrutable through the action like a cat who knows the way to the cream’. He certainly knew the way to women’s hearts. Lindsay Duncan, his co-star in that Royal Shakespeare Company production, observed after the play’s opening night that: ‘A lot of people left the theatre wanting to have sex, and most of them wanted to have it with Alan Rickman.’
Sexy as John Malkovich was in the screen version, Rickman would have been sexier.
Again and again he turned up on, and often topped, lists of the world’s sexiest men. But it wasn’t just his womanising characters who turned the heads of female fans.
Cinema audiences everywhere sobbed their way through the 1990 film Truly, Madly, Deeply, in which Rickman’s character returned from the dead to comfort his distraught girlfriend, played by Juliet Stevenson. At the time, her performance was described as a landmark in the portrayal of grief, a full-on eruption of tears and mucus such as had never really been seen before on screen. ‘But I honestly don’t know what all the fuss is about,’ wrote one female critic at the time. ‘If I’d had Alan Rickman and lost him, I’d be just the same.’
It is hard to think of anyone who could appear quite so villainous and quite so sexy — sometimes, as in the case of Valmont, within the same role.
But Rickman was just as good, if in certain respects slightly wasted, playing thoroughly upright, honourable characters, such as Colonel Brandon in Ang Lee’s 1995 film of Sense And Sensibility.
That was the film on which he got to know Kate winslet, who played Marianne Dashwood, and last year they teamed up again in A Little Chaos, Rickman’s second film as a director. She played a brilliant gardener, Sabine de Barra, who is hired to work on the gardens at Versailles. Rickman was a suitably regal King Louis XIV. while many of my fellow critics dismissed the picture, I thoughtit was charming and gave it four stars.
In particular, I loved one laughout-loud scene in which Sabine encounters the king without realising who he is.
She played it perfectly and so did he, with impeccable comic timing.
That was another of his considerable gifts, and while his death won’t unleash the same outpouring of grief as that of another 69-yearold Londoner who passed away this week, David Bowie, it nonetheless robs us of another man who bestrode his particular world like a giant.