THE TRULY, MADLY, GROUCHY FILM STAR
The star of Truly, Madly, Deeply and Harry Potter was loyal and generous, but you’d never know from these morose diaries
Madly, Deeply: The Alan Rickman Diaries Edited by Alan Taylor Canongate €31.50
★★★★★
They say you should never meet your heroes, but you should probably never read their diaries either. While Alan Rickman’s thousands of fans twigged years ago that the actor, who died in 2016, was not exactly a pussycat, it still comes as a shock to discover what a grouch he was in private.
No famous friend – Ruby Wax, Emma Thompson, Kate Winslet, Ewan McGregor – escapes without him complaining about just how self-obsessed they are. Most of the film and theatre directors he works with are awful, journalists are naturally scum, and Christmas with his siblings is ‘the pits’.
Even Rima Horton, his long-time partner whom he eventually married in 2012, is reduced on occasions to the role of task mistress and mad cat lady. One time, arriving home from New York to find his other half groggy from prescription drugs and no fun at all, he wishes he had stayed away.
This isn’t the whole story, of course. What also emerges from these diaries, which cover the years from 1993 to 2015, is how passionate a
craftsman Rickman was, how much time he spent on thankless committee meetings at Rada, his alma mater, helping to shape the next generation of actors. The outpouring of love and grief that followed his unexpected death six years ago suggests that he was a loyal and generous friend. The problem is that you just wouldn’t know it from these diaries.
As the book opens, Rickman is already a multiplex master of the universe thanks to his baddie r n Die Hard and Robin Hood: Prince
Of Thieves, and also a cult figure following the independent hit Truly, Madly, Deeply, in which he plays Juliet Stevenson’s ghostly lover. From this point, we watch as he starts directing movies himself while also appearing in international blockbusters Sense And Sensibility and Love Actually.
Finally he signs on for the Harry Potter franchise as Severus Snape and, true to form, immediately begins to loathe the whole set-up. The directors are facile and more concerned with ‘getting the shot’ than digging deep into character, and the catering food is cheap and nasty.
Along the way we watch, aghast and admiring, as Rickman lives up to his reputation for being tricky: ‘I can see where the word “difficult” comes from. Why is this destructive side so unstoppable, feeding so voraciously on itself?’ Just occasionally he tells himself to ‘Count blessings. Grow up.’
Did Rickman intend these highly personal diaries, which have been boiled down from a million words, to be set before the public? Editor Alan Taylor gives the following justification: ‘We do not know whether Alan would like to have seen his diaries published but he did receive invitations to write books which could have drawn upon material in them’. So that clears that up.
One thing is certain, though, Rickman’s estate hardly needs the money. The boy who had grown up in a working-class, one-parent
family went on to count Harrods as his corner shop. He thought nothing of splurging on designer clothes that he would wear only once, and his greatest pleasure was picking out luxury furnishings for one of his three homes – in New York, London and Italy.
Into these pages Rickman pours all the private parts of himself, the sort that most of us don’t want others to see. He is often scathing about other people’s work. On Forrest Gump, he writes: ‘I had sworn I wouldn’t go. I went and it was as horrific as I had thought.’ Pulp Fiction fares only slightly better: ‘brilliant and empty’. GoodWillHuntingis ‘a bit of a let-down’. Woody Allen’s VickyCristinaBarcelona is ‘Woman’sWeekly tosh’. And when Titanic fails to win a single Bafta he is thrilled.
What also emerges from this self-portrait is a far freer and experimental Alan Rickman than you might have imagined from his buttoned-up persona. He takes ecstasy with Natasha Richardson and enjoys it, and on another occasion reports that a sex scene between himself and his male co-star is getting them both turned on. And Rickman lives to dance. An evening isn’t really a success unless it finishes with a boogie. One wrap party leaves him snarling: ‘No one is dancing, so what’s the f ****** point?’
By the time we get to 2015, however, it is clear that he won’t be throwing many more shapes. Rickman had beaten prostate cancer a decade earlier but is bothered by a pain in his lower back. It turns out to be pancreatic cancer, leaving him only a few months to live. These final entries are desperately sad, becoming briefer and briefer, until they stop altogether on December 12. A month later, Alan Rickman died at the age of 69.