Farewell to a baddie who made women weak at the knees. Brian Viner tells the story of actor Alan Rickman, who died from cancer this week.
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!”
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, he invited a friend, playwright Peter Barnes, to come up with something better.
Rifling through this substandard script, Barnes came across a scene in which the sheriff was charging along a passage.
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, 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 two days after arriving in Hollywood in pursuit of a film career, after many distinguished performances on stage.
He was 41by 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 that he should do as he was told. But when Rickman received a revised script, he found he had got his way.
But it was another baddie, or perceived baddie, that propelled him to global fame. If Die Hard and then Robin Hood had bestowed stardom on him, the Harry Potter films took it up a dozen notches.
In 2011, when the publishers of the Potter books conducted a worldwide poll to find fans’ favourite character, it was, by a country mile, the apparent villain who 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, JK 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 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.
Also, he had firm ideas about Snape’s costume, once revealing in an interview with the New York Times that he had asked for tight sleeves and lots of buttons, so Snape might be buttoned up physically, just as he was emotionally.
Yesterday, his 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. It is plain from listening 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 The Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, leaving in 1974.
His politics were always Left-wing. 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, and Rickman revealed in an interview last April that they had got married in 2012. 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.
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 knew the way to women’s hearts. Lindsay Duncan, his co-star in that Royal Shakespeare Company production, observed after 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.”
Again and again he turned up on, and often topped, lists of the world’s sexiest men.
Cinema audiences sobbed their way through the 1990 film Truly, Madly, Deeply, in which Rickman’s character returned from the dead to comfort his distraught girlfriend. At the time, her performance was described as a landmark in the portrayal of grief, an eruption of tears and mucus such as had never been seen before on screen.
“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.
But Rickman was as good, if in certain respects slightly wasted, playing thoroughly upright, honourable characters.
While his death won’t un-leash the same outpouring of grief as that of another 69-year-old Londoner who died this week, David Bowie, it nonetheless robs us of another man who bestrode his particular world like a giant.
Daily Mail