Chi ha scritto questa intervista tifa indubbiamente per Alan... ed è sicuramente una donna sedotta dalla sua voce...MUCH MORE THAN A VILLAIN.... (1991)
... WITH HIS HAWKISH FACE AND IMPERIOUS VOICE, ALAN RICKMAN IS HOLLYWOOD'S BIG BAD GUY ("DIE HARD," "ROBIN HOOD").
BUT ASK HIM AND HE'LL TELL YOU HE HAS PLAYED AS MANY SWEETIES AS SLEAZIES. HE'LL TELL YOU ABOUT HIS GOOD-GUY ROLES IN SMALL FILMS, FAR REMOVED FROM THE BLOCKBUSTERS.
By Steven Rea,
(Philadelphia Inquirer, May 26, 1991)
Traduzione
It's the Voice.
You're phoning up from the hotel lobby - the Carlyle, that high-hatted bastion of Upper East Side affluence - to Alan Rickman's room.
"Hello?" the Voice intones.
Whoa. This is a hello unlike any you've ever heard. Two puny syllables infused with a swirling conflation of emotion: seductive, disdainful, imperious - a growl as deep as the ocean, as commanding as Gen. Schwarzkopf on the front.
Hey, you think, getting a grip on yourself, it's just a lousy hello. Upstairs, in the British actor's $550-a-night, no-view suite, you realize why Rickman has, in a few short years, become the man Hollywood calls upon when it needs a bad guy. Not just any old bad guy, mind you, but a smart, sneering, look-down-your-nose-at-the-mindless-rabble kind of bad guy. The arch terrorist of Die Hard, the snide Australian of Quigley Down Under, and, come June 14, the dark, door-kicking Sheriff of Nottingham opposite Kevin Costner in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves.
It's not just the voice, you realize - it's his look, his manner. Dry, ironic, honey-coated contemptuousness. Hawklike features. He's the Basil Rathbone of the '90s, and, alas, he's already in danger of the typecasting that mired Rathbone (baddie Sir Guy of Gisbourne to Errol Flynn's Robin Hood) in villainy for a score of Hollywood productions.
Rickman's obviously aware of his precarious position. How else to explain his trip stateside to talk up his starring role in Truly, Madly, Deeply, the afterlife romance that opened Wednesday at the Ritz Five in Philadelphia?
In Anthony Minghella's sugary first feature, Rickman is cast as a sensitive cellist who, dispatched to the beyond, returns to haunt his lover's life. Juliet Stevenson (who appeared opposite Rickman in the London production of Les Liaisons Dangereuses) is the grief-stricken woman.
You suggest it must have been a nice change of pace, playing a sympathetic character for once. "Inevitably I get asked that," he says with strained patience, "and it so isn't what my experience is. It's just that certain things that one does get more focus than others, but in actual fact if you look at the movies that I've made, it's like three good guys to three bad guys - and one unnameable."
Good guys: The January Man (a 1989 flop), Truly, Madly, Deeply (critics either love it or hate it) and Close My Eyes (a small English film, yet to be released). Bad guys: Already noted.
One unnameable: the fascist interrogator in the little-seen torture drama Closet Land.
"It's just that the three bad guys I've done have been in big, Hollywood, expensive things, and the good guys are in small movies - small budgets at least," he says. "It's a definite mix to me, but not, obviously, in the public's perception. They haven't seen all those things - and didn't, and won't. But you move on, and you can qualify your own image, I suppose."
But for the time being, the image lingers. And it should linger through the summer. It is said, from those who have seen bits of Robin Hood, that Rickman, as the necromantic lord of the shire, chews up the film sublimely.
"Yeah, why not?" he says of playing the villain. "It's fun being naughty."
Rickman, smiling, says he harbors no core of evil that might explain his charismatic sinisterness on the screen. His success in imparting such malevolence, he observes, can be traced to matters more mundane.
Like camera angles.
"If a camera is placed endlessly on the floor in all your shots, and looks up your nostrils - you know, it's not just me. The director and the cinematographer are doing the job in spite of whatever I might be doing at the moment. I kept saying that to (director) Kevin Reynolds in Prince of Thieves: 'Hallo, look where the camera is. Seen it down there before.' "
Rickman concedes that he does have "certain features, that if they're lit from certain angles" take on a look of menace. "It's out of story books, it's out of The Wizard of Oz. Somebody with Debbie Reynolds' features doesn't get cast as the Wicked Witch, although maybe they should." In Truly, Madly, Deeply, Rickman's features assume, appropriately enough, a ghostly glow. The film, made for British television but blown up to 35mm, has been described as "the thinking person's Ghost," a notice the film's U.S. distributor happily trumpets in its ads.
But there are those who think comparing Truly, Madly, Deeply to Ghost might scare off as many moviegoers as it attracts.
"It's just sort of a strange world we describe when we think people are saying, 'Well, I saw Ghost, I'm therefore not going to go to see this other movie.' You know, 'I saw Anna Karenina so I ain't going to see Boris Godunov.' It's so different, and I hope that people tell each other that it is. Then they'll go see why."
Rickman's scenes with Stevenson are particularly affecting. The two have worked together often - in Liaisons (Rickman the Vicomte, Stevenson Madame de Tourvel) and other Royal Shakespeare Company endeavors - and the actor remains in awe of his colleague. For Rickman, one scene in Truly, Madly, Deeply confirms Stevenson's power. It comes early on, when her character, Nina, wracked by the loss of her loved one, breaks down and cries. And cries. And cries. And cries - tears and saliva and fluid oozing from every orifice on her face.
That scene earns the movie," Rickman observes. "I think you needed to have that scene to ground the film in reality, and for her to be as uncompromising as she is with it. Everybody gets a purging. It's a bit like an emotional car wash that she gives you - and then you can get on with the movie, really. You've got to see her grief, and so Anthony (Minghella) really lets you see it, and so does Juliet."
Rickman was born in London, where he still resides. (He shares a house near Portobello Road with a woman friend; it's around the corner from the Prince of Thieves' Maid Marian, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio). Nonetheless, he calls himself a "full-blooded Celt" - his parents were Irish and Welsh. And "they certainly didn't have anything to do with the theater. I'm some kind of accident."
That accident occurred when Rickman was still in grade school. "I was 7, and I remember being given a part in a play and thinking this is exciting. A good escape."
Art school and five years as a partner in a Soho graphics studio got in the way, however, and it wasn't until his mid-20s that Rickman turned to acting as a profession. He is in his early 40s now, although he won't supply exact digits. ("Yes, I do mind," he responds to a query about his age.) An audition at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art led to his appointment to the Royal Shakespeare Company, where he essayed a gamut of roles. His portrait of the seductive, sinister Vicomte in Liaisons (John Malkovich landed the role in the film adaptation) won him accolades both in London and on Broadway (where he received a Tony nomination).
Rickman has also done a considerable amount of television work in England, including Barchester Chronicles, seen here on Masterpiece Theater.
After the 12th-century spectacle of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, the actor will be seen in the aforementioned Close My Eyes, which had its premiere at the Berlin Film Festival in February. The film is slated for fall release.
"It's another love story," he reports, in deep, sleepy tones. "I'm part of a triangle. It's me, my wife and her brother. I discover a little later - rather a lot later than the audience does - that she's having an affair with her brother."
Alan Rickman, victim, not villain. Hollywood, please take noteLe vecchie interviste mi sembrano moooolto più interessanti di quelle recenti...
Ma, secondo voi, il giornalista qui è un uomo? Si chiama James, ma...VILLAIN WITH A VOICE OF HONEY (1990)
By James Delingpole
Traduzione
At one stage Alan Rickman threatened to smash my face in. At least I thought he did. But I wasn't quite paying attention. His voice has such a mesmeric quality that it is terribly easy to drift off on the delicious musicality of his speech and forget what it is he is actually saying.
It came towards the end of our chat. Someone had mentioned beforehand that Rickman was not an easy person to interview, so it was some time before I plucked up the courage to ask him any really difficult questions.
But when as last I accused him of being cold, cynical and reptilian, he struck. "I'm really interested in not having brick walls put up in front of me," he said, referring to those journalists who sought to reduce him to a few easy adjectives. "And if it means the brick builder gets my fist in their face, then so be it."
So, as I discovered when I played back my tape of the interview, his threat had not been as direct as I had imagined. But he had made his point. Alan Rickman does not like being typecast.
The problem is that, for much of his career, he has been unable to avoid it. He has played the demonic lead in Mephisto, the camp but chilling baddies in Die Hard and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, the icy Valmont in Les Liaisons Dangereuses... None of these people are exactly the sort you'd trust to look after your cat while you are away on holiday.
What must make it even more frustrating for Rickman is that he is so terribly good at playing these villains. When his Sheriff of Nottingham snarls "No more merciful beheadings!" you long to see his goodie-goodie rival, Kevin Costner's Robin Hood, swinging from the nearest gibbet.
This was the reason why Costner decided to re-shoot and re-edit the film. Rickman denies that there was any friction on the set, but it is an open secret that, when preview audiences saw the film in its original form, they found the Sheriff much more sympathetic than Robin.
Robin Hood may well be the last time Rickman plays the second string to anybody's bow. Hollywood loves him. So does the West End and Broadway, where he distinguished himself in Les Liaisons Dangereuses. And even the British film industry has reason to be grateful for his performances in its latest offering, Close My Eyes and Truly, Madly, Deeply.
Rickman may have reached an age at which, as he told one interviewer, he is "too old to play Hamlet", but virtually any other leading part he wants is there for the asking. At last, he believes, he will be able to confound those casting directors who simply want him to repeat his best-known roles.
It is understandable that his hackles rise when he is accused of specialising in cold, arid cynics. In his defense he cites The Lucky Chance at the Royal Court. "I was playing somebody completely open, energized, with a mission, not at all cynical, not at all laid-back, not at all any of those words and people said 'Gosh, I didn't know you could do that.' "
Perhaps he just been unlucky. It was not his fault that, say, the television series. The Barchester Chronicles- in which he played the loathsome Obadiah Slope - succeeded, while the film. The January Man - in which he played a nice guy - did not.
And yet, he does have this peculiar ability to invest even his most likeable characters with a vaguely chilling quality. In Close My Eyes, for example, he plays a generous - and totally harmless - rich cuckold. But Rickman endows his character with such an intense inner life that you suspect that, at any moment, he might be about to commit some monstrous act of violence.
When I put this to him, Rickman adopts a pained expression. "There is a certain warmth, I would have thought," he says, before suggesting that what I saw as coldness was in fact "watchfulness". Seeing I am not convinced, he goes on: "This is me. I have a certain pitch to my voice, a certain way of framing my sentences."
And there is some truth in that. He speaks slowly, deliberately and almost dreamily, with each phrase fading languorously into a honeyed, dying fall. He sounds intelligent, sometimes sibilantly dangerous, but always ineffably seductive.
This could well be Rickman's secret. It is why, for example, his portrayal of the callous roue in Les Liaisons Dangereuses was so painfully sympathetic. And why, after an hour's exposure to his hypnotic charm, I felt a desperate urge to write the most gushingly favourable interview sycophancy could devise.
He works this trick yet again in his latest West End play. The Tango at the End of Winter. Although he is playing a madman, Rickman does it with such quiet reasonableness that his character's weird vision of the world threatens to overwhelm the supposedly sane view of those who surround him.
It may sound reminiscent of King Lear or Henry IV but the difference is that Shakespeare and Pirandello give their characters a head start by granting them the most compelling speeches. The text of Tango does not have this sophistication. The skill is all Rickman's.
While there is now no shortage of directors willing to pay tribute to his talents, it was not always so. Rickman entered RADA late - having trained as a graphic designer at Chelsea and the Royal College of Art - and it was some time before he found his feet on the stage.
When Alan first came to Stratford," one RSC director recalls, "it was terribly embarrassing. There was one season when he was so awful that we had a directors' meeting and we asked each other 'What are we going to do with him?' But then he just grew up. And suddenly everyone wanted this wonderful new leading man."
Rickman himself does not set too much store by his stint at Stratford. "I was with the RSC for three years but I also spent seven years doing plays at the Bush, at Hampstead, and the Royal Court, which I regard just as much as my spiritual home."
He resents the way regional theatre has declined since "Thatcher put the boot in". He explains: "When I left drama school you could go to a repertory theatre and be in a Shakespeare play or something large where you could go and make ghastly mistakes. About the only places where you can do that now are the RSC and National. Everyone's making their mistakes in great places."
When talking about the "state of the theatre", Rickman sounds almost excited - which is to say that his voice rises a few decibels higher than his customary half-whisper. The only other time he appears to stir from his customary languor is when I attempt to define him with a few glib adjectives.
Just as he loathes typecasting, so he is unwilling to have his personality summed up in a newspaper profile. Which may be why Rickman has acquired his "difficult" reputation and why - albeit with a sharky grin - he made his little remark about fists and brick walls.
Edited by Ida59 - 16/6/2022, 15:22
