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Questa è un'intervista molto vecchia, ma mi sembra particolarmente interessante.

Se qualcuno volesse tradurla...

RICKMAN'S WORTH (1992)
by Ann McFarron
(Elle, Feb 1992)

TRADUZIONE

Alan Rickman is crouched over a dressing table in his chilly dressing room in the Piccadilly theater. He looks a little tired, a little harassed, and instead of winding down after another arduous performance, he is painstakingly working his way through a foot high pile of letters. The fan mail alone bears testament to Rickman's spiraling popularity, but the inner man is less than dazzled by his success.

'I am a worrier,' he explains politely, as though pointing out a fatal flaw in this character. 'My approach to work is rather like my approach to life. I'm a bit like a dog with an old slipper.' Rickman locks his features into a grimace of cross eyed worry, a raised eyebrow suggesting his abhorrence of his doggy persona. 'I like to think that my philosophy of life is just do it, get on with it. But I don't. I'm a dreadful procrastinator. When I go to bed at night it's as if there's a bit of me that says, "Now go on, have a really good brood...", while there's this other bit of me saying, "Oh, go to sleep." There are so many nooks and crannies in my mind and in my persona which need a little exercise, so they come out at night.'

These nocturnal demons often mean that Rickman gets as little as five hours sleep a night. And during the day, worry can be transmuted into social responsibility- and fan mail. The top letter reads: 'Your comments about my play filled me with great hope. I continue to write...' Had Rickman read a fan's play? 'Yes, well, it smelt like it needed to be read,' he shrugs, almost defensively. 'Actually it was rather good. Look at this one; it's so sad, 'he adds picking up a tragic life story which has been written into three sheets of paper, and recreated, apparently, to cathartic effect in Rickman's West End performance of Tango at the End of Winter. Rickman has that sort of effect on people. When he played the ruthlessly seductive Valmont in Christopher Hampton's Les Liaisons Dangereuses, women in their droves struggled to analyze Rickman's appeal.

'I am a feminist,' one women wrote to the director Hampton. 'I strongly object to this character on principle, but I can't help myself fancying Alan Rickman.' She was not alone. Beatie Edney, who played a virgin seduced by Valmont, says: 'There was always at least one of us in love with Alan- on stage that is. But I know that if I were to tell him I'd had a crush on him , he'd say "Oh shut up, Beatie."

He probably would. For Rickman is contemptuous of the glib sentiment or the easy cliché. He says, quite simply, that it is the actor's job to seduce an audience. After the brooding intensity of his screen personae, what strikes you about Rickman in person is his warmth, supple wit and self- deprecating humor. He is sexy, certainly, and sardonic sometimes, but the sulky, suave, world weary matinée idol is just one facet of an infinitely more complex man.

Talking to Rickman you sense that his ambition is fuelled by a keen sense of his own worth allied to a well-defined social conscience and an iron determination to remain in control in a profession where actor's reputations are gobbled up for breakfast. 'I know a lot about myself,' he says. 'On the one hand I'm the person who's loading up the washing machine in the morning. But when crowds stare at you at the stage door you're suddenly someone else. There are moments when you've got to stop yourself spiralling off. Like when your agent starts arguing percentages or the size of names on a billboard.' How does he prevent takeoff?

'I hope Rima is around, ' he smiles. A warm astute woman, Rima Horton lives with Rickman in West London. The couple met when they were both in their twenties at a local amateur dramatics society in West London. 'No, it was not Love At First Sight', he growls, but it was shortly after he left his childhood home in Acton.

An economics teacher who will shortly be lining up, along with Glenda Jackson, as a prospective Labour parliamentary candidate (for Chelsa) in the next general election, Rima had been with the actor for over 20 years. In a profession where partners can appear to last as long as runs of plays, their relationship appears a model of endurance and mutual respect.

'I'd hate for us to be presented as something extraordinary,' says Rickman. 'We're just as messy and complex as any other couple, and we go through just as many changes. But I really respect her rima and i can sit in a room just reading, and not saying anything to each other for an hour, then she'll read something to me and we'll both start giggling.'

The relationship, Rickman believes, works partly because Rima is not in the same profession. 'I think it's difficult for two actors to live together because this business burns up any available space. Clearly Judi Dench and Michael Williams have made a success of it, but maybe they've learnt to leave business behind in the rehearsal room. I've never learnt that trick. I bring all problems home. I brood. But Rima just laughs and goes straight to the heart of the matter. No matter what problems she has she puts her head on the pillow and goes straight to sleep'.

Rickman was born 44 years ago to Welsh parents, the second eldest of four children. His father, a painter and decorator, died from cancer when Rickman was eight years old. He recalls a, 'devastating sense of grief.' Money was short, the children learnt their responsibilities fast, and Rickman's most enduring memories of those years are being sent to do the grocery shopping. 'Images of not being quite able to reach a knocked and kicking tin cans about the streets.' At primary school Rickman played the leading role in King Grizley Beard. King Grizley who? 'I don't know, but I remember getting a huge buzz out of it.'

The buzz continued at Latymer Upper School, West London, to which Rickman won a scholarship at the age of 11, where 'there were wonderful inspirational teachers' and opportunities to act. Despite the pressure of being one of the eldest boys in a large family, Rickman emphasizes the support of his family. 'I've never done anything for sensible reasons,' he says. 'But they never raised an eyebrow.' For a cleaver boy like Rickman the sensible thing would have been university, but he chose to go to the Royal College of Art where, aged 171/2, he confronted his first naked lady- in a life class. 'Not a turn-on, but a buzz.'

After the RCA, Rickman set up a Soho-based design company. Two years later, he quit to go to the RADA, 'A voice in the head saying, "It's time to do it. No excuses."' He worked his way through the RADA, as a dresser to Ralph Richardson and Nigel Hawthorne.

After two years of rep, including squeezing himself into a squirrel's costume for Christmas panto, Rickman hit his first lead role and his first sexually explicit love scene, opposite his first 'big name leading lady'- Anna Calder-Marshall- in The Devil Is An Ass. 'I had to say, "from these hills to this valley..."' Rickman waves his arms vaguely from his chest to his crotch. 'I mean, where else could I put my hands?'

Only six years later, the actor was standing stark naked in the Royal Court Theater in The Grass Widow. 'A very strange thing to do. You have to pretend its not happening to you.'

Having played Valmont in the award winning Les Liaisons Dangereuses both in London and on Broadway, Rickman was asked to play the terrorist Hans Gruber in Die Hard with Bruce Willis. 'Filming was like a holiday after playing Valmont eight times a week,' he says, and the film was like the best ride at the best funfair'. It may have felt like a breeze, but Rickman's ideas about how his character should look shaped the direction of the movie. The role of the cool suit-clad terrorist propelled Rickman into international Fame. Today, he is one of the hottest screen properties, a consequence, partly, it seems of playing the coolest villains.

Last autumn he starred in three films in the top 10: Robin Hood; Truly, Madly, Deeply, and Close My Eyes. As the cuckolded husband in the latter, Steven Poliakoff's saga of incest, he found himself underneath Saskia Reeves who was wearing nothing but a see-through nightie. 'I've done a lot of hopping in and out of bed naked, but this was my first actual sex scene. She whispered to me, did I have any knickers on? I did. I mean God forbid there should be any real contact.'

The absence of knickers notwithstanding, love scenes, Rickman feels, 'should come naturally. Every kiss should be specific. We didn't rehearse the major scene in TMD, when Juliet Stevenson first sees me [Rickman plays her ghostly lover]. But Juliet and I had done a lot of kissing in Les Liaisons. That was one of the worst things about the New York run. I didn't sleep, I got mouth ulcers, and kissing with mouth ulcers isn't fun.

'Actually,' he boasts, 'I've kissed some of the greatest actresses around - Fiona Shaw, Harriet Walter, Juliet Stevenson...' The actresses are also part of a close circle of friends, mostly women, who play an important part in Rickman's life.

Simple pleasures, he insists, are what matters: 'Sitting around a table with good friends, some sympathy, nice wine good talk, what could be better than that? Except sex. Or getting it right on stage.' After the latter he may be found dining out in restaurants like the Ivy or Le Caprice. His ideal Sunday (often his only day off) is a leisurely lunch with Rima and other friends, followed by a walk or French cricket in the park.

Ask his friends about Rickman's virtues and they name the big ones: loyalty, sympathy, boundless generosity and practical encouragement. Among his vices, Rickman, cites 'a wounding tongue. I'm working on it. Perhaps its the Celt in me.' Friends add that their are times when he wants to control too much. A caricature of the Rickman they love, but can be infuriated by is a cartoonish hybrid of the Sheriff of Nottingham and the romantic but manipulative Jamie in Truly, Madly, Deeply. 'He can be outrageously, creatively over the top, almost like a little boy,' says one friend, 'but he's also loving and gentle, and controlling. Like Jamie you feel if you lived with him, he might move the furniture around while you went shopping.'

Rickman is a staunchly committed socialist, but periodically his social conscience may spiral into fantasy territory. He will announce he's going to work for Mother Teresa... His friends patiently advise other ways. 'He's an angel and a killer at the same time,' says his old friend Ruby Wax. 'He's two extremes - total humility and total ego. He is that self-centered and he is that generous; the artist and the social conscience - a complete mixture of Yin and Yang.' After filming Times Are Changing Back, Rickman looks froward to seeing more of his friends like Ruby Wax, and Rima - 'instead of colliding at weekends' - and shopping, 'mooching around in department stores', one of his favorite pastimes. His strong visual eye is a quality his women friends value especially. Before the last Labour Party conference, Rickman took Rima shopping. 'We eventually found the right suite in Workers for Freedom. It was a real knockout, but ironic, given the name and the price tag.

'He's always trying to make a well-dressed woman out of me, ' laughs his old friend Juliet Stevenson. 'And failing to his immense frustration. he has a brilliant eye. He'll pick out a garment which will look like this grey, sacking bedspread-like thing and say, "That." Of course it looks terrific on.'

Talking to Rickman you get a sense of a man and an actor whose talents and qualities are perfectly balanced between the hard-headed pragmatist and the visionary dreamer. A creative tension, but a tension nevertheless. Before he went to New York to play Valmont, Rickman went briefly to a shrink. "A bit like taking yourself to the launderette. A good idea if you can afford it.'

He talks with scrupulous honesty about his compulsions. An important need, he recognizes, 'is for the child to come out and play'. He has no children of his own, but with friends he enjoys, 'regressive trips to see trash movies like Terminator 2 - 'Morally corrupt, I know but the special effects are wonderful.' In America, his treat is theme parks, like Disneyland and Magic Mountain - the scarier the roller coaster ride the happier Rickman is. And whenever he can, he goes out to play with his sister's children, Amy and Claire, aged eight and 10. 'We do all those daft things - movies, McDonald's, Hamleys. Last time, I told them we'd walk through Hamleys to choose one thing each. They marched straight to the Barbie counter - I couldn't believe it - hideous little dolls with pointed legs and breasts. My sister doesn't dress them in pink or bows.

'However, if I had children, I'd like to think I'd let them wear whatever they wanted. None of my friends would believe me, but I'd let them walk down the road in pink Lurex and gold plastic.

Edited by Arwen68 - 19/6/2022, 17:45

Altre due vecchie interviste molto interessanti.

TOUGH ACTOR TO FOLLOW (1991)
By Ann McFerran
(Entertainment Weekly August 8, 1991)
(Traduzione)

"Los Angeles is not a town full of airheads," insists Alan Rickman, his tone implying that this might be a contentious opinion. "There's a great deal of wonderful energy there. They say 'yes' to things; not like the endless 'nos' and 'hrrumphs' you get in England!". His face contorts into a cartoonish scowl, to illustrate a hrrumph. "When I get off the plane in England I always feel about two inches shorter."

Stretched out in a chair in a London rehearsal studio, the leonine actor certainly doesn't look shorter. And, his unprompted defense of L.A. notwithstanding, he doesn't seem displeased to be stuck in his native city for a while. Nor should he. This is the day of the British premiere of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves in Nottingham, with fireworks at Nottingham Castle afterward. The morning newspapers abound with stories gleefully recounting the offscreen fireworks set off by Rickman's scene-stealing performance as the dastardly Sheriff of Nottingham. While Kevin Costner's rather wooden turn as the righteous Robin left critics and many moviegoers a bit underwhelmed, Rickman's gleefully wicked villain became the summer's most talked-about performance-and that was after the film's producers trimmed some of Rickman's best scenes.

But Rickman, who is in his early 40s, has not returned home to wallow in his hour as conquering movie star: He is here to rehearse a play, his first since his portrayal of the arch-seducer Valmont in Les Liaisons Dangereuses propelled him to fame and film offers four years ago. Rickman will play the leading role in Kunio Shimizu's Tango at the End of Winter, directed by Japan's top theater director, Yukio Ninagawa. The production will debut at Scotland's Edinburgh Festival this month and later transfer to London's West End.

Rickman's decision to abandon Hollywood for the stage just as his film career is soaring has left his American friends baffled. "Coming back to do a play at a Scottish festival must seem very perverse," he admits in his rich baritone. "Even I thought I was mad. A lot of the time I hate the theater," he goes on. "You think, I have to climb Mount Everest, again, tonight. Oh, the theater is a scary place to be." But Rickman never really doubted his decision: "There was just this inner voice in me saying, 'It's time to go onstage.' There are particular muscles which go flabby if you don't use them."

Rickman's new workout place is a huge film studio bearing the play's elaborate set, a skeletal re-creation of a movie house. Tango takes place in an old cinema, where an actor-Rickman returns to explore his past and his psyche, having lost the nerve to go onstage. "That's the thudding irony," says Rickman, with masochistic delight.

In rehearsal, the actors appear to have taken their sartorial cue from the Japanese director, who is dressed totally in black. Ninagawa speaks no English, so an interpreter shadows him. Wearing black jeans and T-shirt under a loose gray jacket, Rickman sits at the back of the stage, his head in his hands, as the scene begins. Then, to a seductive tango, he takes the hand of co-star Beatie Edney, and the man who was so comically unappealing in Robin Hood exudes a feline sexiness. The couple dances, their legs, arms, and bodies moving in balletic unison. As Rickman pulls Edney toward him, she entwines her body around his. It is a moment of palpable eroticism.

The rehearsal continues with stops and starts until, in the final scene, young actors appear from every corner, waving and cheering-commotion the director means to symbolize the spirit of youth. Though Rickman reveres the director-"to work with Ninagawa is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,"he gushes-he is concerned. He raised his hand. "Just one question, "he says. "Are we supposed to like those young people?"

Through the interpreter, the director replies affirmatively.

"It's just that in England, we have these things called football hooligans...,"Rickman says, and the cast and crew collapse with laughter. "And I think that's slightly what I'm seeing."

The phenomenon of drunken soccer fans is translated into Japanese-with difficulty, since such behavior is almost unimaginable in that country and Ninagawa ponders it. "No, they're not hooligans," he replies. Rickman smiles his quizzical halfsmile-one senses he still has his doubts-and work resumes.

Rickman isn't always so reserved; he has a reputation for fiercely held opinions about his roles. Director Howard Davies recalls "moments when Alan and I both wanted to strangle each other during rehearsals for Les Liaisons. He's such a perfectionist, it can be painful. There were times I didn't think Alan's character would survive his surgical dissection." "It's like directing a director," says Anthony Minghella, writer-director of the current film Truly, Madly, Deeply, starring Rickman as a dead cellist who returns Ghost-style to haunt his love. "He keeps you on your toes, and you have to learn not to be threatened by that. He's very concerned with appearance-what he wears."

For his part as the smooth-talking terrorist Hans Gruber in Die Hard (1988), Rickman's notions about how the character should look, wound up shaping the direction of the smash movie, "When I first met Bruce Willis, I thought it would be interesting if these characters could have a mutual respect for each other, even making each other laugh at times. Instead of looking like a terrorist wearing a t-shirt and a windbreaker, why not put on a suit? That made us opposites. As an idea it had repercussions: It made it possible for (Willis' character and mine) to meet, and I could pretend to be one of my own hostages."

As Sheriff of Nottingham, Rickman wore black, again his own idea. "It was a cartoon in primary colors, " he says. "I didn't want the film to disappear into all that historical business. I thought about Richard III and a rock guitarist and I said, 'Let's make it raven, so you know who's coming.'

Rickman's sense of style may come from his years in art school. As the second-eldest child of a large West London family, he trained to be a graphic designer but at 26 abruptly changed course to go to the prestigious Royal Academy of the Dramatic Arts. He spent years working through the ranks of local repertory companies and the London theater scene until 1985, when he joined the Royal Shakespeare Company. That year he played leading roles in several Shakespeare plays and the Vicomte de Valmont in Les Liaisons Dangereuses. The play started life in Stratford's tiny Other Place Theater and ended up on Broadway, winning several awards. Rickman played the role for over 500 performances, but when director Stephen Frears cast his film version, he chose John Malkovich instead. Rickman was disappointed to lose the part he felt he had helped invent. Even today; when asked to discuss it, he cuts off that line of questioning with a shake of the head.
Rickman's old friend Juliet Stevenson, who appears opposite him in Truly, Madly Deeply, describes the actor as a cross between a panther and a camel: "Alan has this wonderful, silky physicality; he plays cunningly with words and moments. And he has this extraordinary stamina-like a camel."

Stamina is the quality Rickman values most in himself as an actor. "I don't know where it comes from. I don't eat the right food. I'm not a monk, and I'm very gregarious. But I'm not stupid." During the filming of Robin Hood, director Kevin Reynolds learned to appreciate that endurance. "It was a very tough shoot and Alan was always endlessly, wonderfully inventive and helpful," Reynolds says. "The flamboyance of the sheriff-that's Alan; he made up several of his lines, and it was Alan's idea to push Marian's legs apart in the rape scene, which made it comical rather than hideous. He's my favorite part of the film; what else can I say?"

"Kevin Reynolds did let me off the leash,"Rickman says. But the very vividness of his portrayal, next to Costner's Robin, created a problem (see "The Battle for Sherwood Forest," EW #71, June 21). After preview audiences said that they preferred Rickman's character over Costner's, the producers ordered Reynolds to make changes. In the end, Reynolds quit the project. Rickman is politic about the whole affair, but he does express a few regrets. He particularly misses a subplot involving his relationship with the old hag Mortianna(Geraldine McEwan). "Unhappily, the scene in which Geraldine tells me she's my mother, with the two of us sailing way over the top into another stratosphere and the crew howling with laughter, ended up on the cutting-room floor," he says. "That was a shame."

And what about the rumors of tension between Rickman and the movie's beleaguered star? Rickman flashes his long-suffering look. "I'm in a no-win situation," he says. "All this stuff about antagonism on the set is absolute nonsense. Costner worked bloody hard, and he was incredibly generous to the other actors. But he's been placed on a mountaintop with a slippery slope, and there are some malicious people in this business."

If Rickman needs a break from the pressures and politics of acting, he finds it at home in West London with his longstanding partner, Rima Horton, a Labour district councilwoman whom he met when they were both in their early 20s and members of an amateur dramatic society. "She is the ultimate leveler," he say. "When I whine about my work, she'll fire back at me some well-aimed sentence about the homeless."

Onstage, Rickman is known for his serious dramatic work, but movie audiences now know him best for pop entertainments like Die Hard, and Robin Hood. He refuses to indulge in condescending comparisons between the two worlds: "I love the act of filming," he says. "I'm like a child with a new toy. I'd like to take what I can from Hollywood, and whatever it is one wants to do in England, and put them together."

Then he adds, somewhat surprisingly, "I do feel more myself in America. I can regress there, and they have rollercoaster parks. My idea of a real treat is Magic Mountain without standing in line."

Rickman's Worth (1991)
by Sean French
UK GQ - September 1991
(Traduzione)

In a decade full of villains, Alan Rickman has created two of the Eighties' most captivating ones. First he starred as Valmont. the amoral, manipulative seducer in Christopher Hampton's stage play, Les Liaisons Dangereuses which was a huge success both in London and New York. Then he played the suave, international criminal Hans Gruber in Die Hard, disdainful of the sweaty heroics of his all-American nemesis, Bruce Willis.

Rickman may have been well-known to a select theatre-going audience, and for his role as another villain, the comic but odious Obadiah Slope in the BBC series The Barchester Chronicles, but the success of Die Hard, his first film, gave him a different level of fame. "I wasn't prepared for the reaction. I flew to New York for a preview and the audience just sttod up and cheered and threw things at the screen. I walked into that cinema and I could have been just someone with a ticket, but when I walked out, I couldn't get to the car. My girlfriens and I went to Anguilla at Christmas and you're on this little West Indian island and everyone knows who you are. You're not Alan, you're the guy in Die Hard." Yet Rickman has played decent characters - he went straight from Die Hard to a film called The January Man. "I was playing someone perfectly nice in that - Kevin's eccentric next door neighbour," he says. And for all the menace and piercing intensity he projects on both stage and screen, in person Alan Rickman is diffuse, amiable, tousled and gently bear-like. His voice remains a remarkable instrument - deep, soft and relaxed to the point of langour, with notes of musical delicacy. He gives an impression of having to crank his vocal chords into motion in order to answer my questions.

But in spite of the good guys he's played, people tend to remember his lustful Angelo in Measure for Measure and his title role in the stage version of Mephisto. Even his benevolent characters display hints of darkness, and his bad characters make evil sinuously intelligent and captivating. A female admirer of Rickman's describes the actor's unusual appeal this way: "He isn't obviously handsome, almost ugly, but when he played Valmont something about his passion and intelligence made him unbelievably sexy."

By his own account, after 500 performances, the intensity of this character, who destroys other people and then himself, almost consumed him. "It stopped being a play in a way, and became an event - especially on Broadway. People came with such high expectations that a mountain had to be climbed every night. You are up there manipulating the audience in the way Valmont manipulates the characters. And when you're playing someone as self-destructive as that night after night, it can't help but to get to you to some extent. The body doesn't always know when it's lying. You know from the neck up, but you send the rest of you actually through it."

Stepping from that to a major film in Hollywood was like a holiday. "It was like taking a vacuum cleaner to your brain but switching it the other way round so that it just blew everything out. It was good to work in a completely different way. Valmont had such a complicated psyche, you couldn't say that about Hans Gruber - his psyche was: 'Give me you money - now.' "

Rickman came into acting late. He went to RADA when he was 26 years old after he had first studied design at Chelsea and the Royal College of Art, and worked as a Soho-based graphics designer. He has no regrets about his late start in the profession. He speaks with a cool sense of having arrived when he was emotionally ready to deal with its pressures and rewards. Faced with a question about being a celebrity, he answers: "I enjoy what happens when you read a script and as an actor, if you're happy enough and open enough on a rehearsal floor or on a film set, something happens between you and the script. I enjoy that, I enjoy the nuts and bolts. As for the other stuff, you start to notice that if you get into a limousine that it's only there for as long as you're selling the movie."

Not much has been seen of Rickman in the past couple of years - but now he is becoming visible in a variety of roles. The different levels of his success allow him to take a peculiar variety of work from informal workshops to high-earning roles in major Hollywood films. When I met him he was padding around his fiendishly tidy flat in London's Westbourne Grove preparing to leave for LA for the opening of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, starring Kevin Costner - and himself as the Sheriff of Nottingham.

About the film, which was shot in England, reputedly amid much conflict between director, star and studio, he speaks vaguely. Is his Sheriff of Nottingham another suave villain? "Not at all," replies Rickman, recalling a more theatrical, spluttering, flamboyantly wicked villain than the cerebral manipulators we are used to from him.

Rickman also stars in the recently released film Truly, Madly, Deeply written and directed by Anthony Minghella. Co-starring with Juliet Stevenson and Michael Maloney, Rickman plays a dead man returning to look after his ex-lover. Though produced by the BBC, the film has opened in the United States to much praise: "It's been described as a thinking man's Ghost," he says.

And opening this month is Close My Eyes, Stephen Poliakoff's tale of star-crossed lovers who happen to be brother and sister. In what otherwise looks like a glossy TV commercial for incest, Rickman is a welcome astringent presence as the cuckolded husband Sinclair, an egnimatic City whizz kid who reads Proust and is by turns sinister and affable. Rickman used his design background to collaborate closely with the costume and productiton designer to make it impossible to put Sinclair into any rigid social pigeon hole. "I didn't want people to learn anything about him through where he lived or who his friends were." It's a remarkable performance that adds a dimension to a character who might seem thin on the page.

But potentially his most interesting appearance is in the play Tango at the End of Winter, which is transferring to the West End after a run at the Edinburgh Festival. Tango is the first production in English of the great Japanese director Ninegawah, and Rickman's first stage appearance since he left Les Liaisons Dangereuses four years ago.

That's not to say that Rickman has been totally absent from the theatre during the years since Les Liaisons - during his spare time he has also been directing Ruby Wax's stage show.

How does he keep control over such a disparate career?

"I've never been able to plan my life. I just lurch from indecision to indecision," he laughs, clearly untroubled by such uncertainty. "It's just a matter of the next sandpit to climb into."

Edited by Ida59 - 18/6/2022, 15:22

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 note




Le 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

Interessante carrellata di pensieri di Alan Rickman sui ruoli teatrali interpretati.

"DON'T FENCE ME IN..." SAYS ALAN RICKMAN
Sarah Gristwood
RSC News - Spring 1986

You could without too much difficulty, think you see a link between the roles Alan Rickman has been playing with the RSC: Jaques in As You Like It, Achilles in Troilus and Cressida, and the Vicomte de Valmont in Les Liaisons Dangereuses in this, his second spell with the Company.
But it's not a connection Alan would thank you for tracing. "It's the actor's old, old plea--don't fence me in! There are qualities of the sick, the selfish, the manipulator or the looker-on in all those parts but their minds extend in wildly different areas and they each have a particular vulnerability that has to be found."
Though Jaques is the role Alan has been playing longest, the period of discovery in it is by no means over yet. As You Like It is "a production in which there is still a sense of growth. I feel very protective towards it." Since we spoke, the play has opened at the Barbican with the critics almost unanimous in acclaiming the improvements in the production. The somewhat mixed reviews the production got for the Stratford opening were fair , he feels -- but he was delighted to see how strong an appeal it made to the teenagers who were "yanked" to Stratford to see it as a school set text. "It's a great pleasure to know their eyes have widened--that they've got some real joy out of it."
What audienced get out of Les Liaisons Dangereuses is something rather different. "The audience should feel like voyeurs. Their response is absolutely crucial." It has certainly been enthusiastic. Alan's character, Valmont, is the seducer who can face any sexual challenge except love. He operates through a great web of truth and lies and, in the end, says Alan, "the play is as seductive as any of its characters".
Howard Davies is director of Liaisons and also of Alan's third role: Achilles in Troilus and Cressida. "When he asked me to do the part he said, 'Achilles should be like a movie star lying by the swimming pool, flinging the scripts back at MGM'. That made me laugh but in rehearsal I found Achilles a rather different person."
Jaques, he says, has "a lot more muscle and passion to the part than people expect." Achilles, by contrast, is "an emotional and intellectual shell. You're constantly told how great he is, what a hero--and then when he finally does fight he calls in his thugs to murder his opponent. But that's not just cowardice. In this case it's mental illness. The text is very spare so you're on a tightrope every time you do it."
One of the definite plusses of the Stratford season for Alan was the chance, in the RSC W H Smith Festival, The Fortnight, to direct a production of Barnes' People by Peter Barnes. "I owe him a great deal. My first major part was in his adaptation of Jonson's The Devil is an Ass and I've worked with him four or five times since."
Alan has never been able to plan his career, he says. But one thing he was determined on. Despite offers of other TV parts after the success of Barchester Chronicles, he wanted to get back to live stage. "I had been away for about 18 months and when I went into Bad Language (a Dusty Hughes play at Hampstead) I was pretty frightened. Your muscles go slack. All the physical sensations said, 'Don't ever leave it this long again'."

Un'altra vecchia intervista di Alan in cui c'è veramente di tutto.
Alcune cose le ho messe in grassetto, ma chi conosce l'inglese se la legga tutta.

E se qualcuno volesse tradurre, questa o le precedenti...

THE LEADING MAN
By Lesley White
(British GQ July, 1992)

Traduzione

The varied roles of Alan Rickman are a way to international stardom. Yet no one in British acting today is more enigmatic.
So intense is Alan Rickman's horror of being labeled, categorized or pigeon-holed as one thing or another that it verges on the pathological. People, the says - meaning journalists - are lazy, unimaginative end they do not pay proper attention to the infinite potential of people - meaning people like him - to be and do anything they choose. His apparent aim is to get through life without being home anything more compromising, in print at least, than an actor who served the play with vigor and humility. His insistence on this matter is quite firm.

It is with due apologies to these heightened sensitivities that we will start with some labels: 45-year-old actor. Good at playing urbane villains. Reluctant film star. Politically correct. Driven by ambition. Self-assured. Occasionally earnest. A person of principles. A man who believes that winning the little battles makes the world a nicer place.

On the set of the blockbuster Hollywood movie Die Hard, Rickman's principles ground a day's shooting to an expensive halt. Not through temper tantrum or artistic crisis, but because he refused point length to throw Bonnie Bedelia to the floor. Cast as the archly sophisticated terrorist Hans Gruber against Bruce Wills' gun-happy hero, the script called for Rickman to perpetuate a degree of violence on the actress that he considered to be both offensive and inappropriate.

"A big victory was won on that film set in terms of not conforming to the stereotype on the page," Rickman explains. "My character was very civilized in a strange sort of way and just wouldn't have behaved like that. Nor would Bonnie's character, a self-possessed career woman, have allowed him to. It was a stereotype - the woman as eternal victim - that they hadn't even thought about. Basically, they wanted a reason for her shirt to burst open. We talked our way around it - her shirt still burst open, but at least she stayed upright."

In many ways Rickman can scene that improbable thing: a performer without an ego problem. Here is the actor as New Man. He is forthright but not bullying, handsome but barely aware of it, and ever sensitive to the ideological content of the work that has propelled him, particularly in the past three years, into the relatively quiet but comfortable suburbs of stardom. Not quite there, but almost. Were it not for his honorable priorities he could well have traveled much further in both fame and fortune.

His scrutiny of scripts that fall at his feet is unforgiving, though these days he tends not to argue on the set, but make his amendments before agreeing to embark on the project. His changes and ad-libs to the role of the Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (a film which even the American press and preview audiences agreed he stole effortlessly from Kevin Costner) were its salvation. Then there is his preference for theatre - often thoughtful, difficult productions - over movies, and his preference for living in a west London flat rather than a Hollywood Hills condo. But mostly there is a stalwart refusal to play the star by oiling the wheels of publicly with juicy insights into what his "real self" may or may not be like.

The latest insult, nearly more than he can bear, was being referred to as "actorish" by the Radio Times. When he delivers the complaint in low, somber tones, you want to do the unthinkable and laugh out loud. Because "actorish" - at least to those people outside the charmed circle of "luvvies" and "darlings" - is exactly what the appears to be.

Alan Rickman is sitting in a shabby dressing room in the Globe Theatre the day before the showbiz preview of The Full Wax, the Ruby Wax one-woman show he has directed. Slumped in a chair, charming and cautious, he is not the easiest person to coax into a tape recorder. He arrives with a polite handshake and an agenda of no-go topics ranging from his family, his girlfriend, his talent for playing villains, any aspect of acting at all ("too, too hard to articulate") right down to the nether reaches of trivia ("my clothes - not an interesting subject of conversation").

This natural reticence on the subject of himself is curiously misleading. To his friends, particularly the group of young British actresses and theatre folk who form his inner circle, the very point of Rickman is his absolute clarity of vision and certainty about life. When they are feeling confused he sorts them out. When they need an objective critic of their work, he will sit, notebook in hand, form his impressions and then deliver the verdict backstage. They number among them Lindsay Duncan, with who he starred in the RSC's production of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Ruby Wax, whose autobiography of Jewish angst he has coaxed and honed over the years and whose creative biorythms he constantly monitors, and Juliet Stevenson whom he met at Stratford, and has directed and acted with, perhaps most memorably in the Screen Two success Truly, Madly, Deeply.

Jenny Topper, artistic director of the Hampstead Theatre and a crucial early supporter, believes that Rickman's appeal to women lies in his certainty. "Women tend not to be very good at being absolute and sure about things," she says. "Alan has this hand-on-heart quality. He is always absolutely sure about his opinions, what is good writing and good theatre, and he has tremendous loyalty to those things. I think that can be very beguiling for women. Also, in a totally admiring way, I wonder if there isn't a streak of femininity in him, a kind of sweetness that perhaps you expect more from other women than men."

Topper recalls Rickman tasting scripts for her at the fringe Bush Theatre and discovering Sharman McDonald's When I Was a Girl I Used to Scream and Shout. "He just said, ' You really must look at this, maybe it's too autobiographical for you, but I know it's very special.' It was his eye that got that play going - but he would never let anyone know that."

Rickman's loyalty to his friends runs deep. "It's just a group of people who are on the same wavelength," he says. People around Stratford, the Royal Court, the fringe... Tony Sher, David Suchet, Jonathan Pryce, Lindsay Duncan, Juliet Stevenson, you know, everyone...."

But playing a love scene with a close friend, says Stevenson, isn't necessarily a help. "I think it put a distance between Alan and the when we were in Liaisons together. On the other end, our friendship really paid off in Truly, Madly, Deeply. We used our own relationship in that film - I really am the Nina character, juggling a hundred balls in the air at the same time and driving Alan completely potty with my scatterbrained way of doing things. He is much more still, selective and sure in his taste, which can be equally infuriating. But he's a great anchor in my life."

Acting came late in the life of Alan Rickman. It has clearly been the redemption of an intelligence so diffuse and ponderous it would have been frustrated by any of the other professions employed by clever working-class boys as a way up and out. Class is something he has left behind. He displays no sense of alienation from high culture, no nagging fear that the theatre - let alone the classics - was not meant for the likes of him. He has played Obadiah Slope in the television version of The Barchester Chronicles, Angelo in Measure For Measure, the demonic lead in Mephisto, an actor on the edge of a nervous breakdown in the Japanese director Yukio Ninagawa's Tango at the End of Winter - all with what looked like consummate ease and confidence.

"Alan used to get very cross with me at the Bush," recalls Topper. "I would suggest an actor for a part and ask his opinion. 'Of course he can do it,' he would say. 'He's an actor his he?' He honestly believes any actor should be able to play any role."

Rickman's next theatrical commitment is playing Hamlet, a role that only a few years ago he declared himself too old to even consider. He changed his mind because the Riverside Studios production will be directed by the Georgian director, Robert Sturua - "that is if he manages to get over here...."says Rickman, "his theatre is the only building still standing in the street."

Despite calling himself an archetypical Piscean ("I absolutely understand the symbol of two fish swimming in different directions"), Rickman is at pains to stress his close personal relationship with the real world.

We met the day before the general election and the night before that he had appeared along with other supportive celebrities including Stenenson and Sher, to say his piece in the Labour Party election broadcasts. He spent election day canvassing with his partner of over twenty years, Rima Horton, Labour's prospective parliamentary candidate in the Tory seat of Chelsea. A Labour councillor and economics lecturer, Horton is said to be the brains in the partnership.

"Alan's definitely the glamorous one of the pair," a friend comments. "You may think him clever when you meet him on his own, but see them as a couple and he is the intuitive one while she has the brains. She definitely sets the intellectual pace."

Asked about his own political views, Rickman is easily prodded into a state-of-the- nation tirade, pouring forth recriminations against "that bitch Mrs. Thatcher", mourning the GLC's demise, praising that nice couple Neil and Glenys. Yet for a complex man who despises the easy cliche, this standard political line is rather surprising. Although you never suspect that his politics are anything less than sincere, he brings to his invective an emotion that seems out of place, an intensity that might work better in a play than in a close conversation. Suddenly the habitual hesitation and half-finished sentences are resolved into a stream of perfectly polished sound bites. These are not lines he learned as such, but when he delivers them you have the strange impression of watching a play too close to the stage.

"The past twelve years have been a bloody nightmare for this country," he proclaims.

Even if they have been indulgently kind to the career of Alan Rickman? The brow knits, the languor stiffens.

"Being reasonably successful doesn't, God forbid, mean losing touch with what ordinary people are going through. I still suffer because I live here and I step out of my front door and smell the quality of life, the waste, the lack of imagination, the appalling selfishness. As for earning a lot of money, I'm about to do Hamlet for a hundred and fifty quid a week and the Ruby show is certainly unpaid so far. I got Die Hard because I came cheap -- they were paying Willis $7 million so they had to find people they could pay nothing. That has only changed incrementally." He stops abruptly as if remembering his point. "... Though it's absurd to talk about that sort of thing when you consider how much an unemployed person with five children on housing benefit has to live on."

The facts of his early life, though he prefers not to discuss them in depth, are a clue his later sympathies and successes. Born to Irish-Welsh parents in London and the second eldest of four children, his father a painter and decorator, died when Rickman was only eight. Money was very tight. "I've been a card-carrying member of the Labour Party since I was born," he says, not quite meaning that (he joined the party five years ago). "The yellow and red posters went up in our windows every time there was an election."

Encouraged by teachers at Latymer Upper School in west London, he enrolled at Chelsea college to study graphic design. He hit the King's Road in 1968. There was Mary Quant's Bazaar, a fellow student who only ever painted under the influence of LSD, a lot of sit-ins and one girl in the graphics department who cycled up and down the King's Road dressed as a nun. Lacking the money for drugs or a taste for the scene, the perpetually wide-eyed Rickman lived at home and "wandered through those days wondering what on earth was going on." A lazy student, it was here he met Rima Horton, and here that the desire to act really caught hold.

"There was a bit of me that always wanted the painting teachers to come into the graphic design department and discover me as a great painter," he admits. "But I could never quite get it together, I think that was the bit of me that was waiting to act."

His discontent was the catalyst he needed. After a year he left and set up a design company, Graphitti with some friends. They had an office in Berwick Street, Soho, for £10 a week, no computers and a lot of Letraset. But Rickman had no heart for anything but acting - he left and got a job as assistant stage manager for the small Basement Theatre Company. Then he decided on RADA.

"I was getting older and I thought if you really want to do this you got to get on with it." His audition - including a speech from Richard III - won the 26-year-old not only a place but a scholarship and access to the best years of his life. "My body finally sighed with relief at being in the right place," he says. "I had really come home at last."

While at RADA Rickman worked as a dresser to Nigel Hawthorne in the John Osborne play West of Suez. He fetched clean shirts, made the tea, put the cufflinks in, ran out for Jill Bennett's post-matinee fish and chips. He also watched Sir Ralph Richardson every night from the wings.

"He was fearless and honest and didn't tell any lies," says Rickman. "And he was totally centred. You can make a choice as an actor either to reveal for to cloak yourself, to hide it away or put it all out on display." He wriggles uncomfortably in his chair. "But I don't like talking about acting."

Asked about his own personal heroes, he says, instantly: "Fred Astaire for the incredible discipline and hard work and bleeding feet that end up looking effortless." Rickman's own discipline at work is fierce. "Its strange - I work hard but all I ever seen to do is smash up against my own limitations. I have never felt anything but, 'Oops, failed again'. In any live performance there's the play, the actor and the audience, three live animals, and the outcome is always unpredictable..."

Although Rickman felt drawn to the RSC, his first year at Stratford was confused, fraught and unfulfilled. He told someone at the time that he left the RSC "in order to learn how to talk to the other actors on stage rather than bark at them." Now he is more philosophical. "I think you need to be incredibly strong to do that Stratford-London bit because the pressures on those big companies to come up with the goods season after season are terrible. If you go there with a burning idealism, as I did, you're liable to be somewhat disappointed."

He shared a house with Ruby Wax, arguing about the level of central heating, encouraging her to write, and having late-night conversations about acting and ambition.

"He was always rather intimidating," says Juliet Stevenson, who was in her first year at the RSC when Rickman arrived. "We first met when Ruby and I were playing Shape One and Shape Two in The Tempest with plastic bags over our heads. I was quite frightened of him, but he was very kind and sort of picked me up in a non-sexual way. He had a talent for collecting people and encouraging them. We both ended up in Peter Brooke's production of Anthony and Cleopatra, both creatures in the court of Glenda Jackson. In the sense that we are both active in the Labour Party, you could say that we still are."

His return to the RSC in 1985 was a happier experience, one that led to fame, fanfares and ultimately complete exhaustion. For an actor who "has to struggle to find the character every time I walk on stage", the experience of playing the cynical Viscomte de Valmont in Les Liaisons Dangereuses for two years was not altogether wholesome.

"You're really brushing evil with a part like that, your looking into an abyss and finding very dark parts of yourself. Valmont is one of the most complicated and self-destructive human beings you would ever wish - or probably not wish - to play. Playing him for two-and-a-half hours for two solid years eight times a week brings you very close to the edge. Never again. Never ever again. By the end of it I needed a rest home or a change of career."

What he got was Die Hard: "A great big present, with eight lines to learn every two days and a lot of Los Angeles sunshine. It was like being offered a glass of ice-cold water when you have been in the desert."

The fact that Rickman himself was excluded from both the prizes bestowed on the RSC's Les Liaisons Dangereuses and the offer of playing Valmont in the acclaimed Stephen Frears film - the role went to John Malkovich - reportedly sent him into a spin of self-questioning depression.

"He became very withdrawn and broody during that difficult.," recalls an admirer, "but he never said a word. One felt very sorry for him."

But Rickman prefers to look to the future: his next film is Bob Roberts starring Tim Robbins, the story of a right-wing American pop star trying to get elected to the Senate. He plays the campaign manager, another part with a political point to make.

"Look," he says, "if your play or film says 'Might is Right' you are reinforcing prejudices. That is definitely not something I'm interested in doing."

As his friend Stephen Davis says, Alan Rickman always knows his lines. "He is an actor to his fingertips."

Edited by chiara53 - 19/6/2022, 18:12

ALAN RICKMAN - WHY IS THIS SUAVE, MELLIFLOUS ENGLISHMAN ALWAYS THE BAD GUY? by Karen Moline (Mirabella)

Traduzione

"Because he has portrayed monsters," said a contemporary of Choderlos de Laclos, who wrote Les Liaisons Dangereuses, people will have it that he is one himself." The uninitiated, therefore, may be forgiven should they assume that Alan Rickman is as staggeringly nasty as the villains that he has so indelibly brought to life - Valmont in the Royal Shakespeare Company's production of Liaisons, the terrorist leader in Die Hard and the super-sadistic political interrogator in Closetland.

"I'm actually quite a nervous person," Rickman insists. He might better be characterized as regally leonine and very guarded, a man who watches and waits and chooses his words as carefully as he does his roles. He also understands that stillness combined with flashes of droll wit delivered in a mellifluous baritone can create an aura of seduction as undeniable as it is un-self-conscious.

These qualities are conspiring to make Rickman an irrefutable presence in Hollywood. He followed Closetland with the romantic English comedy Truly, Madly, Deeply but is returning to villainous form this month with Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Kevin Costner's Robin Hood saga, in which Rickman plays the Sheriff of Nottingham. "We're into black magic, so this is like no sheriff you've ever seen," he says with a crafty grin. "It's another bad, bad guy, but it's funny."

His satanic sheriff may evoke a sly frisson in anyone lucky enough to have seen Rickman's definitive portrayal of the supremely wicked yet surprisingly sexy Valmont on stage. And the stage is where Rickman would like to be. He says he's less interested in being a Hollywood star than in returning to theater in London's West End and resuming the classical roles that have earned him accolades there.

"I'm still an English stage actor," Rickman explains. "who never expected to be in the movies. Film work has given me a different kind of confidence, and I would like to see how that manifests itself in the theater. There are certain parts in the classics I'd hoped to do that are leaving me because of my age" - Rickman is in his early forties - "but I still have faith in other people's imaginations. Somewhere out there are people who will sling me something so much from left field that I would never have thought of it."

Edited by chiara53 - 20/6/2022, 17:22