6. VALMONT IN CURLERS 103

The unglamorous truth about Les Liaisons Dangereuses was that Alan Rickman took the role that made his name in the West End
and on Broadway because he was facing unemployment at the time. With no other offers pending, he accepted the RSCs imitation to
rejoin the company.
'He did have periods out of work in the early 80s,' remembers Richard Wilson. 'He said to me, "I don't know what to do: the
RSC has asked me to go back, and there's this Christopher Hampton play." 1 think he went back because there was nothing else
around.' This is not to say that Rickman, always a devotee of new writing and a very choosy picker of parts, failed to realise the
potential of a pan like Valmont. Although Obadiah Slope was not a charismatic character on the page, Rickman certainly made him so
on screen in his peculiarly insinuating way. But Valmont was a vampire who fed on the emotions as well as the flesh. This dissolute
aristocrat, who conducted his amorous intrigues in the spirit of the Marquis de Sade, captured the morbid imagination.
Les Liaisons Dangereuses, whose story takes the form of sly letters that positively invite you to read between the lines, was
written by an obscure artillery officer with the cumbersome name of Pierre-Ambroise-Frangois Choderlos de Laclos.
First published in Paris in 1782, the epistolary novel caused an immediate scandal; later, in 1824, a decree of the Cour
Royale de Paris ordered this dangerous work to be destroyed. Its critics talked of 'the most odious immorality', 'a work of
revolting immorality' and 'a book to be admired and execrated'. It leaves a taste of bitter ashes in the mouth, and also a feeling
of tragedy that the two protagonists should allow themselves to become the engines of so much destruction. For there is no doubt
that the Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont are creatures of vitality and intelligence.
The poet Baudelaire was one of the few who spoke in its defence, but even he prudently judged it an evil book: 'If you could
burn it, it would burn like ice bums'. Clive James quoted him on BBC TV's Saturday Review on 28 September 1985, just after the



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production had opened at the RSCs studio theatre The Other Place in Stratford-upon-Avon.
Laclos was a revolutionary Jacobin; and the French Revolution began seven years after the publication of this deeply
subversive book about two cynics on a mission to corrupt.
Christopher Hampton says that he had first wanted to dramatise the book ten years previously in 1975. 'It's a play about
institutionalised selfishness . . . absolute indifference to needs, sufferings and emotional requirements of other people . .. it's
about ruthlessness.'
On the Saturday Review panel, Clive James rightly predicted: 'It's going to be an enormous world-wide hit.' That professional
gainsayer A.N. Wilson was, as per usual, the only dissenting voice: 'Alan Rickman has not varied his acting technique one jot since
Obadiah Slope.' But writer Paula Milne strongly disagreed: 'I can't see anyone else in the part.'
'He's very conscious of what critics say; I often tease him about it,' says Stephen Poliakoff. 'He was very upset by some
review during his second RSC stint. It was just before Les Liaisons, when he was in As You Like It. I remember him saying to me
that he read a review with his fingers spread across the page. Michael Ratcliffe in the Observer didn't like him.
'So his eventual success was sweet: it was almost a form of revenge for those of us who thought he deserved better. A revenge
on circumstances, not on one person,' adds Poliakoff circumspectly.
'His Jaques was unfairly attacked by the critics; they didn't forgive him for that,' says Adrian Noble, his director for As
You Like It in 1985 and Mephisto the following year.
They attacked his voice; he was terribly upset by it. He is easily upset by bad reviews, although he won't admit it. They did
the same with his Hamlet in 1992 - they objected to his voice.
'His Jaques was a deeply passionate character who lived on the fringes of society and was sought out by the great
policy-makers and thinkers. That sums up Alan,' says Adrian with a giggle. 'He does court being a guru to a certain extent (is the
Pope a Catholic?) It's a role that sits comfortably on him. He has always lived his career by his own lights, and it's difficult
for theatre folk to do that. He's quite selective about things, mostly successfully.
'He can be railing against the world one minute and be at Neil Kinnock's supper-table the next. Well, most of us were,' admits

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Adrian with another giggle. 'Alan does have a wonderful line in disdain. He doesn't corpse, but he's very funny. He retreats
into his cave, as Jaques did, but he's sought after there. Young actors need people like that who say "You're going on the right
path".'
Rickman's second attempt at that quixotic philosopher Jaques was unveiled on 23 April - the date generally assumed to be
Shakespeare's birthday.
It was followed by that epic sulker Achilles in Troilus And Cressida on 25 June. Les Liaisons was the late summer 'sleeper',
in Hollywood parlance, that finished the year's Stratford season with an opening night on 25 September.
In Howard Davies' production of Troilus, Alan was judged by some to have made Achilles even more of a heel than usual. He did
not meet with Irving Wardle's approval in The Times: '. . . an unshaven Alan Rickman overplays the hysterical tantrums even for
Achilles.' Similarly, Ros Asquith in the Observer wrote ambivalently of 'Alan Rickman's over-the-top but disarmingly rakish
Achilles'. Significantly, Asquith had seen the sexual potential in Rickman's portrayal.
But the quills-were sharpened for his Jaques in As You Like It: Michael Ratcliffe wrote in the Observer about how Rickman
would 'talk through [his] teeth in a funny manner' and how he 'leaves the field of history standing for the outrageous contrivance
of his Seven Ages of Man'.
Of course such a staunch socialist as Alan would always get upset about a bad notice in the Observer, though Michael Coveney
in the Financial Times praised his 'languorous Jaques - now the sensational performance it threatened to become'.
Jack Tinker in the Daily Mail wrote of 'Alan Rickman's all-seeing, all-knowing, all-wearied Jaques'. Eric Shorter in the Daily
Telegraph admired 'Alan Rickman's philosophical Jaques in a shabby dinner jacket who rules the entertainment with a refreshing
relish'.
As if to confound the critics, Alan had set forth his views on playing Jaques in his only published work to date: one of a
collection of essays by Shakespearean actors under the title of Players Of Shakespeare, published by the Cambridge University
Press.
Jaques is all about attitude, which makes Rickman a natural for the role. He wrote of a Jaques "who is perceptive but
passionate, vulnerable but anarchic . He's very sure of himself and a bit of a mess.'

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He admits in print that he made a meal of things in rehearsal: The other actors must have tired of wondering where I was going
to enter from next, or if there would ever be a recognisable shape to the scene.' And there was an air of the dilettante about the
character's self-conscious pose: 'Jaques seeks, frets, prods and interferes but he doesn't DO ... he definitely needs the other
lords to cook his food.'
Rickman saw him as an 'extremist ... he might be in real danger of losing control. He's condemned to wander forever, endlessly
trying to relocate some innocence, endlessly disappointed. Therein lie both his vulnerability and his arrogance . . . you are left
with an image of complete aloneness . . .
'In some ways, it is a lonely part to play,' he concluded, recalling how he and Ruby Wax as Audrey had jazzed things up at
Peter James' suggestion eight years previously at the Sheffield Crucible
In a modem-dress production, they had sung 'Shake it up Shakespeare baby' while eleven hundred people rocked with laughter. So
much for the critics.
Light relief from Jaques' intensity came with another Peter Barnes radio play, an adaptation of Thomas Middleton's satire A
Trick To Catch The Old One. Rickman played another shameless scamp, a Leicestershire gentleman called Theodorus Witgood who is
constantly strapped for cash. Since his estate is under the control of his penny-pinching uncle Pecunius Lucre, he hatches a plot
to gull him.
Rickman is a wonderfully Gothic combination of silken hypocrisy and pantomime villainy in the role. TNN-keeperrr . . .! I have
been searching town for you,' he utters shudderingly, fastidiously attacking each consonant as if spitting out cherry stones.
Though the late Sid James need not stir uneasily in his grave at the thought of the competition, Rickman also unleashes one of his
hearty and dirty belly-laughs again. So much for his laid-back image; once again, radio released him.
Alan has a working-class insecurity that has never left him, compounded by the usual doubts and fears that always assail the
late starter. He's a great one for endless agonising in long, dark nights of the soul.
'In fact, he's a bit too concerned with what the world will perceive,' says Stephen Poliakoff. That's a drawback for actors
even more than writers. He's very concerned with whether something is the right step.

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'Nevertheless, Les Liaisons was pure luck for Alan,' he adds. Poliakoff had lunched the year before with Daniel Massey, who
told him that Christopher Hampton was dramatising the book for the RSC. Was Massey ever considered for the role? Howard Davies
swears until his fax machine is puce in the face that Alan was his first and only choice; but it's tempting to speculate on Massey
playing Valmont as a macaroni dandy in powder and high heels, in which case we would have lost one of the great sexual animals of
theatrical history.
Christopher Hampton, however, insists: 'It was my idea to cast Alan. In fact, it was my wife's idea. She has a very good eye
for casting. She had seen Alan in Barchester Chronicles and Snoo Wilson's play, then I saw him in The Seagull at the Royal Court. I
suggested him to Howard Davies. The RSC was thinking of asking him to play Jaques anyway.
'It was a great boost to all our careers - Alan, Howard Davies and myself. All of us were at the same stage, same level and
about the same age.'
The way Hampton tells it, Les Liaisons was the dark horse that crept up on the RSC and took it completely by surprise.
'Something remarkable was brewing. Howard and I felt like a subversive cell and the actors did, too. We were opening against
Terry Hands' main-stage production of Othello with Ben Kingsley. The RSC thought of Les Liaisons as filling up its quota: it was
the last play of the 1985 season in The Other Place. We were left on our own quite a lot.
'I can't tell you how dubious everyone was. Even Howard was dubious about directing it. It was a project we cooked up; I got
him to commission me. The RSC had dramatised Les Liaisons in the 60s and called it The An Of Love. It was a complete flop then.
John Barton directed it, and Judi Bench and Alan Howard were the stars. It was a black polo-neck job, reading from the script.
'I suggested Juliet Stevenson as La Presidente de Tourvel for our version, and Howard suggested Lindsay Duncan as the Marquise
de Merteuil.
'I first met Alan in rehearsals for Les Liaisons. I knew of him because we had various mutual friends, like Anna Massey. He
comes from an unusual background, with very clear ideas and images - he's an artist like Tony Sher. Some actors are clothes-horses.


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'Alan's voice suggests darkness; and it's expressive, not all on one note. There's a lot of variation. When he played the
Trigorin role in The Seagull, it was the voice of a much older, more experienced man.'
Of Rickman's notoriously pernickety approach, Hampton admits: 'Alan was interventionist about costume. He was adamant that he
wouldn't shave his beard, though an eighteenth-century aristocrat with a beard was of course unheard of. He wouldn't wear a wig
either, so he had to sit in his curlers every night to get enough - what do hairdressers call it? - body in his hair.'
A backstage Valmont in curlers was quite a sacrifice to his dignity, yet Rickman's artistic instinct was impeccable. The
result of all this carefully created 'naturalism' was a primitive, satyric, rough-trade Valmont, with the stubble and the long
frock-coat of a (sexual) highwayman.
For all his elegance, there was something of the wolfish Captain Macheath from The Beggar's Opera about him. He even wore his
boots on the bed in one scene as he discusses tactics with Merteuil. Rickman refused to play Valmont in the tights and high heels
of the period, partly because he didn't want to make him a fop, and partly because Rickman has large, slightly bandy calves.
It was that sense of a werewolf in aristocrat's clothing that John Malkovich also picked up on for his performance as Valmont
in Stephen Frears' film version of Hampton's play, although I also felt that Malkovich modelled himself on Mick Jagger . . . with a
touch of the Japanese percussionist, Stomu Yamashta.
Alan later told Jane Edwardes from Time Out magazine: 'I always wanted the play to have the same effect as the book, and I
knew I had to seduce 200 people in the audience as well as the women in the play. The quality of stillness and silence was a
measure of how far we had succeeded.'
There was an electric atmosphere at the first night at The Other Place,' remembers Hampton. The audience were on three sides:
it was like being in the same room as the actors. The RSC have been touring it ever since. I said to them in 1995, please don't do
it any more. Adrian Noble acknowledged that. It's been done all over the world. It's only last year that it's been released to the
repertory theatres.
'Valmont's one moral act brings the whole house of cards tumbling down. He's in love with this Tourvel woman, the one decent
instinct that destroys the whole business.

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'I don't think you could play that part and be unaffected by it, but you never know with actors.
'Alan really conveyed Baudelaire's burning-ice description, he was very, very cold in the part, but also very disturbed. He
was oiling that subterranean energy; it was palpable. I was tremendously impressed by the simmering violence.
'He was absolutely besieged by fan-letters. A typical letter would be from a grown woman, not a schoolgirl, and it would read:
Tin a feminist but I don't understand how you can have this effect on me." 'I'm not very good at answering those sorts of letter
myself .. . though 1 didn't get nearly so many as he did,' adds Christopher modestly.
•Pressures had to be applied on the RSC, or it would have disappeared from the repertoire. You never saw Trevor Nunn or Terry
Hands: they were so remote. It was just the pressures of running this huge company. They were certainly quite distant figures. At
least we were left on our own and not interfered with, but I felt we were an unscheduled success and inconvenient for them. Most of
my dealings were with Genista Mackintosh: 1 remember screaming at her, saying "You must do this or that".
We were never really acknowledged by the RSC as a success,' Hampton feels. 'It was a terrific hit, yet to keep it alive in the
repertoire, an inordinate amount of hustling went on. Alan was very active in all that, fiercely loyal.
There were 23 performances in Stratford, 22 in London and then it was withdrawn from the repertoire. It was out of the
repertory for three months, and there was a battle to get it on again. The RSC was opposed to a West End transfer, I believe. And I
always felt they refused to approve the selling of the film rights. All we could think of was that there was this rage, because the
RSCs Camille had been a flop. Frank Gero was finally allowed to do it in the West End. Alan was worried about the space in the West
End and had a wheeze about the Almeida. He had a lot to do with the final choice of the Ambassadors.
Then there were problems with the Broadway transfer. There was a lot of pressure from America to get an American company
Howard and I had a tremendous lot of argument about that. Jimmy Nederlander finally agreed to let the original RSC company go over
They were allowed 20 weeks by American Equity rules, and the play wasn't allowed to continue after that.

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'Alan was very militant about that and attacked the Schubert Organisation's Gerald Schoenfeld about Les liaisons' sell-out
business. There was talk of Glenn Close taking over from Lindsay Duncan as the Marquise de Merteuil, but Gerry Schoenfeld uttered
the immortal words: "Glenn Close means nothing on Broadway." This was just before Fatal Attraction was about to open ...'
Glenn Close, of course, played Merteuil opposite John Mal-kovich's Valmont in the Hampton/Frears film version, Dangerous
Liaisons. Close subsequently enjoyed great Broadway success as that other legendary vampire, Norma Desmond, in Andrew Lloyd
Webber's Sunset Boulevard.
'1 don't think anyone came close to Alan's performance as Valmont; and I don't think that Juliet Stevenson has ever given a
better performance than she did as Tourvel, either,' says Hampton. 'Alan did it for six months in the West End and five months on
Broadway. I think it was murderously difficult for him to adapt from the intimate Ambassadors to the Music Box on Broadway. I
remember finding him in tears in his dressing-room from the enormous strain of the project in that big theatre. We only had three
or four previews, but he was wonderful. Wretched Frank Rich of The New York Times insisted on going to an early preview. The night
he came, Lindsay Duncan caught a panel in her dress on a nail and had to play a scene with her back to the wall. Howard insisted on
turning off the air-conditioning because it was making a noise. So the audience was perspiring in the heat. When I saw a drip of
perspiration on the tip of Jackie Kennedy's nose, I thought, "We've overdone it".

'But Alan really flowered in New York; and in this play, it's the man that does all the work. But although he and Lindsay were
nominated, we got shut out of the Tonys - August Wilson's Fences won everything.'
Then came the greatest disappointment of Alan Rickmans career. Having made the role of Valmont his own, he was passed over for
the film version. The story of how the screen role slipped through his fingers is yet another illustration of how timing means
everything in this rackety business.

"We were able to use Glenn Close for the film version, and I slightly backed into casting John Malkovich,' says Hampton. 'The
thing is that there was a tremendous battle over the film rights. I took a lower offer from the production company Lorimar in order

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to retain more control. I said we should rethink the whole thing and start again, and I said 1 thought we should have Alan
Rickman Lorimar said "Start again". Alan had made Die Hard by that stage but it hadn't been released . . . and of course no one
knew it would make such a huge difference to his career. And Lorimar wanted someone with a profile. The director Stephen Frears
came on board at a late stage, and he was keen to do it with American actors.
'Another factor was the rival film Valmont, so we had to move with tremendous speed. I had seen Malkovich in the play Burn
This. I know Alan was very, very upset over it,' admits Hampton, 'but it didn't affect our friendship. We were in New York one
evening, on our way to the theatre. Alan had told me that people kept coming up to him in the street and saying, "It's terrible you
didn't get to play Valmont on film, I don't know what to say to you." As we left the play, a woman came up to him and said "It's
terrible you didn't get to play Valmont on film . . ." Alan just pointed at me and said "Ask him!" I think it was a very hurtful
thing for Alan, but it's rare that a British actor could ever reprise a role in America; I think only Nigel Hawthorne has managed
it with The Madness of King George. And I just didn't have the clout. But Alan's performance was unmatchable.'
Inevitably, playing an evil intriguer night after night had a terrible effect on Rickman's psyche. After a lifelong commitment
to socialism, he belatedly joined the Labour Party in 1987 as if to distance himself from this degenerate aristocrat. Valmont was
not a pantomine villain; that would have been easy to live with. It was his Byzantine intelligence, his insidious understanding of
human nature and finally his moral despair that made the part so depressing for someone with such staunch principles. What made
it even worse was that Rima had become a Labour councillor in 1986 for St Charles Ward in the Borough of Kensington and Chelsea.
There's still a large element of puritanical working-class asceticism, the old Methodist hair-shirt tradition, in the Labour Party,
as if you have to renounce all sins of the flesh - apart from eating mushy peas - in order to be taken seriously. With one or two
exceptions - 'Gorgeous' George Galloway springs to mind - the Tories have always had the best sex scandals. As Rima embarked on a
political career with a public profile for the first time in her work as an educationalist, her long-time boyfriend was seducing
women on stage every night and finding himself buried

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under snowfalls of fan-mail. Of course, Rima appreciated the subtle joke and took it in her stride; but the contrast still
made Alan uncomfortable. No wonder Valmont nearly gave him a breakdown Those tears that Christopher Hampton saw had been just the
beginning. 'It stopped being a play in a way, and became an event - especially on Broadway,' he told Sean French in GQ magazine in
1991.
'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 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.'
The following year, he told the same magazine: Tou are really brushing evil with a part like that, you're 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, 1 needed a rest home or a change of career.'
He also told the Guardian: 'It's a part that ate you alive.' There's a story that he gave Howard Davies a hard time during
rehearsals for Les Liaisons; but I'm inclined to think that it was more likely to have been the other way round. 'Howard is very
cold and self-contained,' says Poliakoff.
Nevertheless, losing the film role to Malkovich was still an incredibly depressing experience for Alan. 'He became very
withdrawn and broody, though he never said a word. You fell terribly sorry for him,' says a friend.
'It would be untrue to say he wasn't put out,' says Stephen Poliakoff judiciously. 'In 1989 I bumped into him on the street in
Notting Hill; I had just seen Die Hard. He told me he had not gone to see Dangerous Liaisons; and out of solidarity, I hadn't
either. Stephen Davis goes further: 'He was terribly hurt.'
'I prefer Alan infinitely,' says loyal friend Theresa Hickey 'Malkovich is this self-obsessed guy in Kung Fu slippers, whereas
Alan is genuinely interested in people. He's very generous-spirited.

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And he's so filmic: he would have made a wonderful Valmont on screen.'
For Alan, stage fright was the ever-present malignant monkey on his shoulder. In 1992, he told GQ that he had to 'struggle to
find the character every time I walk on stage'. And the pressures of playing the vampiric Valmont, who must instantly dominate,
only added to that.
Christopher Hampton's excitable view of how Les Liaisons Dangereuses had to fight for long-term survival against an
intransigent, bureaucratic Royal Shakespeare Company makes a colourful story which is, of course, completely refuted by the RSC
Adrian Noble, at that time associate RSC director, does admit that there was a problem with the transfer of Les Liaisons
Dangereuses to the West End.
The context of that year was that it was a truncated season. Trevor Nunn wanted to open Les Miserables and also Nicholas
Nickleby in London in the Christmas of 1985, so all Stratford shows were cut short. The cast in a repertory system are cross-cast
across different productions. The year we did Les Liaisons, Alan, Fiona Shaw and Juliet Stevenson were all in As You Like It as
well. To free up all that cast - and Lindsay Duncan was also doing The Merry Wives Of Windsor - you have to wait for the shows to
end in the repertoire, otherwise productions would be asset-stripped of their actors. Actors do prefer rep rather than doing the
same thing eight times a week. So yes, there was a problem with the Les Liaisons transfer to the West End: endless problems with
hoicking actors out of the rep. 1 don't know if Ben Kingsley, the star of Othello, was hacked off or not by all the attention Les
Liaisons was getting. That's all speculation.
'As for the film rights, the RSC is always diligent about protecting the film rights of any production. We strike as good, and
as hard, a bargain as we can.'
When 1 contacted the RSC's General Manager, David Brierley, he elaborated on that complicated transition to screen and the
RSC's alleged delay. 'When we enter into a contract with a writer, part of the contract is to do with potential film rights.
'We negotiate a share of the sale of film rights that goes back to the original stage-producing company, which also gets
consultation rights. Christophers agent, the late Peggy Ramsay, was the best agent ever for ferociously protecting her authors. She
did the deal

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and didn't consult the RSC. She was in a hurry because of the competing film Valmont, so it was a bit of a race to the tape.
Plus Christopher's rights to be producer of the movie were also pan of the deal.
'James Nederlander was by then the American producer of Les Liaisons. Peggy had cut us out - both the RSC and Nederknder. We
asked her if she had the right deal, the best deal. We thought there wasn't necessarily a competitive approach here. At this point.
Nederlander found a competitive offer. Christopher and Peggy were anxious not to accept this, because they had gone a long way down
the road with Lorimar - who eventually produced Christopher's film version. But we said, "You can't just do the deal if there's a
better offer. We can't approve of this deal until we have explored the competition as much as possible."
'So Lorimar upped their offer in cash by 50 per cent. Finally the deal was done with them, but the process had been slowed
down Chris had been willing to take a lower offer in order to have a position as a producer.
The RSC and the Nederlander Organisation managed to up the ante in the end, but I think Christopher has never forgiven us,'
says Brierley. 'It was a bit naughty of Peggy to go ahead without the RSC. Nine times out of ten, she would have done a good deal
-but in this case, we helped secure a better one.
'James Nederlander is the commercial rival to the Schubert Organisation that owns the Music Box, the theatre where Les
Liaisons played on Broadway. These are the two great theatre-owning organisations over there. Unusually this production brought the
Schuberts and the Nederlanders together, so the RSC engineered a shotgun wedding. Normally they're like the Montagues and the
Capulets. Nederlander thought the Music Box would be big enough. When we came to New York, our courage had grown and we wanted a
bigger theatre - even though it went on for 20 weeks.'
Trevor Nunn, then the RSC's Artistic Director, emphasises 'Certainly no opposition to the work having an extended commercial
life ever came from me. I saw Howard's production in both London and Stratford and thought it one of the best pieces of intimate
theatre I had ever experienced. But I never had anything to do with the selling of the film rights, which I imagine had been
retained by Christopher.'

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'Everyone knew Les Liaisons would be a hit,' Adrian Noble insists. 'I don't remember Howard Davies being dubious; in tact, I
can remember him fighting off the idea of anyone else directing it. I was pash [passionate] about Alan rejoining the RSC for Les
Liaisons and I did have a say in that, although ultimately it was Trevor's decision. But it was because I've known Alan ever since
he did Man Is Man for me at Bristol.'
With Valmont, as with Slope, Rickman had demonstrated the supreme art of showing the vulnerability in a multi-faceted villain.
As Michael Billington wrote in his Guardian review of Les Liaisons Dangereuses: 'It is easy to say that Alan Rickman, with his air
of voluptuous languor, is superbly cast as the Vicomte: what is really impressive is his ability to register minute gradations of
feeling.
'He stiffens visibly as the Marquise de Merteuil denies him sex, literally shrugs an eyebrow at the news that people live on
56 livres a year, allows his hand to hover over Cecile's body as if exploring a relief-map.
'But the keynote of Rickman's enthralling performance is growing self-disgust at his own destructiveness: he becomes a
seductive Satan with a stirring conscience.
'Alan Rickman seems born to play the Vicomte. He endows him with a drawling, handsome languor and a genuine sense of spiritual
shock at discovering he may be in thrall to love.'
Irving Wardle in The Times wrote: 'Alan Rickman, elegantly dishevelled and removing his mask of amorous melancholy to reveal a
mirthlessly grinning voluptuary, carries the mask of death.' John Barber in the Daily Telegraph thought that 'languid, darkly
handsome Alan Rickman makes a perfect Vicomte: plausible, cruel'.
Charles Spencer in the Stage and Television Today was ecstatic. 'Alan Rickman gives a performance of hypnotic brilliance as Le
Vicomte. Fleshy and reptilian, languid yet prone to sudden bursts if feverish energy, he oozes charm and danger in equal
proportions, an amoral predator who finally finds himself the prey of a stronger woman and the incomprehensible stirrings of his
own soul.'
Only Barry Russell's review in Drama magazine's spring issue of 1986 dropped the classic clanger by questioning 'the casting
of Alan Rickman as the scoundrel of the piece. He is too engaging an actor to play a "nasty" with much credibility'. (Oh yeah?)

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In short, it was one of those reviews that you spend the rest of your life living down; though Russell at least noticed
Rickman's 'endearingly unkempt quality, more fitted for Fielding's Tom Jones than for the aristocratic Vicomte de Valmont'. But
surely that was the point: he was a wild animal in the boudoir . ..
Michael Coveney in the Financial Times gave 'thank* chiefly to Alan Rickman's predatory, dissolute Vicomte de Valmont, a
languorous, squinting agent of destruction'. Sheridan Morley in Punch wrote of 'the silkily splendid' Rickman's 'elegant decay',
although the late Kenneth Hurren was less convinced in the Mail On Sunday. Though Alan Rickman has been widely praised as the jaded
vicomte, I feel he lacks something of a plausible seducer's practised charm,' he wrote.
Perhaps it was the glimpse of the conscience that Rickman's Valmont carried around with him which inspired so many women to
write lovelorn letters to him. It's that potential for redemption and reformation which presents the ultimate challenge to female
zeal.
Before Rickman's Valmont transferred to the West End and thereafter to Broadway, the RSC repertory system had given him the
chance to play another Faustian character who had sold his soul to the devil. Rickman took the lead in Ariane Mnouchkine's didactic
epic drama Mephisto, based on the Klaus Mann novel. As the actor Hendrik Hofgen, he found himself becoming the darling of the Nazi
gods in pre-war Germany. The tale of how this former radical becomes Hitler's protege is the story of an entire country's
corruption.
Mark Lawson in Time Out considered that Rickman 'consolidates his status as a new RSC star', though some other reviewers
expected a more grandstanding performance, finding him far too gloomy and depressive. Perhaps that old blood-sucker Valmont had
sapped his energy; certainly it was crazy to play both in swift succession.
'Mr Rickman is merely bitchy when he ought to be demonic, pettish when he ought to blast everyone in sight or hearing with his
rage,' wrote Francis King in the Sunday Telegraph. The Daily Telegraph's Eric Shorter thought Alan had 'a compelling line in
languid disdain and slimy hauteur', but others felt his heart didn't seem to be in this story of the Nazi rise to power and the
equivocal attitude of the people.

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Of course the voice, never to every drama critic's taste, came in for a hammering. Kenneth Hurren wrote in the Mail On Sunday:
The chief focus is on a star actor and political renegade, played with enervating vocal monotony by Alan Rickman.'
As for Michael Ratcliffe in the Observer: well, he didn't like Alan's performance. Again. There are some attractive and
truthful performances ... all these sustain an evident humanity, but Mr Rickman chooses not to.
'Having frequently been accused in the past of camping it up, he has on this occasion put on sober attire and elected to camp
it down, a dispiriting decision which leads to lugubriousness of voice and feature suggesting complete disillusion with past,
present and future instead of a driving ambition to succeed at all costs. There isn't so much as a whiff of Mephistophelian sulphur
all night.'
Barney Bardsley had written in City Limits, 'Mephisto is about the devil in us all.' But by this stage, the puritanical Alan
was becoming revolted by the devil in Mr Rickman. Valmont was his darkest hour; his great film villains were tap-dancing scallywags
by comparison. Time Out's theatre editor Jane Edwardes pointed out in a 1986 interview for Mephisto that Rickman had become one of
the hottest actors around by playing the coldest of bastards.

He took it all terribly seriously, as usual, and saw his character in Mephisto as a dire warning to those consumed by
ambition. 'It's about how big a trough you can dig for yourself,' he told the Guardian.
Rickman had lost the battle to play Valmont on film and, in retrospect, it may have saved his sanity. Nevertheless, he was to
win the Hollywood war in a strange and quite unexpected way, rediscovering his sense of humour in the process. His performance as
Valmont on Broadway had brought him to the attention of a film producer who wanted a charismatic, intelligent, sophisticated baddie
for his next action movie. Someone, in short, who would put up a truly satisfying fight, who would enter into mortal combat with a
die-hard . ..
Despite having given us the definitive Valmont, Alan Rickman still felt as if he were a misfit outsider with a muffled voice
in the snobbish caste system of the British theatre. It was to be in the more democratic medium of film, paradoxically enough, that
he would be able to exploit his extravagantly theatrical roots. He had to go away in order to become truly honoured in his own
country.

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One is reminded of the famous brick dropped by John Gielgud when he talked about a very talented British stage actor called
Claude Rams, who had been a West End star m the: 20s_ But he threw his career away,' said Gielgud plaintively, shaking his head
sadly. 'He went off to Hollywood and completely disappeared, I wonder what happened to him?'
In Alan's case he staged his 'disappearing' act in a sulphurous cloud of Mephistophelian smoke.


7. A DEAL WITH THE DEVIL 119

One sunny day towards the end of the twentieth century, Alan Rickman found himself being avidly stared at by a waitress while
he and Peter Barnes were having lunch at a restaurant near their respective homes. They were sitting outside at a table on the
pavement and the woman kept looking at Rickman, who maintained his customary Garboesque cool and pretended not to notice the kind
of attention that had become an everyday occurrence in his life. Eventually, when Barnes went inside to pay the bill, the puzzled
waitress said to Peter: 'I recognise your friend from somewhere, and I can't think where.' When Peter said, "You might have seen
him in Die Hard on TV recently,' she gave a tiny shriek of excitement and said, 'Of course, of course - it's Bruce Willis!'
'It's a great story about the fleeting nature of fame,' adds Peter. 'But Alan was just amused by it when I went back outside
and told him; some people wouldn't be amused, of course.
'Actors don't like you saying this, but Alan's present fame is a matter of luck. There are crossroads in everyone's life,'
points out Peter. 'If he hadn't had Die Hard, it might have taken him much longer.' Barnes has a particular fellow-feeling for
Rickman because both had slogged away for years until one film completely transformed their fortunes. With Peter, it was his
screenplay for Enchanted April. 'I had struggled for twenty years until Enchanted April opened the doors for me. It did huge
business in America and was nominated for the Best Screenplay Oscar.' Later Peter finished a massive epic for Warners about the
Medici ruler of Florence, Lorenzo the Magnificent; when he was asked his take on it in script conferences, he said, 'You should do
it as The Godfather in tights.' He's learned the Hollywood pitch. These days he works like a demon, writing seven 'highly
lucrative' American miniseries in just five years. Yet there's no danger of Peter living in an ivory tower: he impressed Alan by
swapping his regular writing venue at the British Museum for the Leicester Square branch of McDonald's much as the Harry Potter
author J.K. Rowling first created her boy hero on scribbled notes in an Edinburgh coffee shop With Alan it was the make-or-break
movie Die Hard that changed his fortunes. It made his career - and it broke a cartilage

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in his knee after he performed eleven takes of a jump from a ledge on to uneven paving stones on his very first day on set.
This torn cartilage is my souvenir of Hollywood,' he said afterwards sounding like someone who didn't expect to be invited twice
For Rickman, always wary of getting carried away, had sternly told himself to regard the job as no more than a once-in-a-lifetime
working holiday of the kind that never even happens for most British actors. He also took a Califomian driving licence away with
him as another souvenir after passing his test on his second attempt; he was failed on the first one for driving too cautiously
through a green light. 'I think maybe that is a metaphor,' he told Karen Moline in Elle magazine, laughing at his own inhibitions.
'He's much loved by actors because he has a profound sense of irony,' says the RSC's Artistic Director, Adrian Noble. 'He can
do trash and elevate it. Somehow he can keep above the shit. It's a deal with the devil. All actors have to do it. You have to do
trash to survive, but he can send it up. Great Hollywood role models are so macho; but most people are not like that at all. Alan
isn't macho at all.
'1 was thrilled for him when it went so well in films. In many ways, he's an old-fashioned actor who can hand in a star
performance - he has the intelligence and cut to create some of the great parts. He's very big, with a big voice.'
Die Hard producer, Joel Silver, preoccupied with casting his new movie, caught Alan's Valmont in Les Liaisons Dangereuses on
Broadway. Rickman reeked of decadence, of course, and Silver professed himself duly asphyxiated. 'He was staggering. 1 was bowled
over by the theatricality of how he played that role,' he told BBC2's The Late Show in November 1994. (Well, it was in a theatre.)
'For Die Hard, we were looking at conventional heavies . . . when we got Alan, it set the stage for a new evolution of the bad
guy.'
In fact, it was all part of the long-established George Sanders and Basil Rathbone syndrome, in which suave British actors
carved out a niche for themselves as the cads of Hollywood. (The fact that Sanders was half-Russian need not detain us.)
Claude Rains, of course, was clever enough to extend his range and make even the politically ambiguous police chief in
Casablanca seem craftily sympathetic as he uttered the immortal 'Round up the usual suspects.' Even so, if you possess sharp
features, narrow eyes and a drawling English accent, you are bound to be typecast thus.

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Jeremy Irons won his Academy Award for the gallows humour of his performance as that suspected Bluebeard, Claus Von Bulow, a
class act if ever there was one. Interestingly, Irons was later to play Rickman's vengeful brother in Die Hard With A Vengance.
American xenophobia has been blamed for the lazy habit of casting foreigners as the bad guys; but the preference for the
theatrical disdain of those silky British scoundrels also betokens an inferiority complex on the part of a bedazzled Hollywood. It
is as if they have to send out for their very best badduns, because they think they can't get them at home.
'When I was working in Hollywood, 1 got a call from someone saying he was a friend of Alan and that he had a script,'
remembers the director Simon Langton, who had cast the then-unknown Rickman in Therese Raquin eight years previously.
'Alan, being a mate of this person, said he would meet me in a well-known bar in LA. It was an ultra-modem place, full of
gleaming marble surfaces. He looked completely at home in the LA bar, but utterly English: rather louche and laid-back.
'We had a couple of beers and then he lounged back in his seat and said, "I have got this ridiculous Hollywood movie. It's
called Die Hard and I play some crazy East European fanatic. It's non-stop explosions - the actors won't get a look-in. And I'm
appearing with Bruce Willis! I play the lead baddie . . ."
'He was very self-deprecating and very friendly; almost too laid-back. I'm sure he doesn't suffer fools, though. He hadn't
changed a great deal, he was physically leaner. That haughty-looking exterior had become even haughtier: hooded eyes, aquiline
nose. I don't think he quite understood what was going to happen. He was quite unfazed by the enormity of it all, and yet this was
his first-ever picture. Normally, you disappear in a cloud of burst fumes and flames when the film bombs, but this one didn't ...'
After playing Valmont solidly for two years, your man was just about ready for the funny farm. Die Hard was, he confessed to
GQ magazine in 1992, '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. '1 had never been in a movie before,' he told Catherine
O'Brien in the Daily Mirror in 1992. 'Suddenly I found myself on a set in the middle of Los Angeles surrounded by hundreds of
people at
10 o'clock at night.

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'It dawns on you that millions of dollars are at stake and everyone is watching and waiting to see if you balls it up.'
It was certainly a wonderful consolation prize for not winning a Broadway Tony for Valmont and for losing the film role to his
imitator, John Malkovich. Die Hard was a huge success whose fortunes at the box office surprised everyone. It propelled the former
television actor Bruce Willis into the supernova league and pushed the unknown Rickman to the very forefront of inventive screen
villainy.
Alan always behaves exactly the same, regardless of his surroundings. If he's annoyed about something he's asked to do, he'll
say so. He saw no reason not to have his usual frank and free exchange of views with the director on this, as on any other
production. This movie beginner nearly stopped the filming one day when he refused point-blank to throw heroine Bonnie Bedelia to
the floor, telling director John McTieman that the violence was both offensive and inappropriate. Rickman combined male feminism
with an instinctive gallantry towards women that was to make him an ideal Jane Austen hero eight years later.
'A big victory was won on that film set in terms of not conforming to the stereotype on the page,' he told GQ magazine. 'My
character was very civilised 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 round it - her shirt still burst open, but at least she stayed upright.'
Which was more than another unfortunate female in the cast did. Hurled across a desk by one of the other terrorists, her
strapless party frock fell down and she ended up topless. But at least Alan Rickman's dabs weren't on her.
Nevertheless, Die Hard is still a simple-minded, xenophobic, Neanderthal film, which carries the subliminal message that
workaholic feminists - i.e. career women - rot the social fabric of America. Until a cowboy comes to the rescue.
Rickman was there to add the gloss of class. 'All sorts of people asked me why I wanted to be in a film like Die Hard,' Alan
told the Guardian in 1989, revealing a lot about the high-minded circles he moves in. 'I thought it could turn out to be a fabulous
film,

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something like the best ride at the fun-fair. That's why.' He is certainly a thrills addict who loves the most death-defying
fairground rides (as his Mesmer co-star Simon McBurney was later to testify).
For all his lordly insouciance in this alien culture, gloomy old Rickman was still convinced he was going to be sacked the
first week.
The first shot I did, and this is significant, was one where 1 had to produce an American accent. If I hadn't produced an
acceptable accent, I'm sure 1 would have been got rid of. I mean, when a film's costing $30 million, no one's got time to waste.
'On the other hand, once they've decided you're all right, they'll make sure they've got it all in the can before they do the
shot where they might kill you. The very last shot I did in the film was one where 1 was dropped from 40 feet.
'I'd certainly never picked up a machine-gun or even a hand-gun before. And we lost a lot of takes because I had a habit of
flinching as they went off.' In fact you can catch him flinching in one split-second of fear as he fired a shot; and neither was
his elusive American-German accent all that hot. They must have decided they just liked his voice anyway. But the tongue-in-cheek
humour of the film was right up Rickman's boulevard; he and Willis got together with various scriptwriters to add jokes and ideas
as the production got underway.
'When I met Willis, my immediate comment was that they're such cartoon-like characters that it would be much more interesting
if they could make each other laugh. There was no emotional development to chart with my character, so it needed something extra.
That came as the script was rewritten. In fact the script was rewritten so much that I could hardly say we filmed the script I
agreed to do.'
The result of making it, he says, 'was endlessly surprising and endlessly enjoyable'. His name is the second to be credited,
followed by Alexander Godunov and then Bonnie Bedelia. Very much a boys' picture.
We first see Rickman's character Hans Gruber emerging from a group of terrorists who seem to have fallen off the back of a
lorry. They walk mob-handed out of the truck. Suddenly this crowd parts like the Red Sea and he emerges from its centre. This is a
cinematographers cliche, but Rickman carries it off well, conveying

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just enough nerves under the professional cool to suggest a human time-bomb who might explode prematurely.
(Gruber was an inspired choice. There is a rumour that Hitler's family name was Schicklgruber, since his grandfather Johann
Georg Hiedler married a peasant girl from Lower Austria whose name was Maria Anna Schicklgruber. Five years before, she had given
birth to an illegitimate child.
According to the accepted tradition, the father of the baby was in fact Hiedler himself. But he never bothered to legitimise
the boy who continued to be known by his mother's maiden name of Schicklgruber until he was nearly 40 and who was brought up by his
father's brother. The latter later took steps to legitimise him and asked the parish priest to cross out the word 'illegitimate' in
the register, putting Hiedler's name down as the father.
Yet twelve years before Hitler was born, his father had started calling himself Hitler. Little Adolf was never known by any
other name until political opponents discovered the old scandal and jeeringly labelled him Schicklgruber.)
The epitome of a designer terrorist, Rickman has his hands buried deep in the pockets of a long cashmere overcoat as he
emerges from the mob. Gruber wears a Mephistophelean goatee beard and moustache. In fact he is Valmont revisited, with the same
facial hair. The sideburns and beard form one long seamless stripe of fur round the chops of this sexy weasel.
After gatecrashing a Christmas party given by Bedelia's Japanese-owned firm on the 30th floor of a skyscraper, the neo-Nazi
admires a scale model of a business project in Indonesia. 'I read an article in Forbes magazine,' he name-drops suavely. 'I could
talk about industrialisation and men's fashions all day, but I'm afraid work must intrude.' A lovely camp flourish. Gruber is after
640 million dollars of negotiable bonds locked in the company vault. Who said we were terrorists?' he asks rhetorically, as if
playing an elaborate game. He turns his head in slow-motion to glower at his henchman Godunov when the latter says 'It's not over
yet' to Bedelia's captive Japanese boss. Rickman then shoots the latter in the head. 'See if you can dispose of that,' he orders,
switching from the conversational to the callous in the abrupt way that is supposed to be the hallmark of the psychopath.
His suit reveals Rickman's surprisingly narrow shoulders. He's big-boned but his lean body has absolutely no pecs appeal

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although Alan does work out at the gym - reluctantly, according to him. Though he believes fundamentally that the best career
advice to a budding actor is to stay fit and healthy, to look after 'the instrument' of your body, he finds the grind of gym a
tedious business. In 2 1995 Premiere interview, he told Duncan Fallowell that he goes to his health club 'in secret - and I
dutifully bore myself rigid on the machines'. Rickman's Gruber travels light, with high cheekbones and a hawkish nose to confer
authority. Willis looks like Popeye in comparison, though the sweaty vest (which surely should have won Best Supporting
Performance) stands up
quite well.
Gruber has a rather contorted, very Germanic insult ready for Willis' character John McClane: 'Another orphan of a bankrupt
culture who thinks he's John Wayne,' he sneers. On the contrary, McClane calls himself Roy Rogers, a Hollywood in-joke that's just
a little too smug. But then that's Bruce Willis for you, revelling in the cat-and-mouse game McClane plays with Gruber.
Hans is pragmatic and not uncivilised, however, just as Rickman insisted: when he takes the staff hostage, he graciously
allows a sofa to be brought in for a pregnant woman at Bonnie's request. Rickman's feral face is well used here. A TV picture
reveals Gruber to be a former member of an extremist German underground movement until his expulsion, too radical even for the
radicals. It shows him with hair combed unflatteringly over his forehead, looking very drab and downbeat . . . this is Alan Rickman
in real life as a superannuated student revolutionary, sloping down to buy his veggies at the Portobello Road market in Netting
Hill Gate. With such a style makeover since his early days, clearly Hans is more in love with capitalism than he lets on.
A welcome touch of satire has a crass Gareth Cheeseman type, of the kind created by the comedian Steve Coogan, emerging from
the hostage group. He boasts to Hans that he can broker a deal by giving him McClane, 'the guy on the roof who is the one man that
can stop the terrorists. Gruber shoots the fool when he realises that he doesn't know where the detonators are.
They risk more subversive humour when Gruber barks at the police and the FBI that he wants 'colleagues' round the world
released - in Northern Ireland, Canada and even Sri Lanka, conjuring up such groups as 'Asian Dawn'. ('I read about them in Time
magazine,' he stage-whispers with perfect comic timing to

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Godunov, who has mouthed the name in facetious surprise.) It really must be like this with some terrorists, making the
revolution up as they go along.
Giruber shows his mettle by posing as one of the hostages when McClane, toting his machine-gun, turns up to ask 'How ya doin?'
in that homespun, all-American way.
This little detail is ridiculous: Gruber has altered his accent slightly, but surely McClane would recognise that rich drawl
anywhere? He's heard it enough times. And how about the lethal-looking teeth, revealed in a wolfish smile? McClane hands him a gun,
whereupon Gruber ominously grounds out McClane's cigarette with his shoe (another cliche") and speaks in German (always a bit of a
giveaway) on his mobile.
'Put down the gun and giff me my detonators,' he demands. It would be laughable in the mouth of anyone else but a deadly
serious Rickman, who has both the intensity and the integrity to make you believe in his villains.
Alan uses a machine-gun to shoot the glass out of a window in a movie with more than its fair share of defenestration. Again
you're suddenly very aware of Hans' jangling nerves under that studied cool: he's the student revolutionary who has hit the big
time.
The FBI men are the usual unbearable egomaniacs and McClane is no less smug in his rivalry with them, so much so that you
almost feel perverse enough to want Hans to win - especially if he could wipe out some of Bruce Willis's smirks. The villain is
supposed to smirk, not the hero; Alan keeps his dignity by contrast. His best line comes when he realises Bedelia is McClane's wife
and makes her hostage-of-the-week with a gun to her head. 'You are nothing but a common thief!' she accuses him. '1 am an
exceptional thief, Mrs McClane,' he hisses, putting his face close to hers like a furious lover. 'Since I'm moving up to
kidnapping, you should be more polite.' But dear old Brute Willis keeps coming back for more punishment, covered in blood like
Banquo's ghost McClane makes all the terrorists laugh, distracting them with a bi of male bonding for one vital moment. As a
result, it's all over Gruber finds himself travelling backwards through yet another window. His head swivels slightly as if he were
an angry snarlirng animal, and then he goes into freefall, imitating the rapid descent of that malignant comic cat Lucifer in
Disney's Cinderella.

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He vanishes like a magician into the ether, dropping 40 feet. All this and Rickman's own stunts, too, as a first-time action
man. The RADA fencing lessons had paid off; perhaps they put the vest on the wrong guy.
'I got Die Hard because I came cheap,' admitted Alan to GQ magazine. They were paying Willis $7 million, so they had to find
people they could pay nothing.' However, it planted Rickman's flag on the international map with a scene-stealing performance that
began his new Hollywood career in grand larceny. 'I wasn't prepared for the reaction,' he told Sean French in the same magazine the
year before. 'I flew to New York for a preview, and the audience just stood up and cheered and threw things at the screen. I walked
into that cinema and I could have just been someone with a ticket, but when I walked out I couldn't get to the car.
'My girlfriend and 1 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.' He was still bemused when he told The Times magazine of 12 March 1994: 'Black
New Yorkers loved Hans Gruber. They come up to me and say: "Yo! My main man!" I don't know what it is. They want him to get away
with it, I suppose.'
Yet he went from there straight back to BBC television and the intellectual comfort of a Michael Frayn play, Benefactors,
which was transmitted on 28 May 1989. It reunited him with Harriet Walter, a member of the Rickman 'harem' whose inimitably dry
little-girl voice was perfect for her role here. Benefactors was a miniature state-of-the-nation play - or perhaps just a
state-of-South-London play - about the collapse of idealism. It told the story of how a tower-block architect - played by Michael
Kitchen, with Barbara Flynn as his pragmatic wife - fell to earth. Rickman's character was
as an ex-senior classics master at Eton, now the bad-tempered editor of a woman's magazine. Harriet was his girlfriend, the
archetypal dippy hippie-chick with a wonderfully vacuous and dithery manner and a maddeningly enigmatic air. They both sponge off
kitchen and Flynn, almost living round at their place. Harriet eats her hair and watches Z-Cars while the other couple, furious at
her constant presence, argue about just whose friend she is. Kitchen and Flynn are capable, confident; the other two are incredibly
disorganised, with smelly children we never see. With her long bell

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sleeves and curtains of hair, Harriet looks like the moping lady of Shalott. She whimpers a lot and tells herself she has held
Alan back in his career.
Of course she begins a relationship with Kitchen, and Alan gets his first chance - but by no means his last - to play a
cuckold. He's bitter and defensive, baggy-eyed and haggard.
'Life goes round like a wheel: what we have done once, we do again,' he says doomily.
Kitchen's anti-social skyscraping plans are leaked to the papers by Alan via Harriet. Alan goes to live in a derelict house in
the middle of the redevelopment area, squatting there.
Welcome to the war,' he snarls at the visiting Flynn and fires off an angry monologue to camera. 'I see in you a little of the
bleakness I have in me,' he says provocatively to her. That's why you don't like me.'
He's menacing, shaggy, sexual, insinuating: a natural subversive and tinpot urban guerrilla. It is to Frayn's credit that he
is not so obvious as to allow Alan and Barbara's characters to end up in bed together, but it's a natural conclusion to draw.
'Don't scrape the sky, just sweep the streets - a whole philosophy of government in eight words,' Alan says, using his
headline-writing skills. But, by the end, this vulnerable malcontent is drily reflecting: 'We had all kinds of supporters by this
time -but not all of them had heads.'
Nevertheless, he becomes famous as a spokesman for the campaign and attacks 'North London cultural imperialism'. He even
survives two attacks by boiling brown stew from the hysterical Harriet, which would have scalded anyone with a thinner skin.
Eventually Flynn fixes him up with a new job, while Kitchen's practice withers in this nicely cynical but over-long piece.
So much for the revolution, indefinitely postponed. It was in 1989 that Alan Rickman became a member of the property-owning
classes. He was 43. After half a lifetime in the theatre, it was the first time that he had been able to afford a property. He and
Rima had shared the rent on her Holland Park flat since 1977, but Die Hard had made a significant difference at last to his
finances. Rima stayed put because she was required to either live or work in the borough of Kensington and Chelsea in order to
remain a councillor.
Though he was worried about how Rima would feel if he moved out, Alan bought a maisonette near a garden square just over a
mile

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away from Rima. They lead such different lifestyles that it's hardly surprising they find it difficult to share; but it was
his burgeoning film career that made the real difference.
Once you start playing the Hollywood game, you have to make yourself available to work around the world at very short notice.
The restless Rickman is forever on the move, while Rima is permanently home-based by virtue of sitting on no less than ten council
committees, not to mention her governorship of Barlby Primary School and her involvement with a canalside project and a community
centre. Her speciality is education, despite, or because of, not having had any children of her own.
'We were all very worried about them at first when Alan set up on his own, but it seems to have worked out,' says die close
friend.
Indeed, there is a longevity to all his loyalties. Alan said no to several overnight movie offers on the back of Die Hard and
returned to Britain and his old mentor Peter Barnes for three remarkable BBC projects: two period television dramas and a
disturbing radio play, Billy And Me. He believes in causes, and he certainly found one in The Preacher.
The latter was the third of four Barnes monologues under the series title of Revolutionary Witness, based on eyewitness
accounts of ordinary men and women caught up in the French Revolution.
Alan played Jacques Roux, a radical priest who officiated at the execution of Louis XVI and organised food riots in 1793. This
was - and still is - the most passionate performance he has ever given, laying his emotions bare in a wonderful fusion of head and
heart.
Roux is standing in a pulpit in an apparently deserted church, with his dog Georges at the foot of the pulpit as his only
audience, apan from us. He is a true terrorist from history; this is the real "ling, as opposed to Hans Gruber's entertaining
ersatz version.
'God created rich people first and then showed them the world they would own,' he says through clenched teeth. He has wild
hair and looks incredibly unkempt, the epitome of the turbulent priest. "Your slavery is their liberty,' he adds in a spell-binding
incitement to righteous violence, based upon Roux's own writings. The church offers fear and punishment for ever and ever. Religion
is a liar and a cheat. Mad Jacques, Red Roux, sower of sedition, subverter of all law.'
His first sermon in a new parish is being preached in this ruined church. He goes before the tribunal tomorrow, charged with

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excess. 'It seems I'm too revolutionary for the revolution,' he says with a bitter smile. 'Do not forgive me, Father, for I
have not sinned.'
His own father had twelve children; Jacques was the cleverest. He was a priest at the age of fifteen years and became a
professor of philosophy. Eventually he was arrested, he tells us, for a crime he didn't commit. This is how fires are kindled,' he
warns menacingly. For he was not given a trial.
'Revolutions must be violent ... the only way to end the greater violence,' he says, banging his fist on the pulpit. As the
title of one South African film put it, Death Is Part Of The Process.

He lives, he tells us, with a good woman and is now a pamphleteer; she sells them. They adopted a son, Emile. The close-ups
reveal Rickman's sensual, well-defined lips, the upper one slightly lifted in that characteristically animali