8. HOW THEY SHOT THE SHERIFF 137

Behind the scenes, Alan Rickman takes pains to behave like a real-life Robin Hood. He quietly gives away proceeds from his
rich films to poor theatre projects, an orphanage in Romania and other pet causes such as Glenys Kinnock's One World Action
campaign against poverty and Children On The Edge. When he secretly agreed in 2001 to voice the Genie of the Lamp in Philip
Hedley's production of Aladdin at the Theatre Royal Stratford East on a strictly-no-publicity basis, Alan recorded it at RADA where
he has long been quietly involved with fund-raising for his old theatrical alma mater. Yet his sharp looks made him a natural
Sheriff of Nottingham.
Everyone in the business has fallen for the rumour that Ruby Wax rewrote Alan's dialogue for the Sheriff in the Kevin Costner
movie Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves. Nearly every person I interviewed for this book muttered conspiratorially, 'Did you know that
Ruby . . .?', so it's travelled a long way. It's a great story, save for one thing: it's not true. To be fair to Ruby, she herself
has never claimed the credit; instead it was claimed on her behalf by friends and/or admirers who made the logical deduction: The
dialogue is funny, Ruby is Alan's friend, Ruby is funny, so . . .'
The real truth behind the Gothic humour of such bravura lines as 'Cancel the kitchen scraps for lepers and orphans. No more
merciful beheadings - and call off Christmas' is that Alan's old friend, Peter Barnes, was the author.
Alan called him in to help as a script-doctor. A downmarket Greasy Spoon caff in London's Bloomsbury was the improbable
operating theatre as Alan spread pages of the script over the table and Peter rolled up his sleeves (very characteristic of Peter,
this) and set to work.
'1 wrote the dialogue for the Sheriff,' Peter confirms. 'Alan and I have been friends for twenty years. 1 used to work a lot
in the Reading Room of the British Museum. There's a working-men's cafe nearby and we went through the script together, because
Alan said it needed some work on it.

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'So there we were: I said, "Look at us, we've ordered egg and chips and we're working on the dialogue of a $40 million movie!"
Alan, slightly misunderstanding me, said "Don't worry - I'll pay for the egg and chips." And he did.
'I made it more speakable. Kevin Costner was clonking around because his dialogue was a bit heavy-going. It doesn't trip
easily off the tongue. Alan is a mixture of Claude Rains and Basil Rathbone in the role. There was something about a teaspoon in
the middle of one speech - cutting a heart out with a teaspoon. It was a bit oddly positioned, so I made it work. In an action
movie, everybody kicks in with the dialogue. The poor old writers are very much relegated.'
The results of that barnstorming session in a Greasy Spoon were such choice witticisms as 'I had a very sad childhood, I never
knew my parents, it's amazing I'm sane', 'You - my room at 10.30 tonight. You - 10.45. And bring a friend' and 'Now sew - and keep
the stitches small' to a physician.
The year 1991 was Alan's annus mirabilis. Four Rickman films were released, and only one of them - the little-known Closetland
- was a flop. Truly Madly Deeply, Close My Eyes', and Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves all enhanced his reputation to an extraordinary
degree, so much so that influential film critic Barry Norman named him British Actor Of The Year. All three films were in the
Hollywood Top Ten.
It was Robin Hood most of all that caught the imagination, though to my mind Rickman has never bettered his performance in
Stephen Poliakoffs Close My Eyes. Therein he gave a cuckold - that traditional figure of fun - an unprecedented dignity and
complexity. Truly Madly Deeply completed the Top Ten triumvirate, remarkable for its raw emotional intensity. Few people know that
it is also the story of Alan: the man you see on screen is his real self (save for the fact that he's not a ghost and he hasn't had
an affair with Juliet Stevenson).
Of course his mad, ranting, glam-rock Sheriff of Nottingham was a huge popular hit, and so completely upstaged Kevin Costner
that there are stories circulating to this day about how Costner removed Rickman's best scenes from the final cut in the editing
room. What's left is so wonderful anyway that one hardly needs to bitch about the missing bits.
Kevin Costner didn't really know who Alan was - the name meant nothing to him. But when filming started, Costner realised

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what a formidable actor Alan was. Costner has a reputation in Hollywood for being incredibly physically well-endowed. That's
why he didn't wear the traditional tights in the role of Robin of Locksley; they made him a pair of breeches instead. However, Alan
Rickman still upstaged him with his wonderful roguish quality and powerful presence.
Rickman's single-minded intensity responded to the need for speed in filming the Ј25 million project. The film lacked enough
time. We were filming at the time of the year in England when you only have light until 3.30p.m., so it was very difficult to get
everything done,' he admitted to Jeff Powell in the Daily Mail in
1991.
Yet his Sheriff almost never happened. 'He turns a lot of things down, fussing a lot,' says the playwright Stephen Poliakoff.
'He tends to be a bit of a pessimist; he has mellowed a lot in the last year or so. He's very honest; he sees the pitfalls
perhaps a bit too much. He doesn't bullshit and he's very self-critical. And he said to me gloomily that he was about to ruin his
career by signing to play the Sheriff of Nottingham in a new film about Robin Hood. I said to him, "Is Prince John in it? No? Do
it!"'
So he did, persuaded only by an offer of some control over his lines with help from Peter Barnes. And the preview audiences at
early screenings cheered for Rickman, not Costner, hence the notorious cuts in the editing suite.
'At first I thought "Robin Hood - again?" I just turned it down flat. Then 1 started to hear of some of the names involved and
I could see the way forward for having fun,' Alan told People magazine in 1991.
And have fun he most emphatically did. '1 tried to make him certifiable and funny - a cross between Richard III and a rock
star,' he explained to the Daily Mail. It was that Thin Lizzy Crotch-Rock memory again . . .
Director Kevin Reynolds, who had manifold problems in getting Robin Hood to the screen and lost the friendship of his old chum
Costner in the process, wisely gave Rickman his head.
Closetland, Truly Madly Deeply and Close My Eyes were in the can by then. 'So it felt okay to go back into the primary colours
and just stride about in two dimensions for a while and have fun,' Rickman told the Sunday Express in 1991.
For someone who is popularly supposed to be politically correct, Rickman has a lot of subversive humour. He's one of the few
actors

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who could turn the Sheriffs attempted rape of Maid Marian into an absolute hoot without making it tasteless. 'It has to be
treated with humour,' explained Alan. 'You give it a particular tone, so that it's one of the more fun scenes. The only difficulty,
to be honest was getting out of the costume.'
Dressed in black, with sprouting ebony wig, beard and moustache, his Sheriff looked like the proverbial Bluebeard. 'I thought
about Richard III and a rock guitarist and I said, "Let's make [his costume] raven so you know who's coming,'" he told Ann McFerran
in an Entertainment Weekly interview. 'It was a cartoon ... I didn't want the film to disappear into all that historical business.'
Once again, as with Elliott Marston in Quigley Down Under, Alan instinctively understood that the Man in Black always won the style
wars when it came to imposing your presence on screen. Would you ever catch Cruella De Vil in verdigris or Darth Vader in violet? I
rest my case.
But Rickman's Sheriff made his first entrance as a wolf in sheep's clothing, as it were, by posing as a masked, white-cowled
monk on a horse, confronting Brian Blessed's Locksley Senior with the snarl Join us or die' and a quick flash of his shark-like
sneer.
The monks close in on Blessed with a pincer movement, their costumes and burning tapers deliberately evoking the Ku Klux Klan
for the benefit of Middle America. Poor old Costner wears a duvet (known as a pelerine cloak in medieval times) and bird's-nest
hair. Needless to say, he doesn't stand a chance in comparison with Rickman's lacquered glamour. Nottingham Castle is depicted as
Dracula's lair; the horizon is studded with shrieking bats. Rickman is discovered nuzzling a girl's body as if chewing ruminatively
on a chicken-leg. His head is cocked bird-like on one side at an interruption, a typical pose for him. His chest is bare but
casually framed with black fabric: the effect is very kinky and straight out of a bondage shop. 'I trust Locksley has visited his
manor and found the home fires still burning,' he says suavely.
His entourage consists of Geraldine McEwan in a white wig as the wizened old witch Mortiana; they make a wonderful pantomime
double-act. The terribly po-faced Robin, by contrast, carries a blind retainer around with him: the self-conscious effect is that
of King Lear, lumbered for life with Gloucester.
The Sheriff was raised by the witch, and scenes that ended up on the cutting-room floor disclose that she was in fact his
mother.
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'Zounds.' he exclaims in horror at the moment of death, 'who was DAD-?'
Rickman's old school master Ted Stead says: 'You cannot get out of him what happened in the editing of Robin Hood, because
he's very professional. But he did say, "You should have seen the eyework that Geraldine and I had." '
' The Sheriff casts coquettish sidelong glances at Maid Marian in the cathedral; very reminiscent of Richard III and Lady
Anne. You shine like the sun, my lady,' he snarls over Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio's hand. The smile is like a rictus grimace, eyes
suddenly flashing as if a snake had awakened with a start. He also has the beaky look of a bird of prey, his head so often cocked
on one side that one begins to wonder if he's slightly deaf in one ear. 'Locksley, I'm going to cut your heart out with a spoon,'
he promises. He slides on the floor in his haste, swats at people in his rage and frustration and repeatedly bashes the guard who
let Robin through the gate. As the luckless flunkey falls, his feet catch the end of the Sheriffs cloak and there's a hideous
rending sound .. . this is a Sheriff who's almost endearingly accident-prone.
"Now sew - and keep the stitches small,' is this piece of vanity's instruction to a doctor about to patch up his face. A fury
of nervous energy, he flagellates himself with rage and stabs at some meat on a plate as it trying to skewer an enemy. 'Something
vexes thee?' enquires McEwan's hag demurely.
He even glowers threateningly at his own statue, trying to wipe off its scar. You - my room at 10.30 tonight. You - 10.45. And
bring a friend,' he tells two wenches.
The Sheriff skewers his useless whingeing cousin with a Spanish blade - 'at least 1 didn't use a spoon,' he hisses. Even
Costner's bare bum can't compete; both he and it are far too stolid. For, in truth. Robin's ponderous tale is in dire need of
Rickman's diabolical inventiveness to jazz it up.
'Tell me. Mortiana. am 1 thwarted?' the Sheriff asks McEwan rhetorically, with a smile like a saw-toothed portcullis as he
realises he can hire Celtic thugs to fulfil a prophecy and marry Marian by kidnapping her. So a mercenary band of cider-heads makes
an appearance, brandishing bloodaxes on the edge of the forest One is again reminded of lulu and the shot of the assegai-carriers
wrapped around the horizon as far as the eve can see. 'Get me prisoners.' grates Rickman
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As his men send flaming arrows into Robin's Iron Age village, Rickman is caught gnawing his nail obsessively and fastidiously
-as in real life. (One suspects the Sheriff was probably a late bed-wetter, too.)

For there is constant human detail in Rickman's villainy Howard Davies, director of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, says that Alan
once rang him up in a fury to disagree after Davies had told a magazine that actors needed to find a trait they could love in a
character. 'On the contrary,' admitted Davies to Allison Pearson in the Independent on Sunday magazine in 1992, 'Alan sets out by
exploring the pathology of a character. He cuts them open and looks for what makes them weak or bad or violent' Indeed, there is a
crazy, deluded gleam in the Sheriffs eye almost as if he really does half-imagine that Marian has fallen in love with him.
Rickman's Sheriff has been frivolously compared to Basil Rathbone's Guy of Gisbome in the Errol Flynn version of Robin Hood, but
Rathbone was incredibly stolid by comparison.
'I had a very sad childhood, I never knew my parents, it's amazing I'm sane,' Rickman glibly tells a child whose life he's
threatening in front of Marian . . . such an obvious bid for our sympathy vote that it's breathtakingly funny. There's a hint of
cynical contempt for such fashionable psychological sob-stories, too.
'If you fail, I will personally remove your lying tongue,' he tells the spy Will Scarlett, who is now suspended by his ankles
in the torture chamber. Rickman turns his own head upside-down to talk to him. At one point Rickman goes cross-eyed with
exasperation (don't we all). 'Shut up, you twit!' he shrieks. And when Mortiana slaps Marian's face, he rasps proprietorially,
That's my wife, crone!' 'For once in my life, I will have something pure . . . will you stop interfering!' he tells Mortiana,
insisting that he won't ravish Marian until they are married in the eyes of God.
His biggest weakness is revealed at the marriage ceremony: the Sheriff of Nottingham's Christian name is George, which
explains a lot. He desperately tries to unstrap his sword in order to subject Marian to marital rape as soon as they've exchanged
their vows. 1 can't do this with all that racket,' he says fretfully, trying to penetrate his bride while a battering ram bashes
down the door in hilariously symbolic counterpoint. Geraldine helpfully puts a

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cushion under Marian's head - better for conception, perhaps? Whatever, it's another wonderfully funny detail.
'Dew yew mind, Locksley? We have just been married,' he sneers with a look of ineffable exasperation as Robin crashes through
the stained-glass window of the tower to make a widow of Marian. Some of Rickman's flamboyant curls are sliced up by Costner's
sword, but he hasn't given up the glamour role yet. He kisses Marian violently in front of Robin and pulls the fatal dagger out of
his own chest . . . quite heroic, really.
He goes fleetingly cross-eyed again and finally swoons with pain, lying like a broken-winged crow on the floor and looking
oddly pathetic. Rickman's full-blooded performance and quirky insights have made the Sheriff strangely lovable: you just know he
was bullied at school and passed over for promotion. Yet the performance is never sentimental.
Neither was he to succumb to sentimentality in a film that would make a stone statue weep without recourse to any religious
miracle. The Sheriff of Nottingham is a troublemaker with a murderous streak, all right — but goodness, this is a costume
melodrama, not Shakespeare. I believe this particular villain needs to be a little laughable, lest we mislead the audience into
taking things too seriously,' said Alan in an interview with the Fort Worth Star-Telegraph in 1991, adding plaintively that he
wished more people knew about his performance in another movie called Truly Madly Deeply. I'm looking to defy as many expectations
as I can, in case the people who liked my turn in Die Hard should take that character as the only thing I'm capable of doing.
That's what I'm doing so much of the broad comedy-villainy for in Robin Hood . .. Kevin Reynolds and I worked out where I could get
away with mugging the camera and sticking my nose into the audience.'
It was the modestly budgeted Truly Madly Deeply, which made ?20 million from its cinema release, that established
Juliet Stevenson as an international name; unlike Alan, however, she has not yet followed up that initial impact on the
international stage. Anthony Minghella directed and also wrote the screenplay for the BBC funded film, which is the most personal,
autobiographical work of Alan's career.
‘We used our own relationship in the film,’ Juliet admitted to DQ magazine in July 1992. 'I really am the Nina character,
juggling
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a hundred balls in the air at the same time and driving Alan potty with my scatterbrained way of doing things. He is much more
selective and sure in his tastes, which can be equally infuriating. But he's a great anchor in my life.'
The enigmatic Juliet, whose forthright independence had lone made her an idol of the Sapphic community, now has a little
daughter by her husband, American anthropologist, Hugh Brody. Director Jonathan Miller nicknamed Stevenson, Harriet Walter and
Fiona Shaw 'the nuns' while they were at the RSC; and all three are great friends of Rickman. Such good friends, in fact, that he
felt relaxed enough to remark years later, 'Actually, I've kissed some of the greatest actresses around - Fiona Shaw, Harriet
Walter, Juliet Stevenson', without making it sound like a vulgar boast. And he was to claim that he and Stevenson had - with the
aid of the famous BBC radio sound effect department, of course - performed 'the first oral sex scene on radio in an Anthony
Minghella play, A little Like Drowning'. With bonding like that, no wonder Alan and Juliet went on to make Truly Madly Deeply with
Minghella. The actor and director Philip Franks is another Stevenson buddy, and even he felt the need to explain himself thus: 'I'm
not gay ... but I have a number of strong friendships with a number of women.' Alan is just the same: a man who attracts all kinds
of women, straight or gay. They are easy in his company because they enjoy being treated like equals.
Socialism is another common denominator for Rickman and Stevenson, a brigadier's daughter who went to Fergie's old school,
Hurst Lodge, and has been trying to live it down ever since.
Both Juliet and Alan took part in the Labour Party TV broadcast for the General Election in April 1992, and she joins him on
crusades: they hosted a party at the Red Fort Indian restaurant in London's Soho to help black South African children. They are
embarrassed by what they see as the trivia of showbusiness, and they're forever trying to prove that they are serious people.
Inevitable, then, that they would make a film together . . .
It's true that Juliet, with her fierce, offbeat beauty, is what the French shrewdly call a jolie-laide (in its literal
translation, pretty-ugly) . . . very much like Alan himself. And there are other similarities.
Truly Madly Deeply was filmed in Bristol and in Juliet Stevenson's Highgate flat in North London. Minghella encouraged the
actors to
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draw on their own experiences, introducing their own quirks into the film. Thus Juliet is a scatty, highly strung woman; and
Rickman is the calm, slightly caustic control-freak in her life.
This scaled-down British version of Ghost tells the story of how Juliet's character Nina leams to come to terms with the
sudden death of her lover Jamie, played by Rickman. What makes it particularly difficult is that he returns to her several times in
the guise of a ghost, accompanied by his friends from limboland. ' The movie begins at Highgate Tube station and the long climb up
the stairs from the underground tunnels into the wooded, slightly spooky exit. Nina is talking to herself: 'If I'm frightened, then
hell turn up,' she reassures herself. 'He always was forthright. I would have been feeling low and hopeless . . . and he's there,
his presence, and he's fine. And he tells me he loves me ... and then he's not there any more. I feel looked after, watched over.'
This almost makes him sound like a Christ figure, except that the film has far too much humour for that. In fact, it exactly
replicates Alan's central role for his mates. 'He's an important figure in the lives of all his friends,' says the playwright
Stephen Davis. We realise that Nina is in fact talking about Jamie in this intense way to her psychiatrist. Then the camera cuts to
Alan, feigning playing the cello (the sounds are not his). He frowns in concentration, his hair long, bleached fair and floppy and
his moustache dark. The contrast suits him. The mourning Nina is surrounded by solicitous men who are desperately concerned about
her: her language-laboratory boss Bill Paterson; a lovestruck, slightly mad and totally unsuitable Pole called Titus; Michael
Maloney as the psychologist she meets in a cafe; and even the elderly oddjob man who has come to sort out the rats in her flat.
Indeed, Jamie is the only one who is never sentimental about her; and this is very much a Rickman characteristic.
He's into the Tough Love Department,' says Davis, who plays lead guitar in his own rock band and tells the story of how Alan
told him to pull himself together during a panic attack for one gig. I played live to an audience at London's Pizza On The Park for
three nights, and it was the most nerve-racking thing ever. 1 said to him, "This is killing me, I'm so nervous." He looked at me
and said, "No one's making you do it." We share each other's troubles a lot. He says, "Don't be negative". But he is, too ... and I
listen to him. It's a one-way street.'
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Nina finds herself crying without warning, and they are real, uglifying tears that make her nose drip and her face flush red.
This is very Juliet Stevenson. '1 miss him, I miss him, I miss him, I miss him ..." Her pain is so raw that it hurts to watch.
She's angry with him for leaving her, a typical reaction of the bereaved. '1 can't forgive him for not being here.'
But this mood is counterbalanced by tantalising moments of fleeting happiness, such as when she is with her beloved young
nephew. 'You aren't getting posh? Say bum and Trotsky twice a day,' she teases him, joking but deadly serious at the same time.
Juliet is so committed that she was reported to have left the Labour Party in 1995 because she felt its modernist stance was
compromising its politics. Alan, so far, stays firm.
Nina won't give her nephew Jamie's cello, however. It's all she has of her dead lover . . . and she won't let go. As she plays
the piano, Jamie materialises behind her, playing his cello. He stands motionless as she cries, her face scarlet with grief. Then
he hugs her as she weeps piteously. '1 kept thinking,' he says drily, 'just my luck . . . dying of a sore throat. Maybe I didn't
die properly, maybe that's why I can come back. Didn't hurt.' She gingerly feels him to see if he's real.
'Are you staying?' she asks meekly. 'I think so.' 'Can 1 kiss you" Your lips are cold.' This is a terrible fiat,' he grumbles.
'And you've got RED bills. And you never lock the back door . . . driving me crazy.'
This is pure Alan, who keeps his flat in Westboume Grove incredibly tidy and would lecture Ruby Wax about monitoring the
central heating when they shared a flat together. Thank you for missing me,' Jamie says morosely, but not without lugubrious
humour.
Tour pain ... I couldn't bear that. The capacity to love that people have . . . what happened to it? I blame the Government. 1
hate the bastards,' he ends with a growl.
'You died and you're still into party politics?' she says, amazed. 'I still attend meetings,' says Jamie defensively.
He makes himself scarce as Titus arrives at the door and invites her to Paris for sex. 'Now I'm depressed. I book tickets. Man
with big emotion, big heart. I love you,' says this ghastly character, a sexual harasser by any other name whom well-bred women are
too polite to rebuff. When she comes back after tactfully getting rid of
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him, Jamie has apparently gone. 'Who was that?' he asks, emerging from underneath the bedspread and laughing almost evilly as
she screams with fright. He warms his lips for her by breathing on his hand and then touching his mouth. They kiss.
They sing at each other, rather raggedly in that cracked, ironic way of close friends, droning their way through a
Sixties/Seventies medley: The Walker Brothers' The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Anymore', Buddy Holly's 'Raining In My Heart', Joni
Mitchell's 'A Case Of You' and Bob Dylan's Tangled Up In Blue'.
They play the childish games of lovers as they vie with each other to declare their passion: 'I really-truly-madly-deeply love
you.' He pushes her away playfully then pulls her back imperiously into his arms.
Rickman plucks a guitar and sings again with that strangely musical cawing-crow voice of his, slightly reminiscent of the late
Jeremy Brett, the definitive incarnation of Sherlock Holmes. Stevenson dances wildly. The rats have gone, perhaps terrified of his
ghost - or their singing. Later he drips a glass of water on her face to wake her up and pushes her out of bed in his benignly
bossy way. This is the essence of Juliet and Alan's relationship; indeed, his relationship with everybody. He has tidied up and lit
the fire for her. Jamie comes and goes with no warning. Nina's handyman friend George, played by David Ryall, confides that he
still talks to his wife who died in 1978. 'And death shall have no dominion,' he quotes sombrely.
Jamie next pops up in the most surreal way when Nina is in the bath with a face pack on; he appears over the edge of the bath.
He pokes a plastic toy animal in her face, and it whirs as it sticks its tongue out at her. 'Oh come on, don't be coy ... I know
you shave your legs,' he says, asking casually whether he can bring some guys back to watch videos. Bizarrely enough, the spirits
turn out to be huge film buffs who wrap themselves up in duvets and watch Brief Encounter intently before taking a vote over
whether to see Five Easy Pieces or Fitzcarraldo. Jamie huddles up in bed next to her:
You smell so nice.' He even brings a string ensemble back to play a Bach suite. She fetches him a hot-water bottle because he
feels permanently cold, the only sign of his otherness.
These quirky interludes are beautifully handled, though the contrasting 'real life' episodes with Michael Maloney have a
slightly embarrassing whimsicality as he tries to jolly her along and bring
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her back into the land of the living. Rickman seems more real than any other man.
Nina briefly glimpses Jamie again, but it's just another cellist on the South Bank next to the National Film Theatre. Her dead
love is then discovered sitting by the fire at her flat again. Nina is driven to distraction by his disorganised friends, who are
playing chess and generally causing mayhem. Alan is even taking up the carpet to expose slightly mildewed floorboards, just as he
did in their relationship. 'Could everybody just go?' she finally says. They all waddle out like offended penguins in the John
Smith beer commercial on TV.
She asks Jamie to remember their first meeting, and there's a real intensity between them. 'I want a life,' she says; it is
her bid for independence and freedom from his memory.
Suddenly you notice that Rickman is grey at the temples. 'Do you want me to go?' Jamie asks softly. 'No, never, never, never,'
says Nina fervently, thinking she means it. But the fraternity of ghosts does go; and she is finally over him as she rushes off to
Maloney's class to meet him.
The rat is back; a pet one called Squeak, supplied by a company called Janimals. It's a sign that the ghosts have truly gone.
They come back briefly, with Rickman at their centre, to stare out of the window at the sight of Juliet kissing her new man in the
garden.
Rickman has never looked more romantic than here, like some sulky Russian dissident artist, but he made the part an
anti-romantic one. The tug of nostalgia is very powerful, but his astringent personality gives the ghost of Jamie solidity. By
contrast, though Maloney's character lives in the real world - and you can't get much more real than someone who works with Downs'
Syndrome adults - he has a gentleness about him that offers Nina an enticing escapism. As ever, Rickman's instinct is to play
against the character he is given, to introduce surprise and tension.
By contrast, his next project was a big mistake. The low-budget Hollywood film Closetland was written and directed by a woman,
Radha Bharadwaj; and, as with Kathryn Bigelow's ultra-violent Strange Days, perhaps only a woman could have got away with it.
Rickman plays a Fascist interrogator trying to break the will of Madeleine Stowe, the nearest he has got so far to the kind of
Torquemada figure that some fans crave. All the action takes place in one room, a gleaming, high-tech affair that bears no
resemblance to the moth-eaten Gothic dungeons favoured by the Sheriff of
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Nottingham. The victim is blindfolded, so that Rickman's voice, slipping into different pans, confuses her. His character,
according to the Variety review of 11 March 1991, is no brute, however, but 'a complex, highly civilised man who displays a range
of emotions and talents'.
Stowe plays a children's author whose work stands accused of feeding subversive ideas to infants in the guise of innocent
stories. Rickman is an agent of the oppressive government. It becomes a contest of wills, with Stowe determined to awaken his
conscience and Rickman trying to break down her resolve. Variety made the point that it is an essentially theatrical piece,
difficult to sell to cinema audiences and perhaps better suited to TV. Amnesty International was the consultant and participated in
the film's marketing campaign, so it's easy to see why Alan became involved.
Rickman was praised for his multi-faceted performance; but he was very unhappy with the end result. 'He said it was awful
after it was edited, and he told me not to look at it,' says his old Latymer Upper English teacher Edward Stead. 'He hoped it would
never open in England.'
It had been a gruelling year. On the back of that disaster, he made Stephen Poliakoffs incest drama Close My Eyes, taking the
pan of the betrayed husband that Poliakoff created specially for him.
Poliakoff had first come across him in 1976 when Alan played one of two middle-class drug addicts in Stephen's play The
Carnation Gang. 'I then ran into him at the RSC during his second time with them in the mid-eighties. I did a starry workshop with
Alan, Tilda Swinton and Juliet Stevenson. I was interested in doing a play about dreams, so we did a workshop. He and Juliet were
very compelling as a weird, dark couple: brother and sister. She was druggy, he was dragging her down into a dark spiral.
Essentially it was a portrait of the 70s and the 80s.
I gave Alan quite a lot of space when I was directing him for Close My Eyes,' adds Poliakoff. 1 made him feel secure; and I
got the impression that not a lot of people had done that. Actors are always being judged on their physical qualities, so they're
very vulnerable.
Alan has big vulnerabilities. He worries that people are doing the work intelligently, and he and Juliet are big smellers of
bullshit. It was the combination of Close My Eyes, Robin Hood and Truly
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Madly Deeply that finally made him known to the man in the street. With success, he expanded enormously in terms of his
confidence. For an intelligent man, it's difficult to sell yourself. Improvisations for directors are very tough for someone who's
intelligent. At least a writer doesn't have to sell himself physically to a complete idiot.
'Alan didn't make any suggestion for the dialogue in Close My Eyes, but he did suggest wearing a baseball cap in the
garden-party scene. And some of his sister's children played the kids running around. 1 offered him the role of the husband
Sinclair before I cast the brother and sister, and he's renowned for being one of the longest drawn-out yes-noers in the business.
He came in halfway through the shooting, and Clive Owen was slightly terrified of him. Sinclair has an opinion on everything;
that's slightly true of Alan, too.'
Close My Eyes is a (very effectively) overheated tale of incest between a brother and sister, separated when young and only
meeting later when both are grown up. Their grabby intensity could be taken as a metaphor for the Yuppie 80s, particularly as parts
of the film were shot in the fashionable surroundings of Docklands London. Clive Owen plays the brother and Saskia Reeves the
sister, married to Rickman's watchful but enigmatic Sinclair.
He's supposed to be a high-powered City solicitor, though Alan j was careful not to include any detailed clues to the
character.
Alan used his own artistic background to collaborate closely with the costume and production designer so that Sinclair could
not be put into any rigid social pigeonhole, according to an interview with Sean French in GQ magazine. 'I didn't want people to
learn anything about him through where he lived or who his friends were.' In other words, he is creating an archetype in this
morality tale for our times.
In his own quiet way, Sinclair is having the big adult breakdown while Owen and Reeves indulge in the screaming, shouting,
childish melodramatics. He finds their relationship intense, but at first he doesn't suspect... or doesn't want to. At one point,
we see him pushing a cart round the supermarket and questioning certain details that don't quite make sense. Then he sits abruptly
on the floor of the shop as the truth registers. It could almost be a scene from a Woody Allen film. There is another scene on a
riverbank in which Rickman's long look at Owen says everything he dare not
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quite admit to himself. It's a devastating combination of suppressed rage and vulnerability.
As Sinclair's suspicions fester behind that outwardly calm facade, the tension becomes palpable ... as James Delingpole
pointed out in the Daily Telegraph, 'You suspect that at any moment he might be about to commit some monstrous act of violence.'
This is a one-dimensional reading of the performance, however. It is Sinclair's tremendous restraint that impresses: you know he
knows, but he's holding back all the time and trying to be civilised, not just for the sake of his dignity but because he feels
like a clumsy, helpless outsider between the siblings. He is powerless to intervene
. in a kinky Greek tragedy. Anyway, who wants to admit that you've been cuckolded by your brother-in-law? Particularly if
you're as rich - and as suavely attractive - as Rickman's well-heeled character. Indeed, the only surprise is that Reeves finds
Owen more attractive.
On the BBC's Gloria Hunniford show in 1991, Rickman said the film showed 'how uncertain our lives are. It's a story about
Britain in the 90s, and my character is an arch-Yuppie.' All the torrid sex is reserved for Reeves and Owen; Rickman admits to
Gloria that he kept his knickers on and Saskia her nightie during a bed-scene. 'I remember us all giggling a bit at that point,'
says Poliakoff. 'I've done a lot of hopping in and out of bed naked, but this was my first actual sex scene,' recalled Alan.
'Saskia whispered to me, "Did I have any knickers on?" 1 did. I mean, God forbid there should be any real contact.'
The female screams and whistles from the studio audience when he nude his entrance on Hunniford's show suggested that perhaps
the wrong guy got his kit off (not that anyone in full possession of their faculties would kick Clive Owen out of bed). Rickman
took the homage with gallantry and humour; despite the explicit letters, he tries to be polite to his fans and always signs
autographs at the stage door.
'We hadn't even had a conversation; we had only just met again; and suddenly Alan was in bed and we had to begin that scene.
It often happens like that if you go into Makeup and then straight on to the set. So I said, "Sorry, I'll keep my underwear on."'
remembers Saskia Reeves, who first encountered him at a play-reading at the Royal Court Theatre back in 1988. So Alan decided to
preserve a bit of decorum too
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'I like being around him because he's such an extraordinary individual. He's calm and extraordinarily eccentric - so different
to anyone else I know.' she says. 'He makes me feel very relaxed. He always brings out a cheeky side in me: I tease him to make him
laugh. He was very sturdy and confident and helpful on Close My Eyes. He's a great socialiser. I invited the cast over to my flat
and we sat up till all hours. I was quite surprised: he stayed the distance for lunch the next day and left in the evening.
It's nice to find a kindred spirit. He's a latter-day philanthropist, he brings people together. He's not a parent figure,
he's my playmate. I tease him. I think he's great.
'hi many ways, I sometimes wonder if there's a hidden agenda with Alan. He can be quite removed: he's like a character in a
Pinter play, where the strongest person is the one who says least. I do that childish thing of teasing and tickling him. 1 teased
and tickled my granny's dog and eventually it bit me on the chin. But Alan has never bitten me yet ... I try to make him laugh. I
try to give him what I see him giving to others. He has this huge support-network whereby he supports and looks out for other
people.
'Sinclair in the film was a calm, solid, eccentric, tender man, rather like Alan. I'm not shy of him. I have never found him
intimidating; that's Alan. He and Rima came to see me in Stephen Poliakoffs play Sweet Panic at Hampstead Theatre in 1996, and he's
the kind of person who always knows nice places to eat. That sort of thing fascinates me about him, though I couldn't begin to say
what he's about. I always feel very positive about him; I never feel intimidated by him.
'Sometimes I feel as if he's playing a game of being aloof on purpose, but it's just the way he is. Sometimes he takes his
time before he's worked out what's going on.'
After wall-to-wall filming, Rickman was ready to head back to theatre with the Japanese play Tango At The End Of Winter, the
story of an actor in crisis. His old friend Peter Barnes adapted it for the Edinburgh Festival and the West End stage, with the
legendary director Yukio Ninagawa directing it.
Rickman played Sei in the Kunio Shimuzu play about a famous matinee idol whose wife urges him to go back to the stage in order
to stay sane. 'He has the usual actor's madness,' Rickman told Jessica Berens in the September 1991 issue of Tatler. 'You know,
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the voices inside the head. The usual . . . this is terrible, why on earth are you doing this?' What a prophetic question; and
very appropriate in these circumstances.
His hooded eyes already looked the part; he was perfect for an Asiatic role. Unfortunately, even Peter Barnes' adaptation
couldn't save this ponderous theatrical metaphor for life. Why did Alan do it? Because it was produced by his old friend Thelma
Holt, who has been called 'the last true impresario' of the British stage. Like Alan, she's a dedicated internationalist. But
ultimately the name of Ninagawa, the Japanese Peter Brook, sold the project to Alan. There is a mystique about Ninagawa, as with
Dennis Potter, whose own flawed script for Mesmer would later involve Alan in a major law-suit and creative stalemate for the first
time in his career.
Amid much publicity about rehearsals stopping for Japanese tea ceremonies, one sensed a case of the Emperor's New Clothes.
Rickman had seen Ninagawa's Medea and thought: This is what the word "unforgettable" means.' Not everyone agreed: I remember a
fellow critic muttering This is the campest thing since Sunset Boulevard' as he and I fled to file copy at the end of the show as
though our trousers were on fire.
But Rickman rationalised it to himself in an interview with Peter Lewis in The Sunday Times in 1991: 'If you have such an
experience watching someone's work and are then asked to work with him, you are not being true to yourself unless you do,' he said.
Usually he's too analytical and too aware of his working-class roots to gush, but this appealed to his quixotic side.
'It wasn't an easy decision. But there's a voice somewhere inside that eventually packs the suitcase. It said, "If you are any
good in films, it's only because of what you do in the theatre." Hence the sideways move in what many have seen as a quirky career.
But as Albert Finney once pointed out, actors don't ascend a great golden staircase to the heavens - it doesn't work like that.
Rather more prosaically, Ninagawa had chosen Rickman for the lead after seeing him in Die Hard - wherein he shot a Japanese
tycoon in the head. He had also caught a preview of Truly Madly Deeply.
Ninagawa is clearly not cocooned from reality, even if he does issue such statements as: The playwright is the mother, the
actors
are the father, and between them they bear the child called Theatre. As director, I am only the midwife.'
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And the-critics played King Herod. I reviewed the premiere at Edinburgh for the Daily Express: 'Only the legendary status of
Yukio Ninagawa can have persuaded Hollywood's favourite British villain Alan Rickman to star in this empty domestic epic about a
Japanese actor's mid-life crisis. Yet even he flounders in a cliche-ridden play laden with pretentious symbolism.'
Yet Ninagawa had directed, in Japanese, an unforgettable world-class production of Macbeth, with the fall of the
cherry blossom symbolising the death of the tyrant and a Samurai parallel | with medieval Scotland's war-like hordes.
Tango At The End Of Winter was Ninagawa's first production with a British cast of actors. He didn't speak English, so they
communicated via an interpreter. Ninagawa did his own casting by making people talk about themselves at their auditions while he
watched their facial expressions.
Tango was a popular hit in Japan in 1988, but the predominantly female audiences there worship actors. A play on such a
subject was bound to succeed, whereas in the West we see it more as a self-reterential indulgence. The action was set in the shabby
auditorium of a defunct cinema, with tattered curtains fluttering at the entrance to symbolise the transience of life. Figures from
the actor's past appeared and reappeared as if in a dream, summoned by memory, as he struggled with his madness. Acting styles
varied wildly, given the language barrier between director and cast. Sylvia Syms' talented daughter, Beatie Edney, played Rickman's
mistress, having appeared alongside Alan on Broadway in Les liaisons Dangereuses. Friends believe that Beatie had a big crush on
Rickman; an impression strengthened by the fact that later she dated his lookalike, a morose young actor called Ronan Vibert who is
frivolously known as 'Moanin' Ronan'. He has never quite forgiven the London Evening Standard for calling him the poor man's Alan
Rickman in the BBC bodice-ripper The Buccaneers. Ronan certainly has a piratical smile but not, as yet, Alan Rickman's gracefulness
and subtlety.
The elliptical Tango was not popular with either reviewers or public at the Piccadilly Theatre, at the time a somewhat jinxed
venue that had had more than its fair share of flops (it has since recovered its fortunes with a string of hits).
David Nathan in the Jewish Chronicle wrote: 'Sei's plight is not gripping, especially as conveyed by Alan Rickman, who .
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declines from his usual melancholic lassitude into terminal lethargy.'
Benedict Nightingale in The Times thought it lacked coherence as Rickman reeled about, 'filling the stage with his sardonic
self-absorption', in the role of the actor who goes mad because he fears he has lost his talent. Could this be a dry-run for
Hamlet?
' "This is embarrassing," announces Alan Rickman halfway through, and the guy ain't joking,' wrote Lyn Gardner in City Limits.
Jack Tinker in the Daily Mail found Rickman 'languid to the point of torpor'.
Yet Michael Billington in the Guardian felt that 'the play is a dense tissue of allusions to Hamlet, Six Characters In Search
Of An Author, Casablanca, Limelight and an old Ronald Colman movie . . . Rickman exactly captures the Hamlet-like melancholy, the
doomed romanticism, the exquisite narcissism of this falling star. It ... makes me hope someone will cast Rickman as Shakespeare's
gloomy Dane forthwith.' Someone did: Thelma Holt a year later.
Although the finale featured a beautiful transformation-scene, most critics, nevertheless, felt the journey there wasn't worth
the effort.
The lack of narrative drive made it a difficult vehicle for the West End, which at least demands a good story from its artier
endeavours. So the production was a commercial failure, despite a strictly limited season that turned out to be something of a
loss-cutting exercise. Alan's old English teacher Ted Stead feels strongly about it to this day. 'Alan was very disappointed with
the reaction to Tango At The End Of Winter," says Stead, who took a party of schoolboys to see Alan's performance. 'Alan found
eight performances a week very trying and demanding, and the reception was lukewarm. He was going to do Peer Gynt with the same
director, but that never materialised.
'I'm convinced it flopped -because Alan wasn't allowed to have star billing in the West End; it was the director who got the
billing,' argues Ted, who believes that the crowds would have come if Alan's name had been prominently displayed. Certainly, Peter
Barnes testifies to the enthusiasm of the Rickman fans that did make it to the stage door. But Thelma Holt explains: 'Alan
specifically didn't want star billing. It was an ensemble company, therefore the billing was alphabetical.' And Alan himself had
gamely told the Sunday Times' Peter Lewis on 4 August 1991: 'I'm
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trying to make myself like an empty vessel, a piece of equipment labelled actor.' This was test-tube theatre.
In Japan, Ninagawa is a god whose word is not questioned. For once, Alan didn't argue; and he was also obliged to submit to
the strict regime of the Taiwanese director Ang Lee on the film Sense And Sensibility five years later. All very noble in the cause
of good global relations, but such self-effacing modesty just didn't make commercial sense in the West End where Alan Rickman would
have brought the faithful flocking to theatre's equivalent of Eric Cantona, had the billing deified the right guy. Alan's fans had
to search for his name near the end of the list underneath the banner headline The Ninagawa Company'. In retrospect, it was
pointlessly purist of him. His talent and personality elevate him.
In a curious twist ten years later, the Texas frontwoman Sharleen Spiteri was to recruit him as her dancing partner in the
video for 'In Demand' and thus enhance his street-cred even more. As she explained, 'I thought it had to be someone who would rip
your coat off and pull you into the tango, so I thought of Alan Rickman.' Well, quite. Who wouldn't? He does rather throw himself
into these things, as Emma Thompson found out when he whirled her round the room at a Sense And Sensibility location party.
But the bold experiment in international theatre was not to be the last for Alan and Thelma. They had taken the hint about
Hamlet.


9. IMMORTAL LONGINGS 157

The foyer of the Royal Court Theatre in London's Sloane Square is well accustomed to the odd loud-mouthed wino who comes in
from the cold steps outside. No problem. Even after it reopened in February 2000 with an urban-chic redesign which included .1
front-of-house revamp that left the box-office looking more like the maitre d's desk at a fashionable restaurant, the home of the
theatrical angry brigade can still cope with noise pollution on any scale. U the evening - either on or off the stage - has been
completely devoid of what Dr Feelgood used to call firkin this and firkin that, I never feel I've had my money's worth from the
Court. The old 70s chocolate-and-orange decor of the main house used to scream at you, of course; and if you're a sensitive
vegetarian, the gorgeous new leather seats now scream at you instead. And even after its refit, the late-Victorian building that
first introduced George Bernard Shaw's loquacious jaw-jaw to British audiences Mill regularly rattles to the sound of the tube
trains entering and leaving the underground station next door. It's not a place to go for a quiet time.
However, a public shouting-match between the actor Alan Rickman and the theatre director Jules Wright over their rival bids to
run the Riverside Studios arts centre shocked even the hard cases. Three years later, everyone at the Court still remembered the
row.
The acrimonious confrontation took place on 28 November 1993, the night of departing Artistic Director Max Stafford-Clark's
fund-raising party for his new Out Of Joint theatre company. That well-known character, 'Arfur (Half of) London', had been invited
to send Max on his way; all the more amazing, then, that the furious exchange of views between the irate Alan and lutes was never
leaked to the outside world.
What Jules now describes as 'a fairly monumental row in which everyone else was extremely entertained' was the culmination of
five months of tension and acrimony directed towards Jules Wright
The so-called 'Rivergate' affair in the summer of 1993 led to a furious campaign in the Press by the supporters of Alan
Rickman
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and the producer Thelma Holt, who headed a starry consortium to take over a dilapidated white elephant in West London's
Hammersmith. It was their ambition to turn it into a new Royal National Theatre.
Among the allegations were stories about a missing - perhaps stolen -- document that was leaked to the Press, plus the
extraordinary sight of Alan Rickman handing a queue of bemused theatre-goers copies of a published letter of support from leading
theatre critics. That kind of activism hardly goes with the languid image of a man who likes chaise-lounging around.
The previous year had begun exceptionally well for Rickman's career, but Rima's political ambitions were to be bitterly
thwarted. On 26 January 1992, Alan was named Best Actor in the London Evening Standard Film Awards for his threefold triumph in
Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves, Close My Eyes and Truly Madly Deeply. For her performance in the latter, his friend Juliet Stevenson
deservedly won the Best Actress trophy.
'Now I know it's possible to win an award for over-acting,' quipped Rickman, referring to that witty old slimeball, the
Sheriff of Nottingham.
He was busy, busy, busy. Rickman and Ruby Wax had formed their own production company, Raw Produce, to develop ideas that
would exploit their shared sense of humour. It was Alan who put a shape to the Ruby Wax phenomenon, bringing her one-woman show
into London's West End for a short season in April before a provincial tour. Rickman was turning out to be quite a Svengali with
his American Trilby.
At the same time, he was also quietly helping Rima with her General Election campaign. A slightly scowling Rickman could be
spotted lurking modestly at the edge of a photograph of Labour candidates and their supporters in the borough of Kensington and
Chelsea.
He turned out by her side on polling day, although he was spared the rigours of door-to-door canvassing. Other celebrity
Labour supporters recruited by Rima included Lord Longford, Baroness Ewart-Biggs and the novelist, Ken Follett. Yet Rima is very
protective of her boyfriend's privacy. 'It wouldn't have been fair on Alan to ask him to canvass for me before. He's got such a
famous face,' she told the Tory-supporting Daily Telegraph's Peterborough diary, whose 7 April edition mischievously published the
most
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unflattering picture of a glowering Rickman that it could find. 'I might have produced Alan before if it was more of a
marginal seat,' she conceded. 'But he may sway the odd wavering voter on polling
day.'
Indeed, four years later she was to explain to the Daily Mail's Nigel Dempster on 3 March 1996: 'Alan is committed to the
cause and he gives me a lot of moral support, but he doesn't come face to face with voters. He just delivers leaflets and then
leaves. It could be embarrassment which stops him, I don't know. I won't push him. Not everyone enjoys being questioned on policy
detail.'
The constituency was split in two for the purposes of the election: Ann Holmes was the Labour candidate for Kensington,
standing against Conservative holder Dudley Fishburn, and Rima Horton was up against 58-year-old Sir Nicholas Scott's massive
majority in Chelsea - the safest Tory seat in the country with an average of 60 per cent of the vote.
A somewhat strenuous private life had nearly led to Sir Nicholas Scott's deselection. In 1987 he was appointed Minister for
the Disabled, but was to leave the post in 1994 after tabling amendments to wreck a Bill of Rights for the handicapped. In the
process, the Tory Wet publicly fell out with his Labour-supporting daughter Victoria, a campaigner for the disabled movement,
Rights Now, who had exposed the governmental tactics that halted the Disablement Bill.
It seemed as if nothing would unseat the accident-prone Sir Nicholas Scott, who drove a car that crashed and killed a man in
1957. A verdict of accidental death was recorded. In 1995, he ran off when his car shunted another into a toddler's pram; Sir
Nicholas was later breath-tested. He was banned from driving for a year and fined Ј200 with Ј450 costs.
Rima had become the local Labour Party spokesman on education and town planning and, by 1992, she had become a senior lecturer
in economics at the Surrey Polytechnic that is now Kingston University. Although she was the youngest, Rima was the only one of the
three Chelsea candidates who coyly failed to give her age - 51-year-old Susan Broidy stood for the Liberal Democrats. Rima's
manifesto, published in the Kensington News, simply recorded that she was born in Bayswater and had lived in the borough of
Kensington and Chelsea for fifteen years. That was the time when she and Alan had first moved into her current flat in Holland Park
in 1977.
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Her brisk manifesto didn't even mention her marital status or rather, the lack of it. This was surprising, given the residual
prejudice from some quarters of the electorate against married women standing for office. A single woman without children had and
still has a positive advantage; single men had a harder time of it until openly gay Labour candidates began winning seats and thus
made marital status irrelevant. The Tories, though, still tend to prefer their candidates with wives attached.
New Labour had sent Rima on the obligatory power-dressing course for the right business-like image, urging her to put her
shoulder-pads to the wheel. Lecturing had taught her all about public speaking. Surprising, then, that Peter Barnes says she tells
him that she still finds speech-making difficult. She speaks in a husky contralto with a slight lisp that makes her sound not
unlike the actress Frances De La Tour; the effect is decidedly sexy. Rima owes her deep, rather thrilling voice to her smoking
habit: she can be a bit of a Fag-Ash Lil and has been known to puff away during speeches. In argument, she's forceful but not
strident. Of course there's nothing like the line 'when 1 was talking to my MA students' to impress fellow Kensington & Chelsea
councillors . . . those not covertly reading their horoscopes or Private Eye or playing with their pocket calculators at die time,
as happened during one meeting in the council chamber that I attended.
Alan Rickman is frequently to be found in the public gallery, taking an active interest in Rima's latest pronouncements on
pelican crossings or guardrails. Not that this chic and attractive figure with her distinctive dark-brown bob appears to need any
moral support. She's incisive and highly articulate, pitching her arguments some way above certain heads in the council chamber who
find themselves getting a free lecture on economics.
'She's not rent-a-quote,' said Ian Francis, at the time news editor of the then Kensington News when I first contacted him
back in 1995. 'She's not on the phone to us straight away about some local issue. She usually waits to be approached, so she
doesn't set herself up to be a great local media figure. She tends to stick to what's going on in the council chamber, so she's not
a great public person.
There's no gimmick with her. Perhaps she hasn't mastered the public aspects of local politics - or has chosen not to.'
Certainly Rima is highly sensitive to Alan's phobia about the Press in general and critics in particular. If she were elevated
to a
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political position at a national level, it would make life very difficult for him which is why she has forced herself to be
philosophical about election disappointments.
'She's very feisty and no-nonsense: she doesn't suffer fools gladly,' added Ian. Nevertheless, he criticised the Labour
Opposition in Kensington & Chelsea for being 'exceptionally inactive. They're active on things like roofs leaking on local estates.
But the council tax has just gone up, and there was no outcry whatsoever from the Opposition.'
Certainly it's difficult to avoid the conclusion that the political scene is just a little too cosy in this Royal borough with
its cast-iron Conservative majority. With Labour in a minority group there's a limit to what the Opposition can do with its
numbers. Certainly Rima, whose politics are Centre Left and whose understated glamour is very much New Labour, is not about to
woman the barricades.
'It's a very boring political scene in Kensington &r Chelsea,' was Ian Francis' verdict on the Nicholas Scott years. 'Scott
will .give you a quote, but he won't be proactive.
'Rima strikes me as a bit of a do-gooder. The ambitious ones are on the phone to us all the time; those who are more
sanctimonious just get on with their work.'
She's certainly popular with colleagues from both sides of the political fence. She can be glamorous and she has a certain
style. She wears chic, expensive-looking clothes, and, unlike many of the other councillors, her official photograph looks as if it
was done in a studio
Indeed, the serious-minded Rima is almost a Sharon Stone in comparison with one (male) councillor, whose rugged features have
been unkindly likened to a 'Wanted' poster of an escaped convict and who is affectionately known as Magwitch behind his back.
She has a big voice and a glint in her eye, but it has been suggested that she's not a natural politician who maintains eye
contact. This might come from being an academic, but she tends to fix on a point on the wall instead and her language can sometimes
be a little high-flown.
Most Labour councillors are not exactly gad-about-town figures, but a sophisticated woman of the world like Rima adds a little
local colour: she's a great fan of restaurants off the Portobello Road. Even
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Tories like her: when I contacted him in 1995, the late Conserva tive councillor Desmond Harney swooned with old-fashioned
gallantry at the mere mention of her name.
Nevertheless, her time had not yet come in 1992: the Kensingtor News' pre-election coverage was forced to conclude that Sir
Nicholas Scott remained the firm favourite in the opinion polls fo the General Election.
Ruby's show, Wax Acts, opened on April Fool's Day, 1992. The Election was held on 9 April, but Kensington and Chelsea, unlike
most other constituencies, didn't start counting until 9 a.m. on 10 April. It would be another 24 hours before the results of
Rima's bid to become an MP were known.
The public and most of the critics liked Ruby a lot. She had been directed by Alan only once before at the Edinburgh Festival
in 1986, but the formula clearly worked for the grander stage of the West End.
Since Rickman and Wax had worked together at Sheffield Crucible in Peter James' production of As You like It, they rehearsed
her one-woman show on the Lyric Hammersmith stage where Peter was by then the Artistic Director.
'Alan Rickman was the creator of Ruby Wax,' confirms Peter. 'He suggested a format for her on TV. There was always something
unlearned and spontaneous about her thing. Scripted stand-up was not as good for her as the spontaneous stuff.
'Even Ruby doesn't know what she will do when she steps on stage. She starts with a clip-board and nothing else. Her career
was greatly shaped by him. Yet there's nothing of the extrovert in Alan. In performance terms, she goes to get 'em while he waits
for them to come.'
Alan himself told Valerie Grove in the April 1995 issue of Harpers &> Queen: 'People assume she just stands at the mike and
delivers routines. But she is the most deeply serious person about her work, tussling with very personal material about herself and
her parents. It was achingly funny, but you can't be alone on stage for two hours without a sense of structure and lots of bloody
hard work.'
Perhaps he allowed her a little too much leeway, according to Anthony Thomeycroft in the Financial Times: 'Her show is
discreetly directed by Alan Rickman, who might try to sharpen up the first twenty minutes.'

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Charles Spencer of the Daily Telegraph, however, emerged as a convert: 'I'd only seen her fleetingly on television and
approached her one-woman show as an agnostic. After two hours in her company, however, I'm convinced that Ruby Wax is one of the
finest comic talents of her generation . . . Constructing wonderful crescendos of fury and indignation . . . She has a splendid way
with words, and her sheer vitality breaks down all resistance.'
Though a virtuous woman may be priced above rubies,' quipped Evening Standard reviewer Michael Arditti, 'an outrageous Ruby
produces a jewel of a show.'
She did have her detractors. 'I ended the evening pummelled rather than entertained,' moaned Tony Patrick of The Times. And
Jack Tinker of the Daily Mail was coolish, wondering if Ruby's well-developed self-esteem needed any support from him. Why do I not
fall down and adore her like the rest of her fans?' he asked rhetorically. They were very much in a minority.
Lucky Ruby, unlucky Rima. Nicholas Scott was returned with an overwhelming majority of more than 13,000.
The Kensington News reported that Labour candidate Rima Horton, accompanied by her actor friend Alan Rickman, was defiant. She
proclaimed that Labour would fight 'again and again' to change the future, echoing a famous speech by Hugh Gaitskell. Labour blamed
a hostile Press and 'lies' over its tax plans, and ten days later Rima was still fighting, urging a policy of non-cooperation with
the hated Red Routes parking restrictions on main roads.
Rima subsequently made it onto a women-only Labour shortlist for the new seat of Regent's Park and Kensington North, but she
lost out to Karen Buck, described rather graphically by the Kensington News' chief reporter Jonathan Donald as 'a mighty political
machine who fires off press releases'.
In early 1996, Robert Atkinson - Rima's fellow councillor from St Charles Ward - was selected as the Labour Party's
prospective parliamentary candidate for the newly named Kensington & Chelsea seat from a shortlist of men and women that did not
include Rima.
Rima simply didn't relish facing certain defeat for a second time in a General Election. Sir Nicholas Scott had been
reselected for the Tories, only to be followed by the equally controversial Alan Clark on January 25, 1997. Kensington & Chelsea
remains staunchly Tory, even after