Madly, Deeply , livre ebook

First published in Great Britain in 2022
by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
canongate.co.uk
This digital edition first published in 2022 by Canongate Books
Copyright © The Estate of Alan Rickman, 2022
Introduction and selection copyright © Alan Taylor, 2022
Foreword copyright © Emma Thompson, 2022
The right of The Estate of Alan Rickman to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
The right of Alan Taylor to be identified as the editor of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 83885 479 9 eISBN: 978 1 83885 481 2
Contents
Foreword by Emma Thompson
Introduction
Diaries 1993–2015
1993
1994
1995
1996
1997
1998
1999
2000
2001
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
2015
Appendix: The Early Diaries
Index
Foreword
The most remarkable thing about the first days after Alan died was the number of actors, poets, musicians, playwrights and directors who wanted to express their gratitude for all the help he’d given them.
I don’t think I know anyone in this business who has championed more aspiring artists nor unerringly perceived so many great ones before they became great. Quite a number said that, latterly, they had been too shy to thank him personally. They had found it hard to approach him.
Of all the contradictions in my blissfully contradictory friend, this is perhaps the greatest – this combination of profoundly nurturing and imperturbably distant.
He was not, of course, distant. He was alarmingly present at all times. The inscrutability was partly a protective shield. If anyone did approach him with anything like gratitude or even just a question, they would be greeted with a depth of sweetness that no one who didn’t know him could even guess at. And he was not, of course, unflappable. I could flap him like nobody’s business and when I did he was fierce with me and it did me no end of good.
He was generous and challenging. Dangerous and comical. Sexy and androgynous. Virile and peculiar. Temperamental and languid. Fastidious and casual.
My list is endless. I am sure you can add to it.
There was something of the sage about him – and had he had more confidence and been at all corruptible, he could probably have started his own religion. His taste in all things from sausages to furnishings appeared to me to be impeccable.
His generosity of spirit was unsurpassed and he had so much time for people that I used to wonder if he ever slept or ever got time for himself.
A word not traditionally associated with Alan is gleeful. But when he was genuinely amused he was absolutely the essence of glee. There would be a holding back as the moment built and then a sudden leaning forward and swinging round of the torso as a vast, impish grin flowered, sometimes accompanied by an inarticulate shout of laughter. It was almost as if he was surprised by himself. It was my life’s mission to provoke those moments.
I remember Imelda Staunton nearly killing him by telling him a story about my mother and an unfortunate incident with some hashish. I’ve never seen him laugh more, before or since. It was a bit like watching someone tickling the Sphinx.
One Christmas Eve party I had a sprig of mistletoe hanging up at home. I was loitering under it and turned to find Alan bearing down on me. I lifted my chin up hopefully. He smiled and approached. I puckered. He leaned in under the mistletoe and a sudden change came over his face. His eyes started to glitter and his nostrils quiver. He lifted up a hand, reached in and pulled a longish hair out of my chin.
‘Ouch!’ I said.
‘That’s an incipient beard,’ he said, handing me the hair and walking off.
That was the thing about Alan. You never knew if you were going to be kissed or unsettled. But you couldn’t wait to see what would come next.
The trouble with death is that there is no next. There is only what was and for that I am profoundly and heartbrokenly grateful.
The last thing we did together was change a plug on a standard lamp in his hospital room. The task went the same way as everything we have ever done together. I had a go – he told me to try something else – I tried and it didn’t work so he had a go. I got impatient and took it from him and tried again and it still wasn’t right. We both got slightly irritable. Then he patiently took it all apart again and got the right lead into the right hole. I screwed it in. We complained about how fiddly it was. Then we had a cup of tea. It took us at least half an hour. He said afterwards: ‘Well, it’s a good thing I decided not to be an electrician.’
I am still heartbroken that Alan is gone, but these diaries bring back so much of what I remember of him – there is that sweetness I mentioned, his generosity, his championing of others, his fierce critical eye, his intelligence, his humour.
Alan was the ultimate ally. In life, art and politics. I trusted him absolutely.
He was, above all things, a rare and unique human being and we shall not see his like again.
Emma Thompson
Introduction
Movie-goers caught their first sight of Alan Rickman in 1988 in the action thriller Die Hard . At the age of 42, antediluvian by Hollywood standards, he was cast as Hans Gruber, a Teutonic terrorist who has seized control of a Los Angeles skyscraper and taken hostages. So far, so unremarkable; expectations for the film were modest and early reviews mixed. This, though, did nothing to dent its popularity at the box office, which grew by word of mouth. Starring Bruce Willis as an NYPD detective, Gruber’s nemesis, Die Hard alerted audiences around the globe to the talented Mr Rickman whose devil-may-care interpretation of a psychopath stole the show and received a deluge of plaudits. As a New Yorker critic later noted, Gruber ‘likes nice suits, reads magazines, misquotes Plutarch. No one ever looked so brilliantly uninterested while firing a machine gun or executing a civilian. As portrayed by Rickman, Gruber seems to possess a strange fatalism, as if he expects to lose, and to die, all along.’
Lord Byron quipped that after the publication of his poem Childe Harold he awoke one morning and found himself famous. The same might be said of Alan Rickman and Die Hard . Until then his career had largely been forged in Britain, most notably at the Royal Shakespeare Company, where, in 1985, he stood out in plays such as Les Liaisons Dangereuses . But before then, in 1982, he appeared on BBC television in a series adapted from Anthony Trollope’s Barchester novels. Perfectly cast as the Reverend Obadiah Slope, a slimy hypocrite with a toe-curling smile, Alan demonstrated that he was as at home on screen as he was on the stage. Global stardom may have taken its time to embrace him but there was surely never any doubt that it would eventually do so.
Blessed with a voice that could make fluctuations on the stock market sound seductive and a delivery that was hypnotically unhurried, it was obvious that Alan had a natural gift for acting. To him, it was more a vocation than a profession and he was irked by those who sought to disparage it and in awe of anyone who devoted their life to it. As his diaries demonstrate, acting is not merely a means of escape – in itself a wondrous thing – but a portal to a greater understanding of what it means to be human.
However, it was not how he originally sought to make a living. Born in 1946 in the London working-class suburb of Acton, Alan Sidney Patrick Rickman was the second of four children – three boys and one girl. His father, Bernard, was a factory worker who died when Alan was eight. It was thus left to his mother Margaret, who worked as a telephonist, to bring up the family. He was educated at a local primary school and Latymer Upper, which counts among its alumni the actors Hugh Grant and Mel Smith.
He met Rima Horton when she was fifteen and he was a year older; both were keen on amateur dramatics. Friends for several years, they became a couple around 1970 and remained together for the rest of Alan’s life, marrying in 2012.
On leaving school he attended Chelsea College of Art and Design, graduating in 1968. After a few years working as a graphic designer, he won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. It was at RADA, where he was recognised as one of the top students, that his future life was defined. As he wrote in 1974: ‘Fine acting always hits an audience with the force and oneness of the well-aimed bomb – one is only aware of the blast or series of blasts at the time – afterwards you can study the devastation or think about how a bomb is made.’
Alan’s apprenticeship was served in repertory theatre, in towns and cities like Sheffield, Birmingham, Nottingham and Glasgow, where he could hone his craft and gain experience. It was his equivalent of a Swiss finishing school and gave him a solid bedrock on which to build. It meant, too, that when he made the breakthrough as a star he never lost touch with his roots or his sense of perspective. Following Die Hard , he was in constant demand. First came Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves , in which he was unforgettable as the Sheriff of Nottingham: ‘That’s it then. Cancel the kitchen scraps for lepers and orphans, no more merciful beheadings, and call off Christmas.’
Always wary of being typecast, especially as a villain, his next role was in the romantic comedy Truly, Madly, Deeply , opposite Juliet Stevenson. She was one of a number of female actors whom he counted as close friends. In 1995, he appeared in An Awfully Big Adventure , an adaptation of Beryl Bainbridge’s novel of the same title, and Sense and Sensibility , which Emma Thompson adapted from Jan