The star’s thoughts reveal a man unwilling to suffer fools or mince his words most of the time.
Alan Rickman’s voice was a purr, but it masked sharp claws. This was evident in the memorable baddies he played and now you can hear it in the feline prose of these selected diaries. “John Major said, ‘You have given us so much enjoyment.’ ‘I wish I could say the same of you,’ was the unstoppable reply. He had the grace to laugh.” You suspect not everyone did. Rickman didn’t suffer fools and his intelligence keeps chafing against his fellow professionals – their self-absorption, their vanity, their unresponsiveness. He snipes and then regrets it. After a barney with his latest director he writes: “How can I curb this ability to distance and intimidate?”
It was an ability that casting directors noted and audiences loved. His smarmy cleric Obadiah Slope in the BBC Barchester Chronicles and his vulpine seducer Valmont in the RSC Les Liaisons Dangereuses were early delights, though he was already in his 30s, a late starter. He wrote to Rada when he was 26 after initially pursuing a career in design. He hit pay dirt in 1988 as Hans Gruber in the immortal Die Hard, holding a skyscraper to ransom while running a malevolent eye over his to-do list in a Filofax.
I had never seen a suaver, funnier screen villain and I still haven’t. (Orson Welles’s Harry Lime is the only one who comes near.) These diaries begin five years later when he’s famous and famously picky. He turns down another script with this: “Would not require acting – just getting on with it while the camera has a look.” If a script wasn’t up to snuff he would change it, as he admitted doing for his Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. It won him a Bafta.
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