Spanning the last two decades of his life, Rickman’s diaries reveal the frenetic lifestyle and frequent fretting of an actor at the height of his fame.
hen Alan Rickman was in his 40s, he took on two roles that proved life-changing. One was the criminal mastermind Hans Gruber in the 1988 thriller Die Hard, and the other was the similarly devilish Sheriff of Nottingham in 1991’s Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. Rickman, who went on to play Professor Snape in the Harry Potter films, became known as one of the great movie villains, an actor who was magnetic in his menace and fury.
But if there’s one thing to be gleaned from Rickman’s diaries, it’s that he was not one to bask in his successes. Despite the many doors that Die Hard and Robin Hood opened for him, the films are tetchily referenced. This is partly because Rickman didn’t regard them as his finest work – on collecting a Bafta for Robin Hood, he said: “This will be a healthy reminder to me that subtlety isn’t everything” – but also because of the interviewers who insisted on quizzing him about them, years later. “They are like tired dogs with a very old slipper,” he carps.
The tone is sometimes gossipy and amusing but at other times anxious and irritable. He second-guesses everything, fretting over the roles he has turned down and the ones he has accepted, and quietly seethes at the perceived failures of script writers, costume designers, directors and fellow actors. After a screening of Galaxy Quest, the 1999 sci-fi spoof which was an unexpected smash, all he can think about are the scenes he was in that have been cut. “Stories of great notices are not helping lift my leaden heart,” he writes. “Here we go AGAIN. This is so boring. Let it go. Move on. Don’t angst over what you can’t change.”
There are, naturally, crisp descriptions of colleagues. Sean Mathias, who directed him and Helen Mirren in Anthony and Cleopatra, is “a big pile of Kleenex”; the playwright David Hare is “more self-involved than any actor I have ever met”. It is particularly amusing to read him railing against critics, while himself displaying all the skills required for the job. About a Boy is, he observes, “the kind of depressing English film where single mothers and Amnesty workers are ugly people in oversized sweaters”.
But we also get a sense of a man who was loyal and generous. He is a devoted sounding board for his friend Ruby Wax, and is blown away by the talents of Emma Thompson, with whom he appeared in Sense and Sensibility and Love Actually. External events are thoughtfully contemplated, among them Labour’s election landslide of 1997, the death of Diana, Princess of Wales and the World Trade Center attacks. He is especially poleaxed by the massacre at Dunblane, which he hears about while improbably holed up at a health spa.
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