Dalia Ibelhauptaitė also felt Alan Rickman’s warmth and generosity
January 2016
“If it weren’t for him, I would be broken forever,” sighed British actor and director Dexter Fletcher (49), mourning the death of his good friend, actor Alan Rickman, who died a couple of weeks ago.
This weekend, D. Fletcher will celebrate his 50th birthday with his wife Dalia Ibelhauptaite and his closest friends, but the joy will be mixed with sadness. One person who was supposed to attend the anniversary will not be there.
Next week, Dexter and Dalia will be among ten people invited to a pre-funeral farewell to Rickman, the actor known for his numerous films and plays, who died of pancreatic cancer on January 14 at the age of 69.
Millions knew him as the wizard Severus Snape from the Harry Potter films. Others remembered him as Grigori Rasputin, the angel Metatron (from the film “Dogma”), the director of the design agency Harry (from the film “Long Live Love”) and many other bright roles – it’s impossible to list them all. Sharing their memories with “TV Antena”, Dexter and Dalia revealed an unseen side of A. Rickman – the artist who became their couple’s matchmaker was a very attentive, warm, generous, eager to help and loyal friend, who left a bright mark on both of their lives. “He has helped hundreds of people without expecting anything in return,” Dalia said.
A quarter of a century ago, a young Lithuanian director was invited to work in London when she was spotted in Moscow by a British theatre producer. Dalia chose actor Nick Woodeson for one of her plays, and he invited her to visit another play in the West End. While having dinner with his actors, Dalia met the play’s star, A. Rickman.
“At that time, my English was still poor, but Alan talked to me all evening, patiently explaining everything.”
He wrote his phone number on a piece of paper and said he could take me around London between performances. And so we walked around every week: he would show me a different block, and then invite me to lunch, which I now understand – fully understanding that going to a cafe in London was an unaffordable luxury for me at the time.
“Don’t think anything of it – it was just friendship, he took care of me like a guardian. The funny thing is that only a month later, when I told one of my friends, he was amazed that I was communicating with a star. I had no idea that Alan was a real celebrity,” D.Ibelhauptaitė recalled. She can tell dozens of stories that testify to the actor’s selflessness.
When Dalia rented a shabby apartment in Notting Hill, Rickman didn’t say a single bad word when he arrived, only praising the choice. A couple of days later, the craftsmen knocked on the door – it turns out that Alan had selected, bought and ordered new carpeting to be brought to the director’s house.
It was to A. Rickman that Dalia is also grateful for her acquaintance with D. Fletcher. When Dexter was fourteen, he acted with Alan in a play in Sheffield. The older actor became a kind of guardian of D. Fletcher and tried to help him throughout his life. “Because I had been working as an actor since I was 11, I had to study on my own. Alan helped me a lot. He was like a father to me,” said D. Fletcher.
“I always knew you’d be great. It was just a question of when,” Rickman’s compliment, given after the premiere of Fletcher’s first film, Wild Bill, still rings in his ears. When Rickman introduced Dexter to Dalia, his career and life had sunk to the bottom. Fletcher was addicted to drugs and had a lot of financial problems.
It was Alan who recommended Dexter to D.Ibelhauptaite for one of her plays. “Alan always suggested actors to me. One of them was Jude Law. And I didn’t accept him after three screenings! When I meet him now, Jude always says first: you didn’t give me work, I even bought a costume for that screening.
And Dexter didn’t even show up at the screening, but he did the next time. He was perfect for the role, but he was like out of place,” Dalia said. Once they had a fight. D. Fletcher told me that the bank would take away his four-story house in London for debts, and he would have to live on the street. “I couldn’t understand how this could happen to a talented, famous actor who supports his relatives and friends, and 200 people wait in his bar after the performance. And here’s the problem, there’s no one to help.
“I told Alan. He immediately called Dexter and told him to come. In front of him, he transferred all the money to save Dexter’s house,” D. Ibelhauptaitė said, grieving. Dexter promised to sell the house and repay this debt. He later did so. Alan did not ask for any promissory note, he began to worry about how to get Dexter out of England so that he would break away from his friends who had fallen into harmful temptations.
He came up with the scheme – D.Ibelhauptaitė went to Italy to stage an opera. The true story resembles an anecdote – A.Rickman came up with the idea that Dexter would be the choreographer of this performance.
“He convinced me that Dexter would learn from Carolyn Choa, the famous choreographer and wife of director Anthony Minghella, and come to Italy and convey her choreographic ideas to the actors. It seemed crazy, but for some reason I agreed. Only during rehearsals, Dexter never showed up. I called Alan and screamed that his idea had ruined my performance, that he had put some kind of fool in my head.
Three days later, Alan and his wife arrived in Italy to support me morally. They tried to distract me, we went to visit the famous producer Saul Zaentz, who lives nearby, 50 kilometers away, who was preparing to make the film “The English Patient” there with A. Minghella and writer Michael Ondaatje. Do you know how it all ended? On the day of the last performance, on the way to the opera, I heard a car beep. I turn around – a white vintage Mercedes, Dexter is sitting on the roof, waving and shouting: “I’m here.”
“I was furious, but Alan asked me not to make a scene in front of people,” laughed D.Ibelhauptaitė. It turns out that D.Fletcher sold his house in London, prepared to return the money to Alan, bought a broken-down Mercedes for one and a half thousand pounds – Dalia had said she liked those – and came to Italy with his brother from London.
“He offered to drive across the country with me, but I was so furious that I didn’t even talk to him,” Dalia admitted. On the flight back to London, Rickman uttered the fateful phrase: “I think you two should be friends.” After the Italian affair, Dexter never returned to drugs. A couple of years later, he and Dalia got married.
Rickman was the best man at the wedding. Six weeks before the wedding, Dalia and Dexter went bankrupt, burdened with huge debts. Rickman paid for Dexter’s bachelor party in Ireland with his own money. “I’ll tell you frankly: if it weren’t for Alan, I would either be dead or homeless, living under a bridge. For everything I have now, I have to be grateful to him, because he pulled me out of the pit more than once and introduced me to Dalia,” Fletcher admitted.
The close friendship between Dalia, Dexter, Rickman, and his wife Rima (the couple secretly married in New York only in 2012, although they had lived together since 1965) lasted a quarter of a century – they often visited each other’s homes, because Rickman hated emails, didn’t like talking on the phone, and valued face-to-face communication the most.
It was A. Rickman who inspired Dalia to stage the musical “Pony Todd: The Demon Barber”, which, by the way, will be shown again in Vilnius in February. After all, A. Rickman played an important role in the 2007 film based on this work, and gave D. Ibelhauptaite a lot of advice.
When Rickman was preparing for the main role in the film about the mysterious doctor of the Russian Tsar, Grigori Rasputin, Ibelhauptaitė translated books from Russian for him, because the actor wanted to know as much as possible about this character. “We lived with Alan in America, he would invite us to watch him filming. He would come to visit us and every time he would suffer my chicken with lemons, because that’s the only way I know how to cook it.
“There are many memories – some of them very sensitive. Dexter once said that Alan trusts me the most. It was after the story when Alan asked me to visit his seriously ill mother, listen to her life stories and record them. I recorded them and gave him 15 cassettes,” Dalia said. Last spring, a fun company gathered in her and D. Fletcher’s apartment. Dexter’s latest film “Eddie the Eagle”, which was presented this week and received wonderful reviews at the Sundance Festival in the USA, stars the famous American actor Christopher Walken.
“I knew that he and A. Rickman really respected each other’s work. That’s why I decided to bring them together. Hugh Jackman was there, our friend chef Jamie Oliver, and the chef Deivydas Praspaliauskas from Lithuania. It was a wonderful evening,” recalled D. Fletcher.
When A. Rickman and his wife came to visit in May, Dalia thought the actor was very tired, but it didn’t occur to her that he might have serious health problems. “As far as I remember, he never even complained. A man who was never sick. And one time in the fall we couldn’t get through to him. That’s how we soon found out that Alan had suffered a stroke,” Dalia said.
When she and Dexter visited Rickman some time later, he seemed slower but insisted that everything was fine. Alan had known he had pancreatic cancer since the summer of last year, but had not told his friends.
When Dalia briefly returned to London in December after the premiere of the play, she spent only a day in this city with her husband – she soon flew to Argentina on vacation. “For some reason, the idea struck me that we must definitely visit Alan. We went, we stayed, we had no idea that this would be our last meeting. We discussed how we would celebrate Dexter and Alan’s wife Rima’s birthday together – it was the same day.
“It’s true that I had health problems, I was treated in Austria. Alan, I didn’t understand why then, this time they asked me a lot about it,” Dalia recalled. When A. Rickman died, Dalia and Dexter were in an area of Argentina for several days, where even mobile communication didn’t work. “We drove to the airport, Dexter turned on his phone and suddenly turned pale. Letters and messages poured in.
It turns out that by the beginning of January, A. Rickman’s condition was already such that friends were told that it was time to say goodbye. However, on his own instructions, his wife did not inform us. He knew that we had been dreaming of this trip for two years, and he did not want to disturb it,” – D. Ibelhauptaitė’s eyes filled with tears. The day she learned about the death of her close friend, Dexter and Dalia attended a pre-booked tango lesson.
“Alan had a lot of irony and a great sense of humor. He would have been really angry if we had canceled that lesson,” said D. Fletcher. D. Ibelhauptaitė recalled one detail of the last conversation with A. Rickman. “He knew about my performances in Lithuania, he was interested, he kept promising to come to Vilnius to see it. In December he told me: I still owe you a trip to Lithuania, we should do it,” D. Ibelhauptaitė said sadly.
“I don’t want people to remember him just as Snape or another popular character. He was a great person, an erudite, a wonderful artist. To me, he was first and foremost a friend – tough and honest. He didn’t expect or ask for anything from the people he interacted with. You rarely meet people like that,” said D. Fletcher.
