Premier Vintage
By James Mottram – The Herald Magazine
His tutors called it hopeless, but Alan Rickman’s syrupy drawl is one of the most potent voices in cinema. And like a fine wine, he’s improving with age
When it’s said Alan Rickman’s trademark is his “silky voice”, it’s like claiming Barack Obama is the most stylish US president since Kennedy. Only with Rickman, it’s a scientifically proven fact. Sort of. A recent study conducted by Andrew Linn, a professor in linguistics at the University of Sheffield, suggested as much. A mathematical formula was devised, taking into account tone, speed, frequency and intonation, to find the ideal voice. With those chocolate-rich chords ensuring every word is delivered with the warmth of a lover’s kiss, Rickman’s voice – alongside that of Jeremy Irons – won out.
From playing Master of Ceremonies on Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells II to hissing at Harry Potter as the boy wizard’s tutor Severus Snape, Rickman has capitalised on his vocal prowess. Even at 63 years old, he has the capacity to woo audiences with the smoothest of utterances.
It’s been this way since the opening night of his breakthrough stage role in Les Liaisons Dangereuses in 1985. As his co-star Lindsay Duncan said then, “A lot of people left the theatre wanting to have sex, and most of them wanted to have it with Alan Rickman.”
With his narrow hazel eyes, flowing silver mane and hulking 6ft 1in frame, Rickman exudes sensuality – a “jaded, exotic quality that suggests he was destined for a world of opiates and seed-pearl dressing-gowns”, as one critic enthused. Rickman, though, regards his voice as just another tool of the trade. “As an actor, you’re a piece of equipment,” he says. “I know enough from training that the equipment should be available for the director from head to foot. Young actors now…it’s a look, a cheekbone, a sexiness, a marketability. It’s not necessarily an instrument. Like a bicycle, you’ve got to oil it, screw it up, loosen it and make it flexible.”
Rickman is unimpressed by all the fuss about his voice, writing it off as a matter of physiology. “It’s nothing to do with me,” he says with a shrug. “It’s a complete freak of nature. Sound is to do with, apparently, the height of the roof of your mouth. It’s all physiological. It’s not anything I take credit for. I’m stuck with it, whatever it is. It comes out of my mouth. I don’t hear what you hear. Whenever I do any kind of recording, I always have to do it three times because I notice people looking a little depressed. I say, ‘Did that sound tired?’ And they say, ‘Yeah.’ Always happens. Whenever I answer the phone, people always say, ‘Sorry, did I wake you up?’ So that is what I live with.
“If you knew what the voice teachers at Rada said about me – hopeless,” he adds wearily. Rickman balks when I mention the rumour that his soporific tones were the result of a speech impediment he suffered when he was younger, making him unable to move his jaw. “That came from a book about me that I’ve never read, and it’s news to me,” he snaps, and the subject is closed. It might be safe to assume a privileged background lies behind his languid, droll and deliberate voice. Not so – Rickman was brought up on a council estate in Acton, London. When we meet, he’s dressed all in funereal black – trousers, shoes and jacket, with less-than-fetching leather patches on the elbows. It’s difficult to reconcile the actor whose manner has what he calls “the airiness of the truly English” with his working-class roots. Is the accent an affectation? Apparently not. “You find yourself becoming middle class, and you have to deal with that,” says Rickman. “You feel guilty and you have to come out of the other side of that.”
He was the second of four children from a poor family. His father, who died of lung cancer when he was eight, was an Irish Catholic factory worker, his mother a Welsh-born Methodist who, according to Rickman, never got over her husband’s death. She remarried, briefly, for three years, but the relationship failed. “There was one love in her life,” he says. He adored his mother, who died when he was in the middle of editing The Winter Guest (1997), his one and only film as director. “She was incredibly talented,” he recalls. “She would have had a career as a singer herself – in another world and given a different mother.”
Although his parents’ marriage straddled differences in faith, Rickman views religion with suspicion. He was brought up a Methodist. “My grandmother ran the Sunday school, so it was like a three-line whip every Sunday – I mean that in political terms. You resent it because it’s about duty and you don’t have any choice in the matter. As an English person, you go to school and it means assembly every morning. Half an hour singing boring hymns, listening to the sports results. Somehow the two things get connected. It sits there for a long time. It’s not used creatively, the experience. There’s not much sense of debate. A few facts are thrown at you, a bit of a reading from the Bible.”
Religion gave him his start in acting – his first stage appearance was in a school nativity play – but art was his first love. He went on to Chelsea College of Art and Design hoping to become a graphic designer. He and some friends set up a studio in Soho and had a lot of fun, even if they didn’t earn much, but it wasn’t enough for Rickman. At 24 he gave up the day job and applied to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. Winning a scholarship to the prestigious acting school, he also supported himself working as a dresser for such venerable thespians as Sir Nigel Hawthorne and Sir Ralph Richardson.
He graduated in 1974, but it would be another decade before his famed performance as the manipulative Vicomte de Valmont in the RSC production of Christopher Hampton’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses. In the interim he impressed television audiences as the odious chaplain Obadiah Slope in the 1982 BBC production of The Barchester Chronicles, but most of his work was in experimental and repertory theatre. Unemployment was always hard to take, he says, particularly when his peers were doing well. “It’s hard when you’re out of work and people you’ve just trained with are on the front of a magazine that you’ve just seen in a shop, and this is somebody you knew last week.”
Although Les Liaisons Dangereuses transferred to Broadway, gaining Rickman a Tony nomination, his career hit a snag. When Stephen Frears began putting together the 1988 film version of Hampton’s play, Rickman’s role went to John Malkovich. As galling as this was, Hollywood producer Joel Silver saw Rickman perform the role on stage and, looking for a charismatic actor to play opposite Bruce Willis in Die Hard, gave him the role of German terrorist Hans Gruber. “It was the first film I ever made,” says Rickman. “I’m proud of it. It was a great script. They remembered to do that.”
For a time he was cast as the villain and gloriously stole the show in 1991 as the Sheriff of Nottingham from Kevin Costner’s anaemic hero in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. Although the role won him a Bafta, Rickman steered clear of further skulduggery until the Harry Potter franchise came along. Instead he played the lover lingering beyond the grave in Truly Madly Deeply; the husband of a woman involved in an incestuous affair in Stephen Poliakoff’s Close My Eyes; and the wealthy suitor in Ang Lee’s adaptation of Sense and Sensibility. And even if he can appear humourless, he has a penchant for comedy, from the gentle humour of Galaxy Quest to the religious satire Dogma.
“I’m not beyond just having a good time,” he protests. “I’m a normal human being. But that’s what you want as time goes on. You want work that’s going to involve you as completely as possible, and also push you a bit and take you into areas you haven’t been in before and test yourself. There’s precious little of it around, so it’s like an oasis when you find a good script.” He pauses for a second. “I think I look for the scary things more directly,” he concludes, pointing to his role as Judge Turpin in Tim Burton’s recent Sweeney Todd film. “I’m asked to do a Stephen Sondheim musical on film – so what’s the worst that could happen? Nobody will employ me any more.”
There doesn’t seem much chance of that. His latest role, in Bottle Shock, is yet another upper-crust gentleman, this time the real-life wine expert Steven Spurrier. The film is set in 1976, the year of the United States Bicentennial. Spurrier was an Englishman living in Paris who ran a small, not particularly successful wine shop and tasting centre, L’Academie du Vin. To publicise his business Spurrier hit upon the idea of organising a blind tasting: the established French wines he so loved versus the little-known wines from California’s Napa Valley. The outcome, which became known as the Judgment of Paris, changed the wine world for ever.
Rickman’s second film with director Randall Miller, following 2007 comedy-thriller Nobel Son, Bottle Shock co-stars Bill Pullman and Chris Pine (who plays the young Captain Kirk in the new Star Trek film). They portray the hick father-and-son team behind Chateau Montelena, the Californian vineyard that enters a chardonnay into the competition. As is so often the case, Rickman walks away with the film. Trotting through the 100-degree Californian heat, he bears little physical resemblance to Spurrier – but he doesn’t need to. He plays the quintessential Brit abroad to perfection. “You think I’m an asshole,” he says at one point to a disbelieving American. “And I’m not really. I’m just British – and you’re not.”
Rickman met Spurrier by chance a few years ago, while they were both staying in Tuscany. “Of course, neither of us at the time knew what any future agenda was going to be,” says Rickman. In the end, he called Spurrier to say he’d be playing him. “I’m so million miles away from being the right casting to play him that in a sense you’ve just got to go, well, it’s okay. He’s called Steven Spurrier and there are facts circulating around this story, and we honour those. But it is based on him, so in a sense it isn’t an impersonation of him apart from being English, and a man in a suit and a tie.”
With that aquiline nose so perfectly engineered for sniffing wine, Rickman must surely appreciate a decent vintage. Is he a connoisseur? “Connoisseur?” he muses. “No. I’m just about able to look to down a wine list and vaguely find something. I vaguely now know what’s going to be a heavy red as against a light red. That’s about as far as it goes.” He’s not quite as Francocentric as Spurrier when it comes to choosing his plonk. “It just depends a lot on which country I’m in and what food I’m eating. I tend to be loyal to the country I’m in. I spend quite a lot of time in Italy so I would never drink anything other than Italian wine and similarly in South Africa.”
Following Bottle Shock, Rickman returns for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, the sixth installment of the franchise. At the mention of this Rickman demonstrates his more awkward side, openly reluctant to discuss his recurring role as Professor Snape. Did he buy the final book immediately when it was published? “Of course I read it,” he says, arching an eyebrow in surprise. How does he find working with so many special effects? “I don’t spend much time in the CGI [computer generated imagery] world of those films – I’m always in a corridor or a small room or something.” When I ask whether playing the same role again and again frustrates him, his patience withers. “As I keep saying, when we’re doing the publicity for Harry Potter, I’ll talk about Harry Potter. This is about this film.”
His response is understandable. Movies like Harry Potter need no extra help from him; films like Bottle Shock do. A supporter of the underdog, Rickman admits to increasing disappointment about the direction British film is taking. “I just get sad when we cartoon our own culture,” he says, “so if there is such a thing as a British film, it’s now becoming so Americanised to get sold and distributed. I look back fondly on the days of The Pumpkin Eater and Sunday Bloody Sunday and movies like that. Ones that are British but have a sense of itself. Now it’s like, we’re English so therefore we’ve got our thumbs in our braces, saying ‘Gor blimey!’ or ‘Fack you!’ Some cartoon English.”
One suspects Rickman’s feelings towards the British film industry might be rooted in his failure to follow up The Winter Guest, his adaptation of Sharman Macdonald’s play. He has been trying to launch two scripts – a take on Elizabeth Bowen’s novel The House in Paris and a script about a female landscape gardener in the court of Louis XIV – but with no success yet. “It’s like the No 3 bus,” he says, shrugging. “You wait for ever.” Besides, he says, there has been little time for him to push his projects, not least because in 2005 he developed and directed My Name Is Rachel Corrie, a one-woman stage show about the 23-year-old member of the International Solidarity Movement crushed to death by an Israeli army bulldozer in Gaza in 2003.
The production went from London to New York, with Rickman shepherding it all the way. “Some people would say it was one-sided,” he says. “It was a perfectly objective view of the situation, but there was a great deal of fuss. One theatre in America pulled out of putting it on, and that was seen as censorship. In London and New York there were demonstrations, but we let it happen. That’s free speech. What we did was to have talkbacks. Every Tuesday we had people like [the playwrights] David Hare and Tony Kushner, as well as Jewish leaders and Islamic leaders, on stage talking. Stir up some debate rather than have people hand out leaflets about a show they hadn’t either read or seen, in most cases.”
Rickman has been something of a political animal himself. A staunch Labour supporter, there was talk of him standing against Michael Portillo in the 1999 Kensington and Chelsea by-election. His long-term partner Rima Horton, a former economics lecturer whom he met in 1965 while both were art students, is a Labour member of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea Council, and once stood as a parliamentary candidate in the area. In recent years, though, Rickman has found himself less and less enamoured of public statement. “I’d rather see it in action,” he says. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine his natural reserve ever giving way to allow him to stand on his soap box. Still, Rickman has often demonstrated his socialist qualities. On the set of Mesmer, in 1994, when he discovered the extras were being fed bread rolls while the main cast and crew were eating properly, he demanded they be treated equally.
He has closely guarded his private life with Horton, who was his first serious girlfriend. She has evidently had much to put up with, including the deluge of mail Rickman receives from admiring female fans. He once said of his partner, “She’s incredibly, unbelievably tolerant, possibly a candidate for sainthood.” She might be relieved to know he describes bedroom scenes as “always a pain, especially with a very beautiful, much younger woman. They’re difficult. They are.”
Next up for Rickman is a reunion with Tim Burton, on the director’s reworking of Alice in Wonderland (in another wonderful piece of casting, he will play the Caterpillar), followed by the final two-part installment of Harry Potter, the Deathly Hallows, which he is currently shooting. He is as busy as ever, and knows how fortunate he is. “I don’t have much time for actors who talk about how difficult it is,” he says. “Compared to what? Shut up. I get to travel the world. I have a pretty interesting life. Some of it’s difficult. You get told you’re talentless, or useless or ugly or fat or too old…so you have to take that stuff.” He pauses again, for dramatic effect. “But it’s still a privileged life.”
Bottle Shock (12A) is in cinemas now. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (cert tbc) will be released on July 17.
