Rickman and the female orgasm
Alan Rickman missed out on the film version of the role which established his name, but has found a sexier hero with even more dangerous liaisons.
By Michael Owen
(Evening Standard, October 22, 1993 )
In his flared frock coat, 18th century cravat and long leather boots, the tall figure of Alan Rickman gazed with impassive disdain at the scene around him. The look seemed familiar and redolent of that indelible image he created in Les Liaisons Dangereuses.
But that was the stage play which triggered his rise to international recognition, and the arena for his autocratic display of immaculate hauteur this week was a field somewhere near the Austrian border in Hungary – a film set.
Rickman never did get to repeat his Liaisons performance as the insidious seducer Valmont for the cameras (John Malkovich was Hollywood’s choice for the version) but now, at last, he has found he film role in which he can unleash all the charismatic power this fine actor possesses.
He is playing Franz Mesmer, the Austrian “alternative” healer who was regarded variously as a miracle man, charlatan, visionary or Svengali, in the film Mesmer. He was expelled from his native Vienna for his unorthodoxy but became a darling of the aristocracy in pre-revolutionary Paris.
His patients were mostly female, his methods were hands-on and tactile and his treatment involved bring the women to a trance-induced delirium similar to orgasm. Rickman, with a vast female following of his own and whose performances regularly generate the epithet “mesmerizing”, is certainly the man for the job. Added to this, the screenplay is by Dennis Potter, and I can say at this early stage that, with a minimum of their flesh on display, this film is going to be seriously sexy.
“The first thing that hit me when I read the script was the erotic charge of it. It’s on every page. He has a relationship with a blind girl which certainly goes beyond the usual doctor-patient relationship.
“He touched his patients intimately, we see treatment which borders on love-making, but anyone expecting any romping around on a bed will be disappointed. Not my style, I’m afraid.”
The film has brought Rickman back to acting after his brave but ultimately foiled campaign to be Riverside Studios to a new future with a group of high-profile actors and directors. He united all the London theatre movement behind him but his bold vision was scuppered by the Studios’ board.
“There’s no point conducting an inquest now, it’s so depressing. There was a positive result in the amount of discussion it opened up. I felt we’d started a new wind blowing through the London arts scene.
“But at the end of the day I do believe a great opportunity has been lost. It comes down to be stifling, grinding mediocrity we have so much of at home. No one is prepared to accept the challenge of making a brave decision, to take a risk on something that might come crashing down or really break through to something new.”
Rickman concedes defeat on the Riverside front but sees no reason why is impressive gathering of talents should not set up shop elsewhere, should another opportunity present itself.
Neither does he old any grudge or the man who got the job, William Burdett-Coutts, director of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. I wish him well. We have talked both individually and within the group.”
Many were surprised to find Rickman, he of the lethal languor, taking such a pro-active role. He bridled at the suggestion. “I’ve always got stuck in. It begins the first time you set foot on a stage and have to start making choices. A lot of other actors are out there doing the same.
“I never saw myself running the place, spending 52 weeks a year there. I thought of it more like a Steppenwolf operation, like the theatre in Chicago, where people come and go.”
Apart from a film noir short with Laura Dern, Rickman has not been in front of the cameras since he played the campaign manager in Tim Robbin’s Bob Roberts, following on from the success of Truly, Madly, Deeply, Close My Eyes and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, and it is a year since he embarked on his last theatre run as Hamlet, staged by the Georgian director Robert Sturua.
“By the time we finished, the show had grown into a very different animal and we became an immensely close company. There were problems. We were working with a director who was used to four or five months of rehearsals and we had five weeks. At he end of the first week we were still on Act I Scene I. That’s when I had to say we have to go a it faster or we’ll never finish.”
He was to have played Peer Gynt with the Japanese director Yukio Ninagawa this winter but has just withdrawn. “It’s been a tough year. I didn’t feel I could find the energy and commitment the Ninagawa project would need.”
There is a new Sharman Macdonald play he may direct and Isabelle Huppert wants him to do Strindberg’s Miss Julie with him, but he is uncertain about his theatrical future.
He is a confirmed internationalist as far as the theatre is concerned, ever since he went to the Daubeny World Theatre seasons of old at the Aldwych as a schoolboy, and had recently been immersing himself in Berlin theatre when the Mesmer film was shooting there.
He said: “I don’t know what I think about theater a more. I know it’s good when there is a high risk factor, when you feel the modern theater is being refined, but I’m not sure where you find that. Of people like Pina Bausch interesting and the more experimental stuff. Having seen some of the work around in Europe I recognize the levels of commitment involved which you don’t often find at home.”
But in a Hungarian field, where British-born but Los Angeles-based director Roger Spottiswoode was waiting to re-start the cameras, Rickman’s immediate problem was to capture the allure that made Mesmer so, well mesmerizing.
“It’s not so hard. He was a man of moral courage, which always creates a certain aura. He could be selfish and egotistical but also had great innocence and didn’t mind making a fool of himself. I find that quite attractive. He was also close to being an actor. He was very theatrical in his work, used lot’s of music.”
And was Mesmer the screen role he missed with Valmont? “No. It’s the same period but they are quite different men. I sometimes feel a twinge when I pull on the costume but then I look at myself. Mesmer didn’t care what he wore and the other one certainly did.”
