When 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 diaries span 22 years, beginning in 1993 and ending in December 2015 (a few weeks after the final entry, Rickman died, aged 69, from pancreatic cancer), thereby capturing him at the height of his fame. From the outside, his life appears an exhausting whirl of rehearsals, film screenings, theatre visits, awards ceremonies, house purchases and mad dashes to catch planes (more than once, he boards a flight and realises he has left half his clothes hanging in the hotel wardrobe). He eats out several times a week, sometimes with colleagues but more often with friends and his partner, Rima Horton. For pushing two decades, he appears to have single-handedly kept the River Cafe and The Ivy afloat.
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.
Quite how gripped the reader will be with these diaries will depend on their tolerance for actors and their fascination with themselves and each other – I couldn’t help zoning out at the lists of famous types spotted or spoken to at assorted parties and awards ceremonies. But just when you think Rickman might be becoming insufferable, he has a knack of bursting the actorly bubble and saying something profound. “Fine acting,” he notes, “is a bloody miracle of chance, the most fragile blending of time, mood, talent and trust. Too often, all we present is an attempted repeat of a hazy memory of the once we thought we almost made it.”
• Madly, Deeply: The Alan Rickman Diaries is published by Canongate (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
