Master of the dark arts
Alan Rickman is back on screen as the sinister Severus Snape in the latest Harry Potter film. Gabrielle Donnelly is truly, madly, deeply entranced
There is, says Alan Rickman when we meet in Beverly Hills, a certain sort of Englishman you can recognise all over the world.
“He’s usually from an upper-class background, and he’s the sort of person who will make no concessions whatsoever to the country he happens to be in,” he muses, his famously expressive voice neutral, so that, unless you listen carefully, you are unsure whether he regards the person he is describing as being on the whole a good or a bad thing.
“He is an alien abroad. He wears a suit and tie and socks even in 100 degrees of heat. His attitude is, ‘I created an Empire. I go where nobody has trodden before, and I say, Now you are mine.’” He stops, and for the first time, allows a glimmer of humour to appear. “Of course, he’s going to lose it all later… but for the time being, the land is his.”
It is tempting to suppose that he speaks so knowledgeably of the breed because this is the sort of Englishman he is himself. At 63, he certainly looks the part today, sitting languidly in this celebrity-ridden hotel, with agents and producers patrolling the courtyard and the sun beating down overhead.
He has the patrician vowels down flat, the world-weary stare, the off-beat, is-he-kidding-or-isn’t-he delivery of jokes so dry you could stick an olive in them and serve them shaken-not-stirred. But appearances can be deceptive, and if you did suppose that he was describing himself, you’d be wrong. Alan Rickman is not upper-class, and does not pretend to be. He’s not even English but half-Irish, half-Welsh; and although his naturally mournful countenance – combined, I suspect, with a touch of honest shyness – can make him seem initially aloof, once you get him talking, you find he is anything but.
“I’ve been excited by America ever since I first came here,” he remarks mildly, sipping at the regulation Californian glass of designer water. “That was, oh, years ago. I’d just finished a season at the Royal Shakespeare Company, it was holiday time, and a friend at the company had a family who had a house in Florida. She said, ‘Come to Miami, I’ll take you to the Fontainebleau Hotel.’” He raises an eyebrow just the merest jot, immediately conjuring youthful high jinks.
He does not say if the friend was fellow RSC graduate Ruby Wax, but he and the effervescent comedienne have been fast friends for nearly 30 years. “So I went. It was all incredibly exciting, especially the food, which was very interesting when you were as young as I was then, and the part I remember being most excited about was the weird discovery of a thing in a restaurant called a … doggy bag.” Ever the actor, he furrows his brow in remembered bemusement. “We don’t have those in England, do we? We eat everything on our plate.” He raps sharply on the table – now he is being a stern schoolmaster. “Or we’re told to. Anyway, we went to this restaurant and somebody asked for a doggy bag, and the food came back all wrapped in aluminium foil and shaped like a swan…” Large, elegant hands swoop gracefully into the foil swan shape beloved of a certain type of American restaurant in the excessive Eighties. “So that was when I knew I’d come somewhere else than England.” His voice changes again, becoming wistfully affectionate. “We’re still close, my American friend and I. Her son is my godson, in fact.”
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