What do we want from a published journal? In the course of this engaging, salty, sometimes repetitive volume, Alan Rickman writes approvingly of Simon Gray’s diaries. The late playwright (inevitably a friend of Rickman) balanced weary regret with an impressive, smoggy lyricism. You get a lot of the former in Madly, Deeply. You get Rickman’s variation on the latter. In one particular respect, the actor — or perhaps his editor — sticks closely to the Gray model.
“The pages suffused with his love for his wife, largely because he mentions her only glancingly,” Rickman notes of Gray’s The Smoking Diaries. Rima Horton, now his widow, crops up frequently, but he rarely writes of her at any length. The effect is, indeed, touching.
Alan Taylor, editor of the volume, admits that “why he kept a diary is unclear”. Taylor cannot say for certain that Rickman would have liked his words to end up in print. This book draws from entries written — sometimes accompanied by lovely drawings, represented here in plates — between 1992 and the actor’s death in 2015. More than a million words have been whittled down to a still-hefty wad of star spotting, professional insight and quotidian mundanity.
That may well be what many desire from such a book, but, if advance coverage is any guide, the potential mass audience is, alas, largely after skinny on the Harry Potter series. The headlines have promised the “bombshell diaries” will reveal why “the actor decided to continue playing Snape”. And so on.
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Rickman chewed through the role of sarcastic wizard Severus Snape from Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone in 2001 up to the final film in 2011. The diaries do indeed confirm he wavered in his commitment. “Talking to [agent] Paul Lyon-Maris about HP exit which he thinks will happen,” he writes as early as 2002. “But here we are in the project-collision area again. Reiterating no more HP. They really don’t want to hear it.”
Following health concerns, he eventually came round to full compliance. “Finally, yes to HP 5. The sensation is neither up nor down,” he notes in 2006. “The argument that wins is the one that says ‘See it through. It’s your story.’”
White-water rafting and totem rituals follow. ‘Robin Williams arrives – his usual, disarming, shy, unpushy self’
Rickman’s enthusiasm for the Potter circus was, however, often accompanied by a characteristic raised eyebrow. “The film should only be seen on a big screen,” he says of the first Potter. “It acquires a scale and depth that matches the hideous score by John Williams. Party afterwards at the Savoy is much more fun,” Williams, the most Oscar-nominated professional still living, will surely shrug off the criticism.
What has traditionally sold theatrical diaries to the wider public is just such outbreaks of sniping from the wings (or the main stage). Rickman made his name playing waspish figures and there are, indeed, occasional digs at fellow professionals — “when in his diaries he is critical of friends it was born of love” Taylor feels the need to note — but anyone expecting the wholesale bitch-fest that made John Osborne’s autobiographies so indecently addictive is in for disappointment. “They don’t know their lines and Emma [Watson]’s diction is this side of Albania at times,” he says of his Potter co-stars.
Not exactly kind, but critics have written worse. “Another production from Sam Mendes,” he writes of a theatre piece in 1996. “What is it about him? Theatre is a playground or a wet-wipe of personal therapy, it seems. No real resonance – no sense of the danger of an unpredictable outburst.” Mendes will be comforted to learn that, by the time of his film American Beauty, Rickman had come round. “Hats off to Sam Mendes. It is full of good stuff,” he accepted.
Rather than any continuing stream of bile, what we get in Madly, Deeply is a great deal of low-level griping interspersed with long lists of celebrities and exhausting accounts of world travel. He and Rima, a sometime Labour Party councillor, had an apartment in New York. They restored a house in Tuscany. They holidayed in the Caribbean and South Africa.
We are forever arranging visas and panting to the next connection. On August 27th, 1998 he participates in a reading of Antony and Cleopatra at the National Theatre and returns home for supper. The next entry begins, as if in a peripatetic variation on Tourette syndrome, with “TO ALASKA!” White-water rafting and totem rituals follow. “Robin Williams arrives – his usual, disarming, shy, unpushy self.” Well, of course he does.
‘Why was it so dark? So late starting?’ Why so infuriatingly late? Because you’re in Ireland, old man
Taylor should, perhaps, have cut out more of the celebrity incantations. After a while, the lists take on the quality of an unintended running gag. “On the flight here Bryan Ferry, Mimi Rogers, Dave Stewart, Geena Davis, Sydney Pollack, Jerry Hall, Siobhan Fahey,” he writes in 1997 (more travel, obviously). Later, in the same entry, we meet “Robin Williams, Barbara Hershey, Michael Keaton, Monica Seles, John McEnroe, Albert Brooks, Jim Brooks, Carrie Fisher, Ruby [Wax], Fran Leibowitz …”
On it goes. In 2004, he writes “What dreams. (1) Joan Collins. I’m interviewing her for a magazine about her time at RADA.” The celebrities are stacking up even when he’s asleep. Escape from Mick Jagger seems impossible.
Beginning more than 20 years after Rickman left drama school and seven years after his theatrical breakthrough with Les Liaisons Dangereuses, the diaries take this working-class boy from Acton through decades of Grade-A celebrity. He is able to laugh at being mistaken for Eric Idle (you can just about see it). Left-wing principles survive acquaintance with senior figures in the Labour Party — “Ian McKellen, Michael Foot, Folletts K & B Harriet Harman, Gordon Brown” are fellow attendees at Glenys Kinnock’s birthday party — and he declines a CBE in 2008.
Given the extent of his travels, we should not be surprised that the book has much to do with Ireland. Domestic professionals fearful of a gutting can rest easy. He suggests that the Abbey’s 2010 production of Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkman was not all skittles and beer, but keeps much of the tensions obscure.
I particularly enjoyed his accidental digs at unhappy Irish habits. “During the show – a good word considering an audience hell-bent on laughs. There were guffaws and titters on any old line,” he says of one John Gabriel Borkman crowd. We have all been there. “8pm Irish Premiere,” he writes of a screening five years earlier. “Why was it so dark? So late starting?” Why so infuriatingly late? Because you’re in Ireland, old man.
Like so much else discussed in this packed volume, the casting, shooting and aftermath of Neil Jordan’s Michael Collins flit by in a breathless rush. His portrayal of Éamon de Valera as a trickster only mildly less slippery than his breakout villain in Die Hard continues to be controversial, but Rickman has little to say about that politician. He finds Tim Pat Coogan’s book on Dev to be “terrifically well-written and entertaining”. His most interesting comment comes a full 13 years after the film’s release. “Minetta Lane to collect Martha Clarke, Suzanne Bertish & Stephanie Carlton Smith [artist] – not before defending de Valera to Frank McCourt on the pavement outside …” he notes in 2009.
Rickman seems almost as excited by the production as was contemporaneous Dublin. “The reconstruction of O’Connell Street is quite brilliant. Post Office, Mansion House, cobbles and – frighteningly – the platform for Dev’s speech,” he notes. “Stephen Rea’s warm heart fills the room,” he further raves.
In the middle of it all he reveals a childlike enthusiasm for an Irish performer. “A kind of headiness is inevitable – and deepened by a trip to Whelan’s for Sharon Shannon. My hero,” he says of the world’s greatest button accordionist. “The joy that empties itself from her CDs is nothing to what happens live. Number after number has the whole body, the whole room moving helplessly with it. And I met her. And kissed her. And asked her to play at our wrap party. And she said yes. Home to beans on toast.”
That last entry sums up what is most pleasurable about this useful volume. Yes, Rickman can come across as somewhat grand. In an amusing introduction, Emma Thompson describes him, paradoxically, as “Virile and peculiar. Temperamental and languid. Fastidious and casual.” But she also stresses the unlikely word “gleeful”. The fellow who enjoys Sharon Shannon and is happy to round off an evening with beans on toast is never too far away. True, the book is full of complaints, but a diary is a good place to work through minor frustrations.
We can’t tell what has been cut, but, on the evidence of this text, Rickman was more guarded about the things that really matter. The entry from July 4th, 2015 reads simply “5.30 Dr Landau, Harley Street. A different kind of diary now.” A footnote tells us he has been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. The entries get shorter. They end on December 12th. One senses a great and unique energy leaving the planet.
Social media may have done for the theatrical diary. Today’s actors are, perhaps, too busy tweeting to bother getting words down in lined journals. A surprising number of 20th-century greats did, however, have worthwhile inner musings eventually put before the public.
Not published until 2012, nearly 30 years after the author’s death, The Richard Burton Diaries are inevitably stuffed with too many dipsomaniac asides, but his waspish bent keeps the gossip lively. (Laurence Olivier, Burton’s obvious predecessor, is dismissed as “a shallow little man with a mediocre intelligence but a splendid salesman”.) Alec Guinness’s journals of later life – My Name Escapes Me and A Positively Final Appearance – are notably more guarded, but get across a real sense of an intelligence that won’t rest. From another generation, With Nails: The Film Diaries of Richard E Grant is shameless in its urge to entertain. His reports from the set of mega-flop Hudson Hawk are eye-opening. Elsewhere, Carrie Fisher is there to let him know that “You’re no longer a tourist, you’re one of the attractions.”
Anthony Sher is, perhaps, the most useful and revealing diarist on the process of acting. There are snippets of gossip in his The Year of the King, but this is mostly an intense meditation on how he put together a now legendary performance as Richard III for the RSC in 1984. The Year of the Mad King, a meditation on playing Lear nearly 30 years later, is equally as strong. “Why does the weather still continue to surprise and appal me?” the South African says of England.
Still, the most scurrilous, hilarious, gossipy, reliably ill-tempered and, yes, insightful of the genre remains The Kenneth Williams Diaries. It is hard to think of a sadder final entry than Williams’s tart rhetorical question from April 15th, 1988: “Oh, what’s the bloody point?” he wrote before dying of a barbiturate overdose.
