The English actor Alan Rickman did not drink, or
take drugs, to excess. He met his life’s partner when both were in their teens.
He disliked indiscreet people and rarely betrayed a confidence, even to his
diary — and thus those diaries, published now under the title “Madly, Deeply,”
are fantastically dull.
اضافة اعلان
“
Mick Jagger’s dinner party” is a typical entry, from
December 2002. And that is it. What was Mick’s bathroom like? Can he mix a
cocktail? Does he place, while at the table, entire heads of broccoli into that
mouth? We will never know.
Like many readers, I suspect, I miss Rickman, who died of
cancer in 2016. He was a droll player of haughty villains, men who looked as if
they were constantly detecting faraway stinks in the air. His wrinkling lips
were as expressive as many actors’ eyes.
He was Severus Snape, the despairing and sarcastic master of
potions, in the
Harry Potter movies. Thanks to that, there are Alan Rickman
coloring books. My favorite detail here may be that he insisted on picking up
even the largest checks in restaurants while uttering the words “Harry” and
“Potter”.
His other films included “Die Hard,” “Truly, Madly, Deeply”,
and “Love Actually.” He was the Sheriff of Nottingham in “Robin Hood: Prince of
Thieves” and got off these paradigmatic lines: “That’s it then. Cancel the
kitchen scraps for lepers and orphans, no more merciful beheadings and call off
Christmas.” He had a long and serious career in theater.
This book has been hewed from more than a million
handwritten words. It is unclear if Rickman wanted these diaries published. I
bet he would n
ot have. They are not embarrassing, but the entries are rarely
fleshed out. Much of it reads like an aide-memoire, quickly jotted notes one
might return to later for a different sort of book.
Nothing here can be held against him, but they are a bit
depressing, these diaries. They run from 1993 to 2015, the years of his
greatest fame. The usual rules had already begun to bend around him. His was a
well-buffed life. He moved from first-class airport lounge to first-class
airport lounge.
Almost every night there was a chic restaurant. In
London his haunts were the River Café, J Sheekey, and the Wolseley; in New York,
Balthazar, Café Cluny, and Café Loup. There are a lot of hospitality tents,
sumptuous parties, and splendid hotels.
But mostly he seems harried, put upon, booked to the teeth.
Not a lot of light shines through the windowpanes. He was difficult to work
with, and he knew it. (“My selfishness when working takes my breath away.”)
David Hare called him “the V.S. Naipaul of acting,” he reports. Naipaul was not
known to suffer fools.
Rickman knew everyone in London. He attends, and speaks at,
many memorial services. The boldface names who appear most regularly include
Emma Thompson (who contributes a foreword), Ian McKellen, Liam Neeson, Natasha
Richardson, Stanley Tucci, Juliet Stevenson, and Daniel Day-Lewis.
If any of his friends were especially close, he does not
say. His partner, the Labor Party politician Rima Horton (they finally married
in 2012), does not appear often. Even in company, Rickman seems curiously
alone. His wrap-up reports of big nights are often, “Very good time had by
all,” or something similar. He saw so much but described so little.
It is possible to go through this book, as if with a metal
detector, and retrieve shreds of tabloid coin.
Ewan McGregor is self-absorbed;
Sigourney Weaver muscled into his shots; Daniel Radcliffe is not much of an
actor; Tim Allen (they starred in the underrated “Galaxy Quest”) is a jerk;
Linda Fiorentino too often blows her lines. He often revised such opinions.
There are more cheerful moments. At the Wolseley one evening
Rickman passed a table at which Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis, and Ian McEwan
huddled. Rushdie stood to say hello, and Rickman commented that there should be
a collective noun for their table. “A remainder,” Rushdie suggested.
Rickman is not good at capturing his fellow humans in a few
crunchy words. He is better on other topics. The morning after a play opens,
for example, he knows the reviews are bad if no one is calling. A private man,
he loathes interviews. (“Not telling you,” he says to himself, after being
asked if he took home a favorite prop from the Harry Potter set.)
He despairs of awards shows yet watches them. “Oh God, how
many more awards can we give ourselves?” he asks. Watching the Oscars reminds
him of “apes picking fleas from each other.”
Rickman and Horton owned property in London, New York, and
Tuscany. Often there was remodeling going on. (They never seem to entertain at
home.) He liked crossword puzzles, and gardening. Sweeping up leaves, he
comments, is good therapy.
In the manner that it takes a large ground crew to put a
single fighter pilot in the air, it takes a large company of humans to move a
famous actor through his days: makeup and clothing and sets and black cars and
interview requests and tickets and reservations and all the rest. I wish Rickman
had something, anything, to say about these people and these processes. He
glides as if on a magic carpet.
It’s typical of this diary that when Rickman learned he had
the aggressive form of cancer that would kill him, he simply wrote: “Dr.
Landau, Harley Street. A different kind of diary now.” The editor must tell us,
in a footnote, it was pancreatic cancer.
(If Rickman had written “The Metamorphosis,” it would have
been one line: “Woke as bug”.)
The last months of entries are moving not because Rickman
relates much about his treatment, or his hopes and fears. They are moving
because he realizes he has lived so fast and hard that he has never had time to
look back, to savor it all.
“Madly, Deeply” is a reminder that, as Simone de Beauvoir wrote,
“What an odd thing a diary is: The things you omit are more important than
those you put in.”
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