We will never know his thoughts about appearing in Die Hard or Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, although his feelings about his villainous performance as the Sheriff of Nottingham in the latter can be gleaned from his dry remarks, when receiving a BAFTA award, that “this will be a healthy reminder to me that subtlety isn’t everything.” But what we have here represents a far more fascinating insight into Rickman’s thoughts than any biography or interview could provide. It is an unavoidable shame that he did not keep a diary during the mid-1980s. It’s this mixture of the sacred and the profane - or, if we are to be honest, the self-important and the absurd - that dominates Madly, Deeply, the diaries Rickman kept from 1993 until his early death in 2016 from pancreatic cancer. Rickman’s general mien of detachment (“there is a deep introspection during these days…a feeling of being marginalized by shallow minds”) is temporarily interrupted by an impertinent journalist, who asks him at the premiere, “If you were a pie, which flavor would you be?” Rickman has recently played the villainous role of Judge Turpin in Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd, an undertaking he describes with what readers will have come to recognize as his signature combination of angst and actorly obsession (“I can only sense the crumbs, dandruff, dirt under the nails.”) At last, the film is finished, and is premiering in London. Perhaps the defining moment of the posthumous collection of diary excerpts from the late actor and director Alan Rickman comes around two thirds of the way in.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |