"Madly, Deeply: The Alan Rickman Diaries"
September 26, 2022 11:19 AM   Subscribe

The Guardian excerpts "Madly, Deeply: The Alan Rickman Diaries." Alan Rickman kept a diary and shared his thoughts on Harry Potter, Love Actually, 9/11, 7/7, and much more. Yes, it's all as dry, withering, and human as you'd expect. Glorious!

Here are some examples, best if read in your mind with his beautiful British stentorian tone.

  • Sept. 11, 2002:
  • As the dance rehearsal is about to begin, the first report from New York comes in. Total shock. All rehearsal becomes an acute, flattening irrelevance but we do it anyway.

  • Oct. 10, 2003:
  • Screening of Love Actually. Me, Martine McC[utcheon] and two of her friends. Actually, she’s one of the best things in the film. Unaffected, truthful and direct.

  • Jan. 8, 2006:
  • The doctors come round and after dealing with catheters and drainage, finally, nervously get to the point – “How did you do the fall at the end of Die Hard?”

  • Jan. 30, 2006:
  • Finally, yes to HP 5. The sensation is neither up nor down. The argument that wins is the one that says: “See it through. It’s your story.”

  • Feb. 14, 2007:
  • Liam Gallagher is a great rock singer but an absolute tosser as a person.
    posted by zooropa (33 comments total) 32 users marked this as a favorite
     
    Emma Thompson also kept a diary during the filming of Sense and Sensibility; it's very much "her", very chatty and witty and verbose. But some of the best bits are when she shares things that Alan Rickman said or did.

    My favorite is one night when the cast is all hanging out at the pub associated with the hotel they're staying at on location, unwinding after the day's filming, and a cat wanders in. Everyone else in the cast all starts fawning over it - "here kitty," waving, etc. - and the cat wanders from person to person accepting their attention. But then when it wanders over towards Alan Rickman, expectantly looking at him and waiting to be adored, he looks back down at it, and all he says to it is, "Fuck off."
    posted by EmpressCallipygos at 11:38 AM on September 26, 2022 [32 favorites]


    I was reading these yesterday - I love the insider chat and the quick snapshots of big events. And yeah, I do hear it in his voice.
    posted by PussKillian at 11:56 AM on September 26, 2022


    Diarists come in all shapes, and their reasons for recording their lives are similarly diverse.

    OT, but as good a place as any to plug (again?) The Great Diary Project (and a video by Dr Irving Finkel chatting about it). (Coincidentally, this past weekend I came into possession of my great great grandmother's diary (Brooklyn, 1851), she a shadowy figure before now. Short essays and poetry in fine copperplate hand, ending with "what a great blessing it is to have such healthy children and a good husband." Okay, then.

    Alan Rickman- saw him on stage in Les Liaisons Dangereuses. Yes, he was as good there as on celluloid.
    posted by BWA at 12:22 PM on September 26, 2022 [2 favorites]


    And yeah, I do hear it in his voice.

    Funny; I hear it in Hans Gruber's voice.
    posted by Servo5678 at 12:31 PM on September 26, 2022 [9 favorites]


    Funny thing that of all places in the world, he went to Vanderbilt for a crucial operation. It is that good; it just brings me up short because that's exactly where I was at the time, studying. (Not at the hospital, though.) If I'd known, I would have ... well, done nothing, because I don't try to meet celebrities, especially those I have huge crushes on. But I'd have looked for him out of the corner of my eye for days.

    ... But then when it wanders over towards Alan Rickman, expectantly looking at him and waiting to be adored, he looks back down at it, and all he says to it is, "Fuck off."

    I am certain he was then the cat's favorite person and it tried to go home with him.
    posted by Countess Elena at 12:46 PM on September 26, 2022 [21 favorites]


    (also, I truly hope that, as much as he cared about his part in HP, he never learned anything about the Snapewives)
    posted by Countess Elena at 12:53 PM on September 26, 2022 [3 favorites]


    And they ran another excerpt the next day, along with some brief movie reviews scattered throughout the diaries.

    I would really like to read the full diaries and will have to see if my library gets them in. (Might even want to own them.) I love his sketches - and I'm glad the journals are transcribed to print, as I love his handwriting but find it difficult to read.

    I'm so glad his wife is sharing these with the world.

    Thank you so much for posting this, zooropa!
    posted by kristi at 12:55 PM on September 26, 2022 [3 favorites]


    the hideous score by John Williams

    :o
    posted by gottabefunky at 12:55 PM on September 26, 2022 [2 favorites]


    Sept. 11, 2002:
    As the dance rehearsal is about to begin, the first report from New York comes in. Total shock. All rehearsal becomes an acute, flattening irrelevance but we do it anyway.

    I'm assuming this a typo for the year?
    posted by tzikeh at 1:56 PM on September 26, 2022 [4 favorites]


    I'm assuming this a typo for the year?

    News traveled a lot slower in those days.
    posted by Parasite Unseen at 2:02 PM on September 26, 2022 [11 favorites]


    a couple of things:

    - holy crap, he was a good artist

    - From the account of his funeral: "We finished with everyone singing The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore." That was the song that he and Juliet Stevenson sang in Truly, Madly, Deeply.
    posted by Halloween Jack at 2:04 PM on September 26, 2022 [6 favorites]


    I got to see him live onstage in Private Lives. He was born to play that role.
    posted by telophase at 2:21 PM on September 26, 2022


    Damn it, was hoping these diaries went back to when he did Galaxy Quest. Also curious about what motivated him to do Close My Eyes.
    posted by BrotherCaine at 2:40 PM on September 26, 2022 [2 favorites]


    BrotherCaine, it looks like the other page of excerpts includes 1994-1998, so it seems likely there may be some Galaxy Quest entries in the full published books. (I, too, would love to read about his time on that film.)
    posted by kristi at 2:56 PM on September 26, 2022 [2 favorites]


    I did not expect to read this all the way to the end, but it was laugh out loud funny.
    posted by potrzebie at 3:27 PM on September 26, 2022 [1 favorite]


    Damn it, was hoping these diaries went back to when he did Galaxy Quest.

    By Grapthar's Hammer, what a diary
    posted by mcstayinskool at 3:30 PM on September 26, 2022 [28 favorites]


    Unfortunate that they decided to excerpt some of the worst films he was in. He's great no matter the picture, but LA and HP are dreadful and just click-bait at this point. Would much rather read about TMD, Die Hard, Closet Land, and Galaxy Quest.
    posted by dobbs at 3:37 PM on September 26, 2022 [2 favorites]


    I worked at a New York adjacent private k-12 school in the late 90s and was friendly with the theater director who in turn was friends with Alan Rickman. He'd apparently invite people to sit on his brand new sofa that Harry Potter bought him, please have this beverage on Harry, etc. It was sort of a "Yes, I'm doing this dreck, but wow the money is good."
    posted by roue at 4:23 PM on September 26, 2022


    Great respect for the man. Intelligent, a writer and an artist. Excellent FPP. Kudos.
    posted by Splunge at 4:26 PM on September 26, 2022


    Confused by "All human acting was there." ?????

    This is all shorter than I'd hope for (I like a dishy diary), but sometimes he's quite pithy.
    posted by jenfullmoon at 5:18 PM on September 26, 2022


    I'm off to go find out if there's anything from when he did Closetland. I'm not exactly sure it would hold up but it affected me deeply. (I made the mistake of investigating and it's not holding up, but generally the performances are praised and should be.)
    posted by abulafa at 5:42 PM on September 26, 2022 [1 favorite]


    I miss him. He was in many ways my first love. I've decided Orlando Bloom no longer counts.
    posted by The Adventure Begins at 6:31 PM on September 26, 2022 [2 favorites]


    Yes, but, did he move the pork chops from the freezer to the refrigerator so they defrost?*

    *or the turtle joke for the party
    posted by revmitcz at 7:07 PM on September 26, 2022




    Since we're moving on to other fun Rickmania:

    1. Alan Rickman coming onto Jimmy Fallon's show and calling him onto the carpet a little, because Jimmy and Benedict Cumberbatch had both had a Rickman imitation contest earlier that season. ....Oh, and both Jimmy and Alan have inhaled helium.

    2. Actor John Sessions on QI doing an Alan Rickman impression, and then telling a great story about something Alan said at a party when a kid asked him why he always played bad guys.
    posted by EmpressCallipygos at 7:27 PM on September 26, 2022 [4 favorites]


    Confused by "All human acting was there." ?????

    I assume that is merely a way of saying that Brian Cox knows an awful lot of actors, and they all showed up for his birthday party, as in 'all (the) human(s who do some) acting was there'. I must also assume it's hyperbolic -- because I was once in a play and yet I have never attended Brian Cox's birthday party.
    posted by Sparx at 7:29 PM on September 26, 2022 [4 favorites]


    Funny; I hear it in Hans Gruber's voice.

    /removing silencer from pistol

    "I am going to tell two interesting anecdotes, there will not be a third."

    (Karl and Theo each pull out a $20 bill)
    posted by Ghidorah at 10:40 PM on September 26, 2022 [6 favorites]


    Azkaban was always my favorite of the movies (I adored what Cuaron did there) and I disliked the first two and was kind of meh about the last few ones, so it's good to see Rickman mostly concurs.
    posted by peacheater at 10:23 AM on September 27, 2022 [2 favorites]


    Damn it, was hoping these diaries went back to when he did Galaxy Quest. Also curious about what motivated him to do Close My Eyes.

    My favorite Galaxy Quest story: Alan Rickman and Tim Allen initially didn't get along at all because Alan was a 'serious' actor and Tim was a goofball, which is meta because these are also the roles they play in the movie (they later became good friends).

    There's a moment Dean Parisot describes in Never Surrender, the Galaxy Quest documentary. After a series of takes of the Mathesar torture scene, Tim Allen gets emotional and asks to leave the set, to which Alan Rickman remarks "oh my God, I think he just experienced acting!"
    posted by eye of newt at 11:08 AM on September 27, 2022 [8 favorites]


    "All human life is there" used to be the slogan of the News of the World, the terrible tabloid Sunday newspaper that was effectively The Sun on Sunday until its journos were caught tampering with the answerphone messages of a murdered teenager and News International were shamed into shutting it down after a hundred and fifty years and replacing it with... The Sun on Sunday. So nothing really changed, but it's extraordinary that NI were ever shamed into doing anything. If Murdoch ever had any shame, he'll have paid a shady character to put it in a bag with a brick and dump it in the canal a long time ago.

    Anyway, it's a well-known cliché (among people in the UK above a certain age) and he was riffing on that.

    I seem to be having a 'splainy sort of week. Sorry about that.
    posted by Grangousier at 11:28 AM on September 27, 2022 [8 favorites]


    "All human life is there"

    Originally a quote from Henry James' The Madonna of the Future:

    Cats and monkeys—monkeys and cats—all human life is there! Human life, of course, I mean, viewed with the eye of the satirist!
    posted by andraste at 5:45 PM on September 27, 2022 [1 favorite]


    Of course I devoured this, but do we know if Rickman consented to the publication of his diary? He writes with the kind of bitchy wit that makes it seem like he expected this to go public some day, but I'd hate to think these were thoughts he never meant to share with the world. I know that the Harry Potter kids looked up to him like an uncle, and some of his takes here could really sting. (He clearly liked the kids a lot as people, but he was quite snarky about their acting abilities.)

    I've seen this framed as Rickman unloading on the Harry Potter phenomenon, but if anything I think it shows that he was really invested in it at the same time that he remained his dry, cynical self. He crabs about the working conditions, as actors do, but he ends it all with "Thank you, Jo." Also, when he refers to throngs of people serenading him with Snape, Snape, Severus Snape, I'm pretty sure they were singing the song from Potter Puppet Pals. If Neil Ciceriega ever heard about that, I bet it blew his mind.
    posted by Ursula Hitler at 6:00 PM on September 27, 2022 [1 favorite]


    Love this entry:

    LAST DAY ON HP.
    At the end of the day, Hedwig the owl flies the length of the Great Hall and drops the Nimbus 2000 in Harry’s lap. Dave, the trainer, hadn’t slept worrying about it all. Simple, amazing things.

    posted by of strange foe at 7:38 PM on September 27, 2022 [1 favorite]


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