‘From furnishings to sausages, his taste was impeccable’
Emma Thompson
The most remarkable thing about the first days after Alan died was the number of actors, poets, musicians, playwrights and directors who wanted to express their gratitude for all the help he’d given them. I don’t think I know anyone in this business who has championed more aspiring artists, nor unerringly perceived so many great ones before they became great. Quite a number said that, latterly, they had been too shy to thank him personally. They had found it hard to approach him. Of all the contradictions in my blissfully contradictory friend, this is perhaps the greatest: this combination of profoundly nurturing and imperturbably distant.
He was not, of course, distant. He was alarmingly present at all times. The inscrutability was partly a protective shield. If anyone did approach him with anything like gratitude, or even just a question, they would be greeted with a depth of sweetness that no one who didn’t know him could even guess at. And he was not, of course, unflappable. I could flap him like nobody’s business and when I did he was fierce with me and it did me no end of good.
He was generous and challenging. Dangerous and comical. Sexy and androgynous. Virile and peculiar. Temperamental and languid. Fastidious and casual. My list is endless. There was something of the sage about him – and had he had more confidence and been at all corruptible, he could probably have started his own religion. His taste in all things, from sausages to furnishings, appeared to me to be impeccable. The trouble with death is that there is no next. There is only what was and for that I am profoundly and heartbrokenly grateful.
Later in 2003, I saw him in New York when I was doing a play. Afterwards, we all went to eat in a restaurant. Alan had started playing Professor Snape from the Harry Potter films. He portrayed him with an intense and brittle spirit. I asked if Snape continued in future stories. “Well,” he said, “the latest book has just come out, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.” Then he quietly added: “And I – I am the Half-Blood Prince!”
He went on to give classic and heartbreaking performances in the Harry Potter films that will live with us for ever.
‘Our tortoise Betty starred in The Taming of the Shrew’
Ruby Wax
My mission in life was to make him laugh and when I did it was better than winning an Oscar. When I hit a comedy nerve, he would fold on to the floor and heave laughing, then he’d make me heave back until we were both on the ground, hysterical.
We had a tortoise called Betty, which was like our adopted child, when we were both performing at Stratford. (Alan played leads, I played seaweed along with Juliet Stevenson.) Alan promised he’d help me get Betty into a show. I had tried to get her into Antony and Cleopatra, telling Peter Brook, the director, in front of Alan, that I’d like to audition Betty for the role of the asp. Alan almost died, because he was playing Antony. I know he was partially upset because Betty would have upstaged him.
In the end, we got Betty on stage during The Taming of the Shrew. Every night, when I’d bring Betty on during a crowd scene, Alan proudly watched from the wings, both of us sick with laughing. He broke my heart by leaving and there isn’t a day when I don’t remember him.
‘Rowan was taking his time while Alan was acting his socks off’
Richard Curtis
I wanted to cast Alan as the lead in Four Weddings and a Funeral – before we got stuck with Hugh Grant – because he’d been so perfect in a film called Close My Eyes, both tender and funny. So it was a great joy to me when Alan agreed to be in Love Actually. My strongest memory was when we were doing the shopping scene where Rowan Atkinson takes too long wrapping Alan’s illicit gift. Rowan was taking his time, doing long, improvisatory takes, even chatting casually to me about ideas – while poor Alan was acting his socks off, in character, angry and impatient, sometimes for 10 straight minutes. It was a great example of true commitment. But also I’m pretty damn sure by the end Alan was actually, quite rightly, extremely angry and extremely impatient.
Another thing about his performance: the most memorable scene is probably Emma Thompson in her bedroom, listening to Joni Mitchell after she’s discovered her husband’s betrayal. I’m convinced that what makes it twice as strong is the subtlety and truth of Alan’s performance with her before that moment. If their scenes hadn’t completely captured a proper, long-term, adult marriage – if Alan hadn’t been so solid, so cool, so not a person who would fall so far – it wouldn’t have all hit so hard. It was an honour to know him and work with him.
‘He turned down perfectly OK jobs because they were just OK’
Harriet Walter
One thing Alan couldn’t do: he couldn’t drive. And that was a blessing because it meant that I could give him a lift every night after The Seagull or The Lucky Chance, the plays we did at the Royal Court. We talked in the car and then he’d ask me into his flat and there I got to know his wife Rima and we’d talk politics and gossip into the early hours over bottles of wine.
In that flat, it struck me that every colour, every piece of furniture, every witty object, had been deliberately chosen and lovingly displayed and prized. Nothing was accidental or superfluous – just as Alan’s jobs and his political causes were very deliberately chosen. Long before he was well known, he’d tell me how he had turned down this or that seemingly perfectly OK job because it was just OK. It was as if he knew that life is short and must be filled only with the things that really matter to you.
‘Do what I do, he said during Quidditch – absolutely nothing’
Jason Isaacs
Everything that I did as Lucius Malfoy in the Harry Potter films was down to Alan. When they offered me a part in the second movie, I nearly turned it down because trying to be sinister in the same film as him seemed pointless. In the end, I came up with a Malfoy designed to avoid doomed comparisons with his effortlessly terrifying Snape: Malfoy had long blond hair, a pinched, high voice and as many props as I could hide behind.
In person, though, he put paid to my intimidation on my first day: we were shooting a sequence where we watched and reacted to a Quidditch match. “This is the quaffle,” said a props man, waving a tennis ball on a stick. “And now, here come the beaters. Here they are, but the keeper blocks it and, watch out, here’s the Gryffindor seeker. And … he falls … but … HE’S GOT THE GOLDEN SNITCH!”
“I’m so sorry, Alan,” I said. “But what’s going on? What should I do?”
“No idea.” he whispered. “Do what I do. Absolutely fucking nothing.”
Who knew! The man behind the most distinctive and contemptuous drawl in theatrical history was actually completely accessible, anarchically funny, utterly in the moment on and off screen, and a consumer of music far, far more contemporary than my best-of-the-70s tastes – a point he made mercilessly in the makeup chair as my cheese-fest blasted out.
He was also passionately committed to making things better, whether through his many unwavering political and charitable commitments or by having, like me, busloads of kids visit the set every time he worked. It will continue to be one of the highlights of my professional life to have shared the screen, and the odd terrible gag, with him.
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