The Alan Rickman

But it's not a connection Alan would thank you for tracing. "It's the actor's old, old plea--don't fence me in! There are qualities of the sick, the selfish, the manipulator or the looker-on in all those parts but their minds extend in wildly different areas and they each have a particular vulnerability that has to be found."

Though Jaques is the role Alan has been playing longest, the period of discovery in it is by no means over yet. As You Like It is "a production in which there is still a sense of growth. I feel very protective towards it." Since we spoke, the play has opened at the Barbican with the critics almost unanimous in acclaiming the improvements in the production. The somewhat mixed reviews the production got for the Stratford opening were fair , he feels -- but he was delighted to see how strong an appeal it made to the teenagers who were "yanked" to Stratford to see it as a school set text. "It's a great pleasure to know their eyes have widened--that they've got some real joy out of it."

What audienced get out of Les Liaisons Dangereuses is something rather different. "The audience should feel like voyeurs. Their response is absolutely crucial." It has certainly been enthusiastic. Alan's character, Valmont, is the seducer who can face any sexual challenge except love. He operates through a great web of truth and lies and, in the end, says Alan, "the play is as seductive as any of its characters".

Howard Davies is director of Liaisons and also of Alan's third role: Achilles in Troilus and Cressida. "When he asked me to do the part he said, 'Achilles should be like a movie star lying by the swimming pool, flinging the scripts back at MGM'. That made me laugh but in rehearsal I found Achilles a rather different person."

Jaques, he says, has "a lot more muscle and passion to the part than people expect." Achilles, by contrast, is "an emotional and intellectual shell. You're constantly told how great he is, what a hero--and then when he finally does fight he calls in his thugs to murder his opponent. But that's not just cowardice. In this case it's mental illness. The text is very spare so you're on a tightrope every time you do it."

One of the definite plusses of the Stratford season for Alan was the chance, in the RSC W H Smith Festival, The Fortnight, to direct a production of Barnes' People by Peter Barnes. "I owe him a great deal. My first major part was in his adaptation of Jonson's The Devil is an Ass and I've worked with him four or five times since."

Another souvenir is his new california driver's license despite the fact that he failed his first test for driving too carefully through a green light. ("I think maybe that is a metaphor," Rickman says with a laugh.)

Sixteen years ago, at the age of 26, he chucked his work as a graphic artist and summoned the courage to audition for the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. "I was at that age when you just can't get past the next bit of your life, so you take an action of some kind," he says. "Actually all it involved was writing a note, requesting a date for an audition. I still remember the act of putting that envelope in the postbox, thinking, 'That's my life; it will change now.' And it did,"

He hasn't stopped since. Rickman has appeared in many Shakespearean stage roles, as well as in Thérèse Raquin, Romeo and Juliet, and The Barchester Chronicles on English television. "I think I was in the last generation that realized that when you left drama school, you would go off to repertory for two years and then you get work," he explains. "That's all changed. People don't think they need to do rep; they think you can come out and be a star overnight, like the Brit pack."

Disqualified by age from packer status, Rickman nonetheless did make the leap from stage to the Twentieth Century Fox lot within 48 hours of his arrival in Los Angeles, when Die Hard producer Joel Silver, who'd seen him in Les Liaisons, and director John McTiernan immediately offered him the part. He is as bemused by this sudden shift in his career as he is about the Hollywood lifestyle: the rented house with the pool and hot tub, and the serious work on the set of a $25 million film.

"Sometimes you have to wait for your face to settle," Rickman says. "They seem to think that now my face is not going to get any better and that it's probably not going to get any worse. And since I'd been doing a play for two years, I didn't want to get on a stage again; I needed some kind of explosion to take it away. Hans, my Die Hard character, is a really good part; bad guys are fun to play, although I don't want to make a habit of it."

The greatest challenge he's faced (aside from fanatics on the Los Angeles freeways) has been to scale down his technique for the intimacy of the lens. "That's something I was worried about, and John has to remind me, 'You're in close-up, Alan, don't move your head around so much.' Yet I'm always aware of the camera and it feels like that's the audience. When I've had scenes with Bruce, it's quite clear that I'm working with somebody who has a great deal of experience with the camera; it's a great censoring device at work. It's a question of watch and learn - fast."

You're phoning up from the hotel lobby - Carlyle, that bastion of New York's Upper East Side affluence - to Alan Rickman's room.

"Hello?" The Voice intones.

Whoa. This is a hello unlike any you've ever heard. Two puny syllables infused with a swirling conflation of emotion: at once seductive, disdainful, imperious.

Upstairs, in the British actor's $550-a-night, no-view suite, you realize why the 40ish Rickman has, in a few short years, become the man Hollywood calls upon when it needs a bad guy. The arch terrorist of Die Hard, the snide Australian of Quigley Down Under, and, June 14, the dark, door-kicking Sheriff of Nottingham opposite Kevin Costner in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves.

It's not just the voice, you realize - it's his look, his manner. Dry, ironic, honey-coated contemptuousness. Hawklike features. He's the Basil rathbone of the '90s, and, alas, he's already in danger of the typecasting that mired Rathbone in villainy for a score of Hollywood productions.

Rickman's obviously aware of the precarious position. How else to explain his trip stateside to talk up his starring role in the romance, Truly, Madly, Deeply?

In Anthony Minghella's sugary first feature, Rickman is cast as a sensitive cellist who, dispatched to the beyond, returns to haunt his lover's life. Juliet Stevenson (who appeared opposite Rickman in the London production of Les Liaisons Dangereuses) is the grief-stricken woman.

You suggest it may have been a nice change of pace, playing a sympathetic character for once.

"Inevitably, I get asked that," he says with strained patience, "and it so isn't what my experience is. It's just that certain things that one does get more focus than others, but in actual fact, if you look at the movies that I've done, it's like three good guys to three bad guys - and one unnameable."

Good guys: The January man (1989), Truly, Madly, Deeply and Close MY Eyes (a small English film, yet to be released). Bad guys: Already noted. One unnameable: the fascist interrogator in the torture drama Closet Land.

"It's just that the three bad guys I've done have been in big, Hollywood expensive things, and the good guys are in small movies - small budgets, at least," he says.

For the time being, the villainous image lingers. It is said, from those who have seen bits of Robin Hood, that Rickman, as the neurotic lord of the shire, chews up the film sublimely.

"Yeah, why not?" he says of playing the villain. "It's fun being naughty."

Rickman, smiling, says he harbors no core of evil that might explain his charismatic sinisterness on the screen. His success in imparting such malevolence, he observes, can be traced to matters more mundane. Like camera angles.

"If a camera is placed endlessly on the floor in all your shots, and looks up your nostrils - you know, it's not just me."

Rickman concedes that he does have "certain features, that if they're lit from certain angles" take on a look of menace. "it's out of story books, it's out of The Wizard of Oz. Somebody with Debbie Reynolds' features doesn't get cast as the Wicked Witch, although maybe they should."

In Truly, Madly, Deeply, Rickman's features assume, appropriately enough, a ghostly glow. The film, made for British television but blown up to 35mm, has been described as "the thinking person's Ghost." But there are those who think comparing Truly, Madly, deeply to Ghost might scare off as many moviegoers as it attracts.

"It's just sort of a strange world we describe when we think people are saying, 'Well, I saw Ghost. I'm therefore not going to go to see this other movie.' You know, 'I saw Anna Karenina, so I ain't going to see Boris Godunov.' It's so different, and I hope that people tell each other that it is. Then they'll go see why."

Rickman's scenes with Stevenson are particularly affecting. The two have worked together often - in Liaisons (Rickman as the Vicomte, Stevenson as Madame de Tourvel) and other Royal Shakespeare Company endeavors - and the actor remains in awe of his colleague. For Rickman, one scene in Truly, Madly, Deeply confirms Stevenson's power. It comes early on, when her character, Nina, wracked by the loss of her loved one, breaks down and cries. And cries. And cries. And cries.

"That scene earns the movie," Rickman observes. "I think you need to have that scene to ground the film in reality, and for her to be as uncompromising as she is with it. Everybody gets a purging. It's a bit like an emotional car wash that she gives you - and then you can get on with the movie, really. You've got to see her grief, and so Anthony (Minghella) really lets you see it, and so does Juliet."

Rickman was born in London, where he still resides. Nonetheless, he calls himself a "full-blooded Celt" - his parents were Irish and Welsh. And "they certainly didn't have anything to do with the theater. I'm some kind of accident."

That accident occured when Rickman was still in grade school. "I was 7, and I remember being given a part in a play and thinking, 'This is exciting.' "

Art school and five years in a graphics studio got in the way, however, and it wasn't until his mid-20s that Rickman turned to acting.

An audition at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art led to his appointment to the Royal Shakespeare Company, where he essayed a gamut of roles. His portrait of the sinister Vicomte in Liaisonswon him accolades in London and on Broadway.

After Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, the actor will be seen in Close My Eyes, slated for fall release.

"It's another love story," he reports. "I'm part of a triangle. It's me, my wife and her brother. I discover a little later - rather a lot later than the audience does - that she's having an affair with her brother."

Geez. And all I said to the guy was that if his sheriff of Nottingham isn't the best acting to be found in Robin Hood, then certainly it must be the most acting to be found in Robin Hood.

'Do you mean, like, 'over the top' or something?' asked Rickman.

'No, I swore off using that expression after Sylvester Stallone called that awful movie of his Over the Top,' I answered. 'And besides, 'over the top' suggests an uncontrolled job, or maybe amateurish. Your villain, here, is patently a controlled job of acting. I'm just not certain whether it makes the film, or breaks it - - a very difficult call.'

'Well, then, at least we've made an interesting motion picture,' Rickman said. 'I hope you can see it again before you decide what to put down for publication.'

'I think I could stand another look.'

'No, really: Am I being insulted here?'

Rickman is not actually that thin-skinned - - and he seems never less than gentlemanly - - but he is at the tense juncture where a screen player who has done one thing consistently well over a reasonably long stretch proves to be at risk of terminal typecasting.

Rickman's one-thing-well accomplishment is villainy. from 1988's Die Hard through such more recent assignments as Quigley Down Under, Closet Land and Robin Hood, Rickman has excelled sufficiently at bad-guy business to invite regard as an artistic descendant of Vincent Price.

'Yes,' Rickman said, 'and Vincent Price also did comedy tremendously well, and is a tremendously versatile actor. And we all know where his gift for villainy landed him: typed for life. But I do appreciate the likening to him.

What I wish more people knew,' he added, 'is that there's a nice little ghostly love story out there in a few theaters now called Truly, Madly, Deeply - - where I play a tender, loving sort of chap who returns from the dead - - and that I'm looking to defy as many expectations as I can, in case the people who liked my turn in Die Hard should take that character as the only thing I'm capable of doing.

'That's what I'm doing so much of the broad comedy-villainy for in Robin Hood, you know. (Director) Kevin (Reynolds) and I - - well, we worked it out where I could get away with mugging the camera, and sticking my nose out into the audience, and throwing away some asides and one-liners.

'Now, what you were saying earlier, that may be because of expectations you've brought from having liked the Die Hard bad man. I am hellbent on defying your expectations, at every turn, and even if you don't like what's being done, I dare you to find it uninteresting.

'Robin's Sheriff of Nottingham is a troublemaker with a murderous streak, all right - - but goodness, this is a costume melodrama, not Shakespeare. I believe this particular villain needs to be a little laughable, lest we players mislead the audience into taking things too seriously.

"The word 'villain' doesn't mean anything to me," says the 45-year-old Rickman, whose bold, insinuating stage and screen persona seems layers removed from the unassuming, barely audible actor now shifting uncomfortably in his chair over morning coffee at London's Blakes Hotel. Wearing blue jeans, a denim shirt, and a colorful Jean Paul Gautier tie, the actor quickly dismisses the subject of typecasting. Then, sensing perhaps that he should at least attempt an answer, he explains: "Each character I play has different dimensions. I'm not interested in words that pull them together. The whole business of laying yourself on the line is difficult whatever the character. It's my life as well as my work, so when people try to stick a label on my life, I think, 'It doesn't seem like that to me.'"

Rickman's gallery of rogues certainly hasn't been filled with the usual suspects. His specialty isn't the usual street thug or gangster, but rather the coldly elegant, calculating mastermind - the thinking man's villain. The Vicomte de Valmont, the sexually scheming French aristocrat that Rickman played in Christopher Hampton's stage play of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, plots various conquests merely to amuse himself - and to dishonor the many women who fall prey to his charms. In Die Hard, Rickman's ruthless Gruber is the dapper ringleader of a gang of European thieves intent on pulling off a major heist in an L.A. office tower. And in The Barchester Chronicles, the popular BBC miniseries that launched Rickman from the ranks of the unknown in 1982, the actor portrayed a creepy, conniving chaplain named Obadiah Slope.

"I'm a lot less serious than people think," says Rickman, whose narrow hazel eyes, long nose, and curling lip accented by a neat mustache do give off a certain air of menace. "It's probably because the way my face is put together."

If Rickman hopes to shed his constraining bad-guy image, his performance as the dastardly Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, his latest move, is unlikely to advance him toward that goal. The $50-million adventure epic opened in June and stars Kevin Costner, Morgan Freeman, Christian Slater, and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio. Shot on location in England and France and at London's Shepperton Studios, this Robin Hood was four months in the making and provides a fresh and darker telling of the familiar seven-hundred-year-old tale, most memorably brought to the screen in 1938 with Errol Flynn in the leading role. Rickman's Sheriff ("the character you are not supposed to like," he allows) deals in black magic and spells, while Costner's Robin Hood is teamed up with a new companion, a princely Moor (Freeman) with whom he escapes from captivity during the Crusades.

"Our film is more like Raiders of the Lost Sherwood Forest," says the sandy-haired Rickman, brightening as he recalls the sheer energy and physicality that went into playing the Sheriff, a role that called for him to ride horses through "that" forest and to perform his own sword-fighting sequences.

"Kevin and I are essentially the bookends of the story. The Sheriff is pretty certifiable, but I think he's someone audiences can hate and laugh at. I tried to make him funny. I've also made him as black as possible - there are absolutely no colors on his costume. We tried using my own hair and that didn't work, so we put a raven-colored wig on him. I got the outline first and then put it all on and said, 'Now how does this feel? Yeah, this feels like somebody who kicks doors down and hits people and stamps his feet when he doesn't get what he wants.'"

According to the buzz at the time of the film's opening, Costner found Rickman's Sheriff a little too bookendish for his taste: There were reports that Costner was "concerned" that Rickman's performance was so strong that he'd steal the show, and that the film was re-edited at the last minute to flesh out Costner's character. Rickman, however, voices his admiration for Costner and his low-key approach to his own fame. "The first time I thought 'Well, there's a real person' was late one evening when Mary Elizabeth and I were standing on some platform delivering lines to nobody," says Rickman. "The next thing I knew, somebody was lying on the ground reading lines that weren't even his so that we would have someone to play off, and I looked down and it was Kevin Costner. He had just finished a long day of filming, and I thought, 'Three cheers for you.'"

Over the last year, Rickman has starred in four movies, shot in quick succession. In contrast to his loony caricature in Robin Hood, Rickman gave a charming and subtle performance in the chamber-size Truly, Madly, Deeply, which opened in May, an extremely affecting film about a woman (Juliet Stevenson) whose dead lover (Rickman) one day reappears in her flat; the plot may seem a bit stale in light of last year's Oscar-nominated hit Ghost, but many found it a good deal more inventive.

At the Berlin Film Festival earlier this year, Rickman was seen in Stephen Poliakoff's Close My Eyes, the British playwright and director's film about a man, played by Rickman, whose wife is having an affair with her brother. Last spring, the actor also starred as a government interrogator in Closet Land, a chilling two-character film about an author of children's books who has been summoned for questioning because her latest story is thought to be subversive. Reminiscent of Kafka's The Trial but not nearly so effective, the film met with largely poor reviews. "When we were making the film, I thought, 'This could be too relentless,'" Rickman noted. "I mean, there wasn't a single joke in it."

Trained as a stage actor, Rickman didn't begin making films until 1987, when the director and producer of Die Hard saw him in Liaisons on Broadway and promptly cast him in their film opposite Bruce Willis. "All sorts of people asked me why I wanted to be in a movie like Die Hard," says the actor, whose follow-up films - Norman Jewison's January Man, and Quigley Down Under with Tom Selleck - were short-lived. "Doing Die Hard was a big holiday for me because I didn't have to go onstage every night. It was also something I'd never done before, and I like all that in life."

Die Hard grossed $80 million and stamped Rickman, then 42, as a bankable movie actor. But when Les Liaisons Dangereuses was released the following year as Dangerous Liaisons, the film featured an all-American cast, with John Malkovich in the role Rickman had originated. The minute the subject is raised, Rickman cuts it short: "I haven't seen the film, and I don't like to talk about it because it's in the past now," he says.

Rickman put in a grueling two-year stint in Liaisons, first in repertory at the Royal Shakespeare Company, then in the West End, and finally on Broadway, where he did eight shows a week for six months and was onstage for virtually the entire three hours. "Valmont was a cruel part to play for a long time, and I don't think it was entirely healthy for me," he says now. "It would take a lot to get me to do that again. Valmont is so self-destructive, yet he doesn't know it, so you have to play a lie all the time. I wasn't very pleasant to live with during that period."

Though the original Lacros novel was written in 1782, Rickman was all too aware of its contemporary resonance. "I thought it was interesting that the audiences hated the Marquise and let the Vicomte off the hook," he says. "People still allow Valmonts in this world. Of course, our job was to not let the audience off the hook, because the play is about the audience. We had to get them to love these two monsters, and it was fascinating to watch that kind of evil being so entertaining an erotic. There we were, hardly taking off any clothes, and, as a friend put it, there wasn't a dry seat in the house."

Christopher Hampton recalls that it was Rickman's mesmerizing quality that convinced him that the actor was ideally suited to play the Vicomte. At the time, Rickman was well known in the profession "as a coming man," says Hampton, who had seen him in several productions at the Royal Court, but not to the general public. "Alan was able to transfix not only the viewer, but he also seemed to have a kind of hypnotic effect on the people he was playing his scenes with." Hampton, in fact, had so wanted to see Rickman in the role that he purposely turned in his script to coincide with the RSC's cyclical hiring of new actors. That way, he says, he would be able to suggest Rickman, who was then not a member of the company.

Rickman didn't turn to acting until he was 26, when he was already established as a graphic artist with his own firm. "there was an inevitability about my being an actor since about the age of 7, but there were other roads that had to be traveled first," explains the first-generation Londoner, son of an Irish factory worker father and Welsh mother. When he finally decided it was possible to pursue an acting career, he went to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and got by with free-lance design jobs and stints as a dresser in the evenings. (The highlight, he says, was a production of the John Osborne play West of Suez, which gave him the chance to stand in the wings nightly and study his hero, Ralph Richardson.) Rickman later joined the RSC, where he performed both classic and contemporary plays before leaving to work on the fringe for nearly seven years. Following his successful turn in The Barchester Chronicles, he returned to the RSC, where Hampton was on hand to help him land the plum role of Valmont.

While Rickman acknowledges that his growing renown has opened important doors, the business of publicity is something he approaches with a great deal of discomfort. "Celebrity is a minefield," he says, adding, a little naively, that he finds it curious that "so much newsprint is devoted to the lives and opinions of actors. I'm still really unsure about how much of that is relevant."

Home for Rickman is still London, where he lives with his girlfriend, an economist. "It's been more like a trampoline lately," he admits. "I love to travel and I don't have children, so there is a certain freedom." For the first time in a year, Rickman is taking a break from moviemaking and this month returns to the stage in Tango at the End of Winter, which opens August 8 at the King's Theatre in Edinburgh and then moves to the Picadilly in London's West End. Written by Kunio Shimizu, adapted by Peter Barnes, and directed by Yukio Ninagawa, the darkly humorous Tango centers on Rickman's character, Sei, a successful Japanese actor who, feeling his life is empty, tries to recover something of his roots by returning to the town where he grew up and where his family still runs the local movie house.

But after that, there's no telling what Rickman may be up to.

Rickman may have been well-known to a select theatre-going audience, and for his role as another villain, the comic but odious Obadiah Slope in the BBC series The Barchester Chronicles, but the success of Die Hard, his first film, gave him a different level of fame. "I wasn't prepared for the reaction. I flew to New York for a preview and the audience just sttod up and cheered and threw things at the screen. I walked into that cinema and I could have been just someone with a ticket, but when I walked out, I couldn't get to the car. My girlfriens and I went to Anguilla at Christmas and you're on this little West Indian island and everyone knows who you are. You're not Alan, you're the guy in Die Hard." Yet Rickman has played decent characters - he went straight from Die Hard to a film called The January Man. "I was playing someone perfectly nice in that - Kevin's eccentric next door neighbour," he says. And for all the menace and piercing intensity he projects on both stage and screen, in person Alan Rickman is diffuse, amiable, tousled and gently bear-like. His voice remains a remarkable instrument - deep, soft and relaxed to the point of langour, with notes of musical delicacy. He gives an impression of having to crank his vocal chords into motion in order to answer my questions.

But in spite of the good guys he's played, people tend to remember his lustful Angelo in Measure for Measure and his title role in the stage version of Mephisto. Even his benevolent characters display hints of darkness, and his bad characters make evil sinuously intelligent and captivating. A female admirer of Rickman's describes the actor's unusual appeal this way: "He isn't obviously handsome, almost ugly, but when he played Valmont something about his passion and intelligence made him unbelievably sexy."

By his own account, after 500 performances, the intensity of this character, who destroys other people and then himself, almost consumed him. "It stopped being a play in a way, and became an event - especially on Broadway. People came with such high expectations that a mountain had to be climbed every night. You are up there manipulating the audience in the way Valmont manipulates the characters. And when you're playing someone as self-destructive as that night after night, it can't help but to get to you to some extent. The body doesn't always know when it's lying. You know from the neck up, but you send the rest of you actually through it."

Stepping from that to a major film in Hollywood was like a holiday. "It was like taking a vacuum cleaner to your brain but switching it the other way round so that it just blew everything out. It was good to work in a completely different way. Valmont had such a complicated psyche, you couldn't say that about Hans Gruber - his psyche was: 'Give me you money - now.' "

Rickman came into acting late. He went to RADA when he was 26 years old after he had first studied design at Chelsea and the Royal College of Art, and worked as a Soho-based graphics designer. He has no regrets about his late start in the profession. He speaks with a cool sense of having arrived when he was emotionally ready to deal with its pressures and rewards. Faced with a question about being a celebrity, he answers: "I enjoy what happens when you read a script and as an actor, if you're happy enough and open enough on a rehearsal floor or on a film set, something happens between you and the script. I enjoy that, I enjoy the nuts and bolts. As for the other stuff, you start to notice that if you get into a limousine that it's only there for as long as you're selling the movie."

Not much has been seen of Rickman in the past couple of years - but now he is becoming visible in a variety of roles. The different levels of his success allow him to take a peculiar variety of work from informal workshops to high-earning roles in major Hollywood films. When I met him he was padding around his fiendishly tidy flat in London's Westbourne Grove preparing to leave for LA for the opening of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, starring Kevin Costner - and himself as the Sheriff of Nottingham.

About the film, which was shot in England, reputedly amid much conflict between director, star and studio, he speaks vaguely. Is his Sheriff of Nottingham another suave villain? "Not at all," replies Rickman, recalling a more theatrical, spluttering, flamboyantly wicked villain than the cerebral manipulators we are used to from him.

Rickman also stars in the recently released film Truly, Madly, Deeply written and directed by Anthony Minghella. Co-starring with Juliet Stevenson and Michael Maloney, Rickman plays a dead man returning to look after his ex-lover. Though produced by the BBC, the film has opened in the United States to much praise: "It's been described as a thinking man's Ghost," he says.

And opening this month is Close My Eyes, Stephen Poliakoff's tale of star-crossed lovers who happen to be brother and sister. In what otherwise looks like a glossy TV commercial for incest, Rickman is a welcome astringent presence as the cuckolded husband Sinclair, an egnimatic City whizz kid who reads Proust and is by turns sinister and affable. Rickman used his design background to collaborate closely with the costume and productiton designer to make it impossible to put Sinclair into any rigid social pigeon hole. "I didn't want people to learn anything about him through where he lived or who his friends were." It's a remarkable performance that adds a dimension to a character who might seem thin on the page.

But potentially his most interesting appearance is in the play Tango at the End of Winter, which is transferring to the West End after a run at the Edinburgh Festival. Tango is the first production in English of the great Japanese director Ninegawah, and Rickman's first stage appearance since he left Les Liaisons Dangereuses four years ago.

That's not to say that Rickman has been totally absent from the theatre during the years since Les Liaisons - during his spare time he has also been directing Ruby Wax's stage show.

How does he keep control over such a disparate career?

Stretched out in a chair in a London rehearsal studio, the leonine actor certainly doesn't look shorter. And, his unprompted defense of L.A. notwithstanding, he doesn't seem displeased to be stuck in his native city for a while. Nor should he. This is the day of the British Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves in Nottingham, with fireworks at Nottingham Castle afterwards. The morning newspapers abound with stories gleefully recounting the offscreen fireworks set off by Rickman's scene-stealing performance as the dastardly Sheriff of Nottingham. While Kevin Costner's rather wooden turn as the righteous Robin left critics and many moviegoers a bit underwhelmed, Rickman's gleefully wicked villain became the summer's most talked-about performance - and that was after the film's producers trimmed some of Rickman's best scenes.

But Rickman, who is in his early 40s, has not returned home to wallow in his hour as conquering movie star: He is here to rehearse a play, his first since his portrayal of the arch-seducer Valmont in Les Liaisons Dangereuses propelled him to fame and film offers four years ago. Rickman will play the leading role in Kunio Shimizu's Tango at the End of Winter, directed by Japan's top theater director, Yukio Ninagawa. The production will debut at Scotland's Edinburgh Festival this month and later transfer to London's West End.

Rickman's decision to abandon Hollywood for the stage just as his film career is soaring has left his American friends baffled. "Coming back to do a play at a Scottish festival must seem very perverse," he admits in his rich baritone. "Even I thought I was mad. A lot of the time I hate the theater," he goes on. "You think, I have to climb Mount Everest, again, tonight. Oh, the theater is a scary place to be." But Rickman never really doubted his decision: "There was just this inner voice in me saying, 'It's time to go onstage.' There are particular muscles which go flabby if you don't use them."

Rickman's new workout place is a huge film studio bearing the play's elaborate set, a skeletal re-creation of a movie house. Tango takes place in an old cinema, where an actor-Rickman-returns to explore his past and his psyche, having lost the nerve to go onstage. "That's the thudding irony," says Rickman, with masochistic delight.

In rehearsal, the actors appear to have taken their sartorial cue from the Japanese director, who is dressed totally in black. Ninagawa speaks no English, so an interpreter shadows him. Wearing black jeans and T-shirt under a loose gray jacket, Rickman sits at the back of the stage, his head in his hands, as the scene begins. Then, to a seductive tango, he takes the hand of costar Beatie Edney, and the man who was so comically unappealing in Robin Hood exudes a feline sexiness. The couple dances, their legs, arms, and bodies moving in balletic unison. As Rickman pulls Edney toward him, she entwines her body around his. It is a moment of palpable eroticism.

The rehearsal continues with stops and starts until, in the final scene, young actors appear from every corner, waving and cheering--a commotion the director means to symbolize the spirit of youth. Though Rickman reveres the director--"to work with Ninagawa is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity," he gushes--he is concerned. He raises his hand. "Just one question," he says. "Are we supposed to like those young people?"

Through the interpreter, the director replies affirmatively.

"It's just that in England, we have these things called football hooligans...," Rickman says, and the cast and crew collapse with laughter. "And I think that's slightly what I'm seeing."

The phenomenon of drunken soccer fans is translated into Japanese---with difficulty, since such behavior is almost unimaginable in that country--and Ninagawa ponders it. "No, they're not hooligans," he replies. Rickman smiles his quizzical half-smile--senses he still has his doubts--and work resumes.

Rickman isn't always so reserved; he has a reputation for fiercely held opinions about his roles. Director Howard Davies recalls "moments when Alan and I both wanted to strangle each other during rehearsals for Les Liaisons. He's such a perfectionist, it can be painful. There were times I didn't think Alan`s character would survive his surgical dissection." "It's like directing a director," says Anthony Minghella, writer-director of the current film Truly, Madly, Deeply, starring Rickman as a dead cellist who returns Ghost-style to haunt his love. "He keeps you on your toes, and you have to learn not to be threatened by that. He's very concerned with appearance--what he wears."

For his part as the smooth-talking terrorist Hans Gruber in Die Hard (1988), Rickman's notions about how the character should look wound up shaping the direction of the smash movie. "When I first met Bruce Willis, I thought it would be interesting if these characters could have a mutual respect for each other, even making each other laugh at times. Instead of looking like a terrorist wearing a T-shirt and a windbreaker, why not put on a suit? That made us opposites. As an idea it had repercussions: It made it possible for [Willis' character and mine] to meet, and I could pretend to be one of my own hostages."

As Sheriff of Nottingham, Rickman wore black, again his own idea. "It was a cartoon in primary colors," he says. "I didn't want the film to disappear into all that historical business. I thought about Richard III and a rock guitarist and I said, 'Let's make it raven, so you know who's coming.'"

Rickman's sense of style may come from his years in art school. As the second-eldest child of a large West London family, he trained to be a graphic designer but at 26 abruptly changed course to go to the prestigious Royal Academy of the Dramatic Arts. He spent years working through the ranks of local repertory companies and the London theater scene until 1985, when he joined the Royal Shakespeare Company. That year he played leading roles in several Shakespeare plays and the Vicomte de Valmont in Les Liaisons Dangereuses. The play started life in Stratford's tiny Other Place theater and ended up on Broadway, winning several awards. Rickman played the role for over 500 performances, but when director Stephen Frears cast his film version, he chose John Malkovich instead. Rickman was disappointed to lose the part he felt he had helped invent. Even today, when asked to discuss it, he cuts off that line of questioning with a shake of the head.

Rickman's old friend Juliet Stevenson, who appears opposite him in Truly, Madly, Deeply, describes the actor as a cross between a panther and a camel: "Alan has this wonderful, silky physicality; he plays cunningly with words and moments. And he has this extraordinary stamina-like a camel."

Stamina is the quality Rickman values most in himself as an actor. "I don't know where it comes from. I don't eat the right food, I'm not a monk, and I'm very gregarious. But I'm not stupid." During the filming of Robin Hood, director Kevin Reynolds learned to appreciate that endurance. "It was a very tough shoot and Alan was always endlessly, wonderfully inventive and helpful," Reynolds says. "The flamboyance of the sheriff--that's Alan; he made up several of his lines, and it was Alan's idea to push Marian's legs apart in the rape scene, which made it comical rather than hideous. He's my favorite part of the film; what else can I say?"

"Kevin Reynolds did let me off the leash," Rickman says. But the very vividness of his portrayal, next to Costner's Robin, created a problem (see "The Battle of Sherwood Forest," EW #71, June 21). After preview audiences said that they preferred Rickman's character over Costner's, the producers ordered Reynolds to make changes. In the end, Reynolds quit the project. Rickman is politic about the whole affair, but he does express a few regrets. He particularly misses a subplot involving his relationship with the old hag Mortianna (Geraldine McEwan). "Unhappily, the scene in which Geraldine tells me she's my mother, with the two of us sailing way over the top into another stratosphere and the crew howling with laughter, ended up on the cutting-room floor," he says. "That was a shame."

And what about the rumors of tension between Rickman and the movie's beleaguered star? Rickman flashes his long-suffering look. "I'm in a no-win situation," he says. "All this stuff about antagonism on the set is absolute nonsense. Costner worked bloody hard, and he was incredibly generous to the other actors. But he's been placed on a mountaintop with a slippery slope, and there are some malicious people in this business."

If Rickman needs a break from the pressures and politics of acting, he finds it at home in West London with his long-standing partner, Rima Horton, a Labour district council-woman whom he met when they were both in their early 20s and members of an amateur dramatic society. "She is the ultimate leveler," he says. "When I whine about my work, she'll fire back at me some well-aimed sentence about the homeless."

On stage, Rickman is known for his serious dramatic work, but movie audiences now know him best for pop entertainments like Die Hard and Robin Hood. He refuses to indulge in condescending comparisons between the two worlds: "I love the act of filming," he says. "I'm like a child with a new toy. I'd like to take what I can from Hollywood, and whatever it is one wants to do in England, and put them together."

But despite all the acclaim that Rickman enjoyed for his roles as Hans Gruber, the suave terrorist of Die Hard and the lock'-jawed Obadiah Slope in the BBc's Barchester Chronicles, he is keen to leave his bad-guy image behind.

"You play one of those parts remotely successfully," he says, "and before you know it you've got this label around your neck. And a label is not how I see myself at all. I'm as neurotic as the next person when it comes to being asked constantly to produce qualities which actuallly have nothing to do with you. One longs for a director with a sense of imagination rather than being filed away under 'blond, uptight' or 'dark, sulky' or whatever."

In his two most recent films, both due for releasw this month--Stephen Poliakoff's Close My Eyes (for Channel 4) and Anthony Minghella's Truly, Madly, Deeply--Rickman shatters the mold that was threatening to entomb him. Both films enphatically demonstrates his screen versatility.

In Close My Eyes, Rickman plays a wealthy husband who discovers his wife is having an affair with her own brother. In Minghella's resonant Truly, Madly, Deeply, he plays a romantic, thinking-man's ghost. A gentle, droll and intelligent part, it reunites Rickman with Juliet Stevenson, who played opposite him in Les Liaisons.

"It was an opportunity to find out where life and work briefly challenge each other," he explains. "I've worked very closely with Juliet in many productions. In fact I think we performed the first oral sex scene on radio in another of Minghella's plays, appropriately entitled A Little Like Drowning."

To complete a busy month, Rickman is also preparing for a prodigious return to the London stage. He plays the lead in Yukio Ninagawa's production of Kunio Shimizu's Tango at the End of Winter, a modern Japanese play Ninagawa directed for the 1988 Tokyo season. It's an intruing departure for this near legendary Japanese director, well-known for his ability to cross-fertilise cultures and demolish barriers between theatrical forms. Tango at the End of winter is Ninagawa's first London production of a contemporary Japanese play after flirtations with Macbeth, Medea, The Tempest and Suicide for Love. The director was keen to explore a more naturalistic approach-- hence his debut with a European cast.

"It's a very hard play to articulate about because it touches all sorts of nerve ends," he says. "It does have a narrative but as Ninagawa says: 'We find out about this play by doing it.'" Shimizu's script centres on an acting community in Japan which values European traditions--rather in the manner, I suspect, that Ninagawa chooses to interpret his classical Japanese productions. Curiously, however, the focus is ona particularly Japanese notion of an ageing leading actor (Rickman) who gets to 40 and panics about his fading career because that's when, in Japanese tradition, his power diminishes. Japanese actresses can go on forever, it seems, but the appeal of their actors fades with time. Unlike the RSC's production of Mephisto (Rickman again played an actor), which was firmly rooted in politics, this production concentrates on the actor's personal dreams and nightmares. It is full of those donagerously indulgent games actors like to play with themselves.

"One of the concerns I had about this role was that the play is from a culture which puts its actors on pedestals," says Rickman. "Delving around in an actor's psyche and paranoia is therefore in intrinsically interesting activity. This, of course, is not true in Britain, where actors spend a lot of time working on rubbish tips, standing in dole queues and on whatever the opposite of a pedestal is. But I hope the audience will see the play as more than just applicable to actors. It's also about lying, and how close acting is to madness. It's also a curious thing to be doing becuase the actor I play has not been on stage for three years. I haven't been on stage for four.

To Rickman, who is quickly establishing himself as one of the finest British actors of his generation, one key to a good performance is paying attention to those instinctive thoughts.

"Susan Sarandon said a wonderful thing to me once on the set of The January Man," he recalled during a lunch interview last week. "She saw me pacing back and forth before we were about to do a scene, while she was just standing to the side. She said, 'Don't think about it too much; that was my mistake.'

"In many ways she's right. There are times when you do have to think about it quite a lot, but there are a lot of times when you should just do it. You have to let the animal part of an actor have its head."

It's a strategy that has worked for Rickman, who has become a favorite actor of American film critics during the past several years.

His vivid performances in two Hollywood hits - he was Bruce Willis' nemesis in the original Die Hard and the Monty Pythonesque Sheriff of Nottingham in this year's Robin Hood - have made him a familiar face to audiences around the world.

He continues to do most of his work in his native Britain, including two films released this year: Truly, Madly, Deeply and Close My Eyes, a drama about an incestuous relationship that opened last weekend.

In person, he comes across as intelligent, reasonably introspective and a bit of a curmudgeon.

Asked whether he derives pleasure from his work, he replied, "I'm not sure. It's a compulsion. You kind of realize 'This is what I was supposed to do.' "

Good acting, he said, "is a mystery, but I know it has a lot to do with not minding what you reveal. Not being defensive, not using craft as a way of showing off; not keeping it on display, behind a cage.

"Acting is mostly about listening," he added. "If you just focus in on what the other person is saying, acting takes care of itself to quite a large extent."

Whether playing a crazed terrorist or a subdued cellist, Rickman always brings a welcome specificity to his characters; one always feels he is playing a specific individual rather than a type. Talking with him confirms that is his intent.

"The aim is never to generalize," he said. "That's your job (as an actor), really. It's about seeing (a character) in three dimensions as much as possible.

"If you can't see him in three dimensions - and you can't, always, certainly in the movies - then it's about dealing in as much ambiguity as possible, so the audience has their own relationship with the character. It's about pulling the rug out from people's preconceptions."

Rickman has done that well enough to attract considerable praise - including a number of reviews that said he "stole" the recent Robin Hood from Kevin Costner. That particular comment irritates him.

"I think it's just a lazy phrase," he said. "I haven't seen Cape Fear, but I've heard the film is 'stolen' by this young girl (Juliette Lewis, who plays Nick Nolte's daughter). What does this mean?

"That means the character is properly realized. How wonderful that there's a young girl who's got the concentrated energy to be up there with Robert de Niro.

"I don't think (acting) is about competition," he added. "It shouldn't be made into that. I'm glad if people like one's work, but why turn it into something else?"

Besides, these critics are far happier with Rickman's work than the actor is himself. Asked if he is satisfied by his performances, he shook his head emphatically.

"It's a nightmare to sit and watch a film that I'm in," he said. "There's a horrible inexcapability to it. I keep thinking, 'That wasn't what I was doing! I didn't sound like that. I didn't walk like that.' "

So the huge gulf between intentions and results is. . .?

"Huge."

Despite this, while making a film, Rickman never watches his "dailies" - the footage that was shot during the previous day's work.

"You would start to censor yourself, I would think," he said. "You'd be watching yourself and say, 'Is that what I do?' Then on the set you'd be thinking of what you saw in the dailies, and you'd think, "Oh, I mustn't do that.' Suddenly everything would be slightly constrained."

And those little voices wouldn't be heard.

His final words on a recent morning as he wagged a finger: "No villains. No bad guys."

Consider capturing him on paper a "test," said Rickman, who looks more California beach boy than esteemed Shakespearean actor. "See if you can write an entire article without using the words 'villain' or 'bad guy' once." Impossible.

Two of his widely-seen and well-loved characters: the terrorist villain in Die Hard and the bad-guy Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves.

"A journalist's lasso," he calls the lumping of his more than 20 years of acting (he won't give his age) into simply "the guy who plays villains."

Take a look at his newest offering, he urges. Close My Eyes, a movie about incest now in limited release, opens in New York in January. It casts him as the warm, humorous husband of a woman in love with her brother.

"I like the idea that any film raises a few eyebrows," he says. "It's intriguing, isn't it, that you could make a film about wife-battering and nobody would talk about whether eyebrows would be raised. But as soon as you talk about something that's actually a passionate relationship between two individuals - and it's something that happens."

He has just come from doing a Japanese play in London, and from making a movie in Pittsburgh with Bull Durham's Tim Robbins.

London-raised Rickman is the only one in his family to go into the theater, he first felt the acting "sensation" at 7, when he had the lead in the school play, King Grizzly Beard.

Although he spent some time as a graphic artist, acting was "inevitable," he says. "I knew it would happen. It was just a question of other things to deal with, other voices in me screaming for attention until that one could be dealt with. It screamed loudest and had been there longest."

Traveling is what he likes to do when he's not acting - the Australian outback is the place he was "most affected by in recent years."

And thrills make him happy. Roller coaster rides, to be specific. "Everything falls away."

The best? Colussus at Magic Mountain in valencia, Calif., north of Los Angeles.

And he loves to daydream: "Give me a window and I'll stare out it."

His long-time love - Rima Horton, a teacher and politician. They're not married: "I think every relationship should be allowed to have its own rules." Secret to staying together?

"She's tolerant," he says slowly thinking. "She's incredibly tolerant. Unbelievably tolerant. Possibly a candidate for sainthood."

Rickman's performances always come with a jolt. To complicated characters like the Vicomte de Valmont in Les Liaisons Dangereuses, which he created on the West End and on Broadway, Rickman brings the shock of clarity. And to the memorable evil characters in his repertoire, like the Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves or the international terrorist Hans Gruber in Die Hard, Rickman brings the astonishment of humanity. "The best thing anybody said about Die Hard was 'We really wanted you to get away with it.' I think that's great. It meant that some ambiguity had been introduced into the good guy/bad guy Hollywood action movie. I like the fact that people got confused."

Rickman exudes the irony he purveys; it gives him an aura of mystery and danger. Talking backstage at London's Piccadilly Theatre during his run in the Japanese play Tango at the End of Winter, Rickman watches over his words, which rumble slowly out of him in a clipped clear voice tinged at once with authority and ennui. Both the cramped dressing room and Rickman are unprepossessing and make no concessions to comfort. "I like getting ambiguous responses from people," he says, enjoying the drama of his feistiness. "I'm not up there in a glass cage to be admired and for people to be enchanted by me. I like to mix it up. Audiences shouldn't be passive creatures. They come to work."

On stage and off, Rickman doesn't easily give himself away. He doesn't have what Charlie Chaplin called "that come-hither thing." Instead, Rickman teases the world with his maverick intelligence. "Thank God for Alan Rickman," wrote Anthony Lane in London's Independent on Sunday, comparing him to that select band of English actors - James Mason, Robert Donat, and George Sanders - who are "sensual, unhurried, turning everyone else into jitterbugs. Their villains are played like lovers, and vice versa; you don't trust them for a minute, but they won't give you a minute to look away."

Rickman thinks on his feet, and he has the ability to convey thought, which makes both audiences and personal acquaintances wait on his words. Tall, with reddish hair graying at the temples, a nose aspiring to aquiline, and a crenulated row of lower teeth that bite hard on consonants to give postures of flattery and fury their special piquancy, Rickman compels by the fierceness of his contradictory nature. "I'm a Piscan. In every area of my life complete opposites are at work all the time," he says. "I stagger myself sometimes. Who is this person? The 'you' who can't organize picking up the laundry - and you know that 'you' very well - watches the other one in a rehearsal situation and says, 'Who is this person who has all these ideas and all this invention?' There's a very, very instinctive person and a very, very practical person. It depends on what time of day it is, I think."

Like all outstanding performers, Rickman has the ability to be properly sensational. He has a love of rich language and an orotund voice capable of delivering verbal fun and ferment with equal musical power. "I am my own instrument," he says. Rickman also knows how to exploit both his irregular looks and his fine sound to take the focus of a scene and make it memorable - as he did in what he calls his one-eyebrow-raised, one-nostril-flared performances in Die Hard and Robin Hood. "Your Mr. Takagi, alas, will not be joining us for the rest of his life," he said with chilling sibilance to the assembled group at the company Christmas party in Die Hard - having just executed their boss. And as the seething Sheriff of Nottingham, Rickman got a chance to put his full lips around such comic fulminations as "No more merciful beheadings!"

In his latest film, the political satire Bob Roberts, Rickman is Lukas Hart III, venal campaign manager to the eponymous Roberts, a reactionary folk singer who gets elected to the Senate. Roberts is played by Tim Robbins, who also directed the film. "The people behind candidates tend to be transparent," says Robbins. "I was interested in casting someone who was a cross between Dr. Strangelove and William Casey. I don't like safe actors, which is why I chose Alan, who has the courage to make bold choices and chew on the scenery a little bit. He's also got a whimsy to him when he plays evil that's very seductive. I'd like to play opposite him in a movie about competing psychopaths. I'd like to try and out-psychopath Alan Rickman." The movie was a sensation at this year's Cannes Film Festival, where the critic for the trade paper Variety described Rickman as "ferociously good."

Rickman sees himself as "a quite serious actor who doesn't mind being ridiculously comic"; indeed, he takes his characters to the brink of vulgarity. In Les Liaisons, vulgarity was at the heart of the game of sexual manipulation. "The whole essence of the play was surface: dirt under polished fingernails," says Rickman. The role earned him a Tony award nomination in 1987 and brought a new amperage to his star and to his reputation for intellectual menace.

RICKMAN, WHO LIVES IN WEST LONDON with Rima Horton, an economics teacher who recently made an unsuccessful run for Parliament, did not hit upon his life's work until the relatively late age of 26. He characterizes himself as "a dreamy kid," the second of four children whose father - a decorator - died of cancer when he was eight. At first Rickman gravitated to the visual arts. After attending the Latymer Upper School in West London, to which he won a scholarship at the age of 11, he enrolled at the Chelsea School of Art and then the Royal College of Art. He parlayed his art studies into a successful Soho graphics-design business. Rickman reclines on the gray dressing room sofa and pictures the pillar-box on Berwick Street outside his design firm in Soho where he mailed his application to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts (RADA). "My life changed the moment I posted that letter," he says. There's a voice inside you that tells you what you should do. I'd been doing some amateur theater. Our design group was very successful, but I could also see that it was just going to repeat itself. And then that voice came up and said, 'It's now or never to change.'"

Rickman did two years at RADA, earning his way as a dresser for Sir Ralph Richardson and Nigel Hawthorne and winning RADA's highest performing award, the Bancroft Medal. But Rickman's real reward was psychological. "Most of our lives, we function with a big divide between here and here," he says, drawing an imaginary line between his head and torso. "When I went to RADA, my body was saying, "About time." It was being used, and I was aware that I was where I was supposed to be, doing what I was supposed to do, and just in time. In acting, you can't hang about too long."

Rickman spent four years working the length and breadth of England in repertory before joining the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1979. During those journeyman years, in addition to suffering the embarrassment of playing a squirrel in a Christmas pantomime and having to sing "She's Pooped Without Her Porridge," he appeared in a wide range of rigorous roles, in such plays as Jarry's Ubu Rex and Brecht's Man is Man (at the Bristol Old Vic), as well as Ibsen's When We Dead Awaken (at the Crucible Theatre, Sheffield).

Now in his mid-40s, Rickman is bankable on both sides of the Atlantic, and at a time when England's entertainment industry is on its uppers, he is flush with offers of stage and screen work. But his ascent has not been effortless. "Some actors have opportunities and shapes given to them. Not me," says Rickman. "I've had to guide my career and seize any opportunity that came my way." Indeed, his commercial success in Hollywood has put him at a curious crossroads. "The Sheriff and Hans Gruber were fun to do, but they're cartoon characters. You press that button when required, but it's not the sum of what I've done, or what I can do." As an antidote to typecasting and the public's perception of him, Rickman turned up last year in a couple of highly ambitious, low-budget English films. He was the sardonic cello-playing ghost haunting his mourning lover, Juliet Stevenson, in Anthony Minghella's Truly Madly Deeply. And writer-director Stephen Poliakoff wrote the urbane, intellectual Sinclair in Close My Eyes for Rickman, who managed, amid this overheated tale of incest, to keep the audience's attention to his own restrained perplexity.

If American film audiences haven't yet taken the full measure of Rickman's abilities, Rickman has the measure of America, which exhilarates him. "When you get off the plane in England, you've got to shrug a little bit, hug yourself into your coat a bit more," he says. "I stand straighter in L.A. It's something about how the English are brought up, and what we're told we can expect. Maybe it's because I drive a car in L.A., and I don't here. I feel more in charge of myself. I wouldn't dream of being out there as an actor looking for work. To actually say 'OK, I'm going to pitch a tent here and wave a flag saying EMPLOY ME' - I couldn't do that. But I enjoy being there: It's disgusting and wonderful. Like going to Dunkin' Donuts for lunch every day."

STYLE IS METABOLISM, and Rickman's edgy fascination with extremes reflects the curious mixture of repression and anger that percolates beneath the surface of his cool facade. "Oh, yeah, I'm angry," says Rickman, who attributes his bumptiousness to his Celtic gene pool, a mixture of Irish and Welsh. "I'm passionately angry at this country. Twelve years of a Tory government has left the theater in tatters. The infrastructure has been eroded. Where are the new playwrights? The new fringe theaters? The serious plays on the West End? There are no great playwrights coming up, as far as I can see. I want England to wake up."

Rickman's own contributions to the theater include playing a benign Svengali to the American comedienne Ruby Wax, whose one-woman show he directed last spring on the West End. Wax, a brazen, caustic motor mouth, has had several popular TV series in England (four specials culled from a recent one are currently airing in this country on the A&E cable channel). She met Rickman in 1977 at Sheffield's Crucible Theatre, and it was he who helped her create and shape her comic persona. "His sense of comedy is outstanding," she says. "He's given me a kind of class that I never would have had." One might have predicted what Rickman likes about her: "Ruby is so reckless," he says admiringly, "and so daring."

"The reason I don't like talking to most journalists is their desire to reduce everything to a one-page article and to make you compare things." Rickman says. "You find yourself forced to answer the question, when really what you want to say is: 'Nothing is like anything else and I'm not thinking of anything else I've done, just the job in hand.' So a slight prison is created."

It is not only journalists who find Rickman something of a challenge. After three days of non-stop luvviness on the set of his latest film, Mesmer, with the cast chorusing, "He's so generous, so kind, such a unique presence", someone finally admitted that this was not the whole story. "He's famously tricky to work with," says the actor Simon McBurney.

"When he's preparing on the set there isn't much communication," he explains. "Everyone does something different to get the juices flowing and with Alan it's to find fault: 'This isn't right, that's no good.' He's aloof on the set, which has led to friction with the director. But then you need that kind of thing in the creative process."

"He can seem difficult", says Stephen Poliakoff, who directed Rickman in Close My Eyes, "but I've known many more troublesome. He is concerned about the way he looks, like American actors, but without their competitive nature. Although he steals scenes, I don't think he sets out to."

Roger Spottiswoode, the director of Mesmer, to be released here in the autumn, agrees that Rickman is "not the easiest person to persuade to try out new ideas; he'll test you before he accepts them." For instance, Spottiswoode wanted the character of Mesmer, a tortured visionary who understood alternative therapy 200 years in advance, to be more emotionally involved with the character of a young blind girl he attempts to cure. One of his ideas was for Rickman to lick the girl's eyelids, but the actor objected, perhaps because he felt it crossed some undefined ethical divide between dramatic necessity and gratuitous lechery. "There are always discussions about whether an actor is arguing for the character or projecting himself on to it", Spottiswoode says, "but Rickman will take real chances with his character being hard to like. He became the character during filming, so when there were arguments it was as though he was talking as Mesmer: brilliant and Jesuitical, charming and full of hubris."

IN THE END, Rickman got his way. His ability to contribute to the process of character development is part of his perceived worth as an actor: he has an elaborately conceived notion of what is psychologically feasible and convincing for his character to do. It is a wider perspective, say his supporters, than most other actors would offer, encompassing freakish outbursts, passion and sullenness in preference to any straightforward interpretation.

"I need time to go home and find out who I am," he said at one point, suggesting the depth of his immersion in the role. "Confusion over your identity is common to every actor," says the writer and director Anthony Minghella. "You pretend to be someone else, and so your homework is to slough off your part and put on your own skin."

If there is more than one Alan Rickman, there are also different facets to his talent. He was propelled into movies following his stage performance as Valmont in Les Liaisons Dangereuses, for which he won a Tony award in America. Although he was passed over for Stephen Frears's version of the play, Rickman was rewarded with the role of Hans Gruber in Die Hard. In this film, the RADA-trained actor found himself playing the villain in a farcically violent and melodramatic Bruce Willis vehicle.

The menace he had worked up in years of stage performance, from the fringe to the RSC, transmitted itself with equal force on screen. He went on to play the Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, eclipsing the putative star, Kevin Costner, with a combination of outrageous camp and vicious anger. In this role he won a Bafta award for best supporting actor.

But outside mainstream Hollywood films, there has been a very different, more complex body of work: the lover who returned from the dead to console the grieving Juliet Stevenson in Minghella's Truly Madly Deeply, the husband cuckolded buy his wife's affair with her brother in Close My Eyes and a political fixer in Tim Robbins's satire Bob Roberts.

So far, despite lavish praise for his film appearances, he has never taken the lead role. There has always been a central character - Willis in Die Hard, Stevenson in Truly Madly Deeply, Costner in Robin Hood and Saskia Reeves in Close My Eyes - against whom he can play off his peculiar brand of demonic or self-absorbed brio. "He had a long wait to become a leading actor", Poliakoff says, "which doesn't reflect well on British directors."

Rickman's strongest suit in Hollywood remains the pantomime villain given a chillingly believable streak of charm. But for the British theatre-goer, the genuine article, in the flesh, has become an eagerly anticipated event. Tango at the End of Winter in 1991 captivated audiences with Rickman’s quiet, logically argued madness. His Hamlet, at London's Riverside Theatre in 1992, was dangerous, unlikable and sold out its run. He was, said the critics, mesmeric.

Franz Anton Mesmer was celebrated in 18th-century Vienna as a miracle healer, treating seemingly incurable cases with physical touch, hypnotism, electric currents and magnetism. The medical establishment was scandalised and Mesmer was eventually exiled to France, where he became a darling of the aristocracy.

Since Rickman's opinion of most scripts offered him is that they are "like junk food, things to keep the cinema full", he was keen to do something of substance. A screen play by Dennis Potter added eroticism and mystery to an already cracking tale, and the producers Lance Reynolds and Wieland Shultz-Keil had drawn together a $9.5-millio budget from Canadian, British and European sources, partly on the strength of Rickman's commitment to the project.

SO THE MITTEL-EUROPEAN winter found him in a vast Hungarian palace, shooting a scene in which a young Viennese woman collapses at the piano and Mesmer - ignoring protestations from the watching nobility - tends to her by rubbing her breasts as she lies on top of the instrument.

"What's interesting about the process of acting", he says afterwards, "is how often you don't know what you're doing. The acting touches nerves you have absolutely no control over." He still finds it traumatic getting up on stage, a telling admission from an actor who seems to radiate poise. "I get stage fright and gremlins in my head saying: 'You're going to forget your lines.'"

Poliakoff puts it down to Rickman being "a worrier, in a good sense. He's not afraid to go against the grain, and he puts an enormous amount of thought into everything he does."

Purists might mock the idea of such intensity being applied to some of the Hollywood pap Rickman has wound up in. But then most purists earn more than the £150 a week that provincial theatre provides. He has clearly been choosing parts which will help him to build a reputation for villainy and comic timing to add to his stage plaudits. Besides, he compares the restfulness of film-making after the theatre with "a glass of ice-cold water when you have been in the desert".

Mesmer appealed to Rickman because the character is about "bravado and reckless cliff-diving, not the story of someone in complete control. If the part had been badly written it would have been like whoring. 'Could you please turn on the tap.' Some things I'm offered in the States, I can't actually see why anyone's bothering except for the pay cheque. You read the script and think: 'Why?' It's a law of diminishing returns, because if I don't believe in it, then I won't be any good. You come to see yourself as a chemical component to be injected into something."

The veracity of Mesmer's character, he says, "is for anyone to decide, but I think it will come out sympathetically". Then he laughs, "A camera angle can change all that. You can think, 'This is my moment of utter emotional honesty', and then the camera goes another foot lower down and shoots up your nostrils and that's emotional honesty out the window. Suddenly you're being incredibly devious."

The film itself is something of a risk, aiming boldly at an audience sophisticated enough to appreciate 18th-century mores and to follow the thread leading from Mesmer to modern psychoanalysis and the holistic approach of alternative medicine. It is certainly a serious piece of work, viewed as such by Rickman. He attended a hypnotist's show as research and has introduced some of that theatricality into the part.

"It's important that the performance comes from inside", McBurney says, "and Alan's perfect for that. He doesn't project at all, which is curious for an actor who projects so much on the stage. He just lets the camera come and find it."

What most female cinema-goers have found is sex. Poliakoff grows lyrical in this praise of Rickman's allure: "A lot of women find him very sexually attractive. He has a depth, along with dangerous, mercurial sexuality, and there aren't many actors like that. He's idiosyncratic, but also very sexy. It's an intriguing combination."

Stevenson found herself on the receiving end of Rickman's intrigue at the RSC. "I was quite frightened of him", she has said, "but he was very kind and picked me up in a non-sexual way. He has a talent for collecting people and encouraging them." The two have remained close, acting together in Les Liaisons Dangereuses before Truly Madly Deeply. "We used our own relationship in that film," she has said. "I really am the Nina character, juggling a hundred balls in the air at the same time and driving Alan potty with my scatterbrained way of doing things. He is much more selective and sure in his taste, which can be equally infuriating. But he's a great anchor in my life."

Rickman's fan mail bulges with requests for signed pictures (which he happily supplies) and other, more intimate requests. "I'm not going to talk about them", he begins, "because it would betray the people who sent them, but I don't answer them. It's a weird area. There you are, 15ft across the screen, and people can visit all sorts of fantasies on your face that are nothing to do with you. You just have to deal with it. I still go down Portobello Road and buy the veg."

One male correspondent, who has traced Rickman's home address, sends him every negative press cutting he can find, with the message: "Just thought you should know." Black New Yorkers loved his neo-Nazi terrorist in Die Hard. "They come up to me and say: 'Yo! My main man!' I don't know what it is. They want him to get away with it, I suppose.

Rickman tries to resist the snares of stardom. "I like the phrase of David Hare's: 'Show business thins the mind!' If you spend any time in Los Angeles, there's only one topic of conversation."

OUTSIDE THE confines of his job, he lives with his long-standing partner Rima Horton, an economics lecturer who stood as the Labour parliamentary candidate for Chelsea in the last election. They have no children. He says he has had feminism "knocked into me, and a jolly good thing, too". He will not go further into his private life: "That sort of thing gets a bit personal. Not having had children has given me more space to work, I'm sure that's true, and when I work I'm very driven, but otherwise I don't sit around missing acting."

Like his partner, Rickman is a socialist, and his sense of fairness and humanity find practical expression. "He has helped many young actors, including financially," an old friend says. "If he has changed in any way, it's that he has become more generous." When he discovered that the Hungarian extras on Mesmer were being fed bread rolls while the cast and crew had cooked meals, he stormed into the producer's office to demand they got equal treatment.

Maybe it is because he's always doing different things - the media lovea man to be one thing in one place. Maybe it is because he's intensely private. 'Journalism' is almost thedirtiest word in his vocabulary and he is giving this interview less because he has two new films about to appear and more because he is trying something different again, as the director of a play which he was partially responsible from commissioning. It is The Winter Guest by Sharman MacDonald and has its world premiere at the West Yorkshire Playhouse before coming down to the Almeida in London.

Mr Rickman is standing in the Almeida wine bar after rehearsals dressed in a navy blue donkey jacket, red tartan trousers, and black boots which are simultaneously lace-up and elastic-sided. He is going through a few script points with a couple of incredibly young actors while 'high life' music skips in the background. Too noisy. We transfer to the profound quiet of the empty Almeida Theatre.

First, some background to place him in contest. What sort of family does he come from? Long silence. Very long. Then utterance. 'I never talk about my home life.'

I don't mean his life now (he lives in Notting Hill with Rima Horton, an economics lecturer; they have no children). Just his origins. Because I'm trying to place the voice, a rather sloppy sleepy chewing-gum voice off-stage, off-set, but it does have the actor's resonance.

'I think it's unfair on one's family to see themselves written about in newspapers. They have their lives to live and why should they be dragged into this?'

'I don't want to drag anybody anywhere. But where were you born?'

He eases a little. 'My whole life's been lived in west London - born, schooled, art-schooled, drama-schooled.'

After the Chelsea School of Art, he worked as a graphic artist for three years, then went to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art at the age of 27. Why the sudden switch to drama?

'It never felt like a sudden switch to me. The curse of our times is that you are supposed to decide your life at 16 and stick to that.'

'Do you have a theory of acting?'

'I do - but I wouldn't ever talk about it because it looks stupid in print...' I wait. '...It's not that I'm being closed. But you interrupt your instincts by explaining. I took one look at Stanislavsky and closed the book very quickly.'

He has generally worked in the serious rather than the commercial theatre and his big break came playing Valmont in the Royal Shakespeare Company's production of Les Liaisons Dangereuses in 1986 in London and New York.

'Your most recent stage part was Hamlet. How do you renew Hamlet?'

His jaw drops slowly, hangs there for a while, then slowly lifts: 'Well...when did it get old?'

'I see. Yes. A great play is always new. Um...what qualities do you admire in an actor?'

'It's unnamable...but one thing an actor has to be is a fit instrument. The thing that wanders out of a Tube station and onto the stage, I mean, it's not in the case like a violin. An actor has to protect himself a bit. And yet be very open. To be both fit and open is a hard balance to achieve - in fact it's impossible. I hate putting this into words because it sounds so...wanky.'

'Aren't you a member of health club? Are you a fit instrument?'

'Less fit than I was. Yeah, I'm a member...Actually I go in secret and dutifully bore myself rigid on the machines. My problem with Hamlet was how the hell do you do this thing physically, how do you breathe it? Not only is the play very long but you discover that this bastard Shakespeare has put three huge soliloquies one almost directly after another.'

He has never directed a play before but presumably the transition from acting is as smooth as was that to acting from art.

'No!' he exclaims out of his lugubriousness. I think he's thawing. 'It was troubled from the very first day! And the main trouble is that as an actor you've got too many memories of horrible rehearsals.'

'How do you direct? Layman's guide. How to direct a play.'

'The play makes the rules. This play is about couples who swim in and out of focus so...'

"Do you hope to direct more? Or are you at heart an actor?'

'I think it's unnecessary to make a decision like that. This is to do with [the lip curls] journalism, not with me.'

But I defend my question: 'No. It's to do with the idea that in order to be really good at something you have to be wholly absorbed by it. Life is short, there's not time to do everything, one must focus. I'm a writer. There's no time for me to be, for example, a symphonist as well.'

'That's very different,' he replies. 'That's creative. As a writer you are involved in a much more mysterious process. An actor or director is an interpreter. One thing I will say - my job gets harder and harder. The more you understand about what you are capable of, the less the instrument can do it physically. It's an inverse equation, if that's the right phrase. I just slammed those two words together. It sounded right.'

Meanwhile, his film career continues to leapfrog in its eccentric fashion.

Mesmer (about the 18th-century precursor of hypnotism, filmed largely in Hungary, with a script by Dennis Potter) is Rickman's first official film lead - but its release has been arrested by a row. The distributors, Mayfair, dislike it and are refusing to accept delivery on the grounds that it is not the film they paid for. This is unprecedented and the film-makers are appealing against the decision.

It must be painful for Rickman, but he responds in a typically elliptical manner:'...I had a letter today from a German director whom I was supposed to be working with on another brave, independent movie which in the end they couldn't get together. He finished his letter with, "If only life could be a little more tender and art a little more robust". That seems to be relevant.

And it was ironical to be at Dennis Potter's memorial service one day and in a courtroom the next, on both occasions saying the same lines in support of his work.'

'I want to discuss your appeal. One of things which is appealing about you - forgive the flattery - is your misfit, maverick quality.'

'Maverick,' he replies, 'is a word which appeals to me more than misfit. Maverick is active, misfit is passive.'

'Let me approach it differently - you could be a huge star, you have that knack, the camera likes you, whatever it is.'

Rickman is an extremely committed actor - yet brings to this intensity a self-mockery and sense of incipient disillusionment which is very modern: the streak of nastiness is crucial to his appeal - men admire the sardonic power-in-reserve and women respond to its sexual implications. I asked one of his female admirers what attracted her and she said this: 'He has an incredibly sexy voice - it says been there, done that. A lived-in face, but it lights up in unusual ways. He feels so much of our time - people who grew up in the Sixties and Seventies - but the sexiest thing is he can send himself up, often when you're least expecting it.'

'And so,' I say, 'it's interesting why, with all these plusses, something is not quite in gear. Is part of you resisting this elevation to iconic status?' He stares around in funereal bewilderment and I nudge. 'Maybe this friction with the system is crucial to your appeal. Maybe you'll become iconic soon...'

'There's no master plan,' he finally divulges. 'It's not calculated. Every choice is taken on its own terms. For example, I went straight from filming Mesmer, which was difficult, to doing Mike Newell's An Awfully Big Adventure which was a breeze.'

'And which, unlike Mesmer, will be released without problems.'

'I hope so. But, oh, they were two different experiences. If you are dealing with a subject like Mesmer and a writer like Potter, you know it's going to be a tussle every day to find out whether you can go as far on the screen as is on the page. Whereas I read the part in Adventure and knew immediately how to play it. Also Mike Newell is so efficient at shooting and we were all in Dublin and just wrapped it up. But in Mesmer we were shooting in several countries on a tight budget so...But Mesmer has been seen at the Montreal and Vienna Film Festivals and was invited to the New York Film Festival, but wasn't allowed to go. Unfortunately a lot of this film industry arguing is not about films but about the size of people's willies.'

'But you also have - forgive me for saying so - a reputation for being difficult. Is that fair?'

'Depends on who's saying it,' he replies.

'Or for being intimidating. When I spoke to Mike Newell, he said that before he started shooting Adventure he'd been thinking, oh God, I'm going to work with Alan Rickman, I must be on my best behaviour. He's so choosy, how can I ever live up to the fact that he's chosen me?'

'Like he doesn't choose what he's gonna do?' retaliates Rickman, opening his eyes wide - they are the colour of pale tea without milk. 'Like, I didn't go on to the set thinking, "Oh, God, I must do my best because this is Mike Newell who's had this world hit with Four Weddings and a Funeral?' Apart from the film business being all about the size of people's willies, we also swim in bucketloads of bullshit. There are plenty of people more difficult than me.'

'Who?'

'Juliet Stevenson, for example. I would say that "difficult" means a highly intelligent human being who asks pertinent questions and tries to use her or himself to the fullest extent. Who says I'm difficult? Since I know I don't shout and scream about the size of my ...'

'Willy?'

'I was going to say dressing-room, then I can only assume it's about my approach to the work - in which case I don't mind being called difficult.'

'Does Hollywood interest you?'

'Yes. I'm not stupid. I know that we would not be sitting here doing this without Hollywood.'

'Oh, we might be.'

'No, we wouldn't It's Hollywood which puts you on the bigger map.'

'Isn't that a slightly melancholy fact?'

'It's not melancholy. It's tragic, appalling. How much longer do people have to bleat on about throwing away a British and European film industry before it's properly organised? It's awful that we all have to toddle off to Hollywood.'

'You've acted in Jarry, Brecht, Ibsen, Chekhov, Wedekind, and so on, but have you acted in Europe?'

'In Germany, Holland, Switzerland. We took The Brothers Karamozov from the Edinburgh Festival to Russia, in English, with four actors, and a fur coat being swapped around. In one place we performed it in a 7th-century church on a hill and finished with the four of us singing The Ode to Joy climbing up a belltower - I don't think the Russians understood a word.'

He laughs, but just before he laughs, he looks as though he's about to burst into tears; a curious, characteristic expression of his. Generally his manner is a tranquilised exasperation, but it constantly bubbles into drollery and laughter.

'What's the buzz in being an actor?'

'...Something to do with a collective experience combined with a sense of one's own power? There can be a huge buzz in acting but the thing is...the moments are frequently followed by a very swift kick in the guts or smack to the head.'

'No more questions.'