The Alan Rickman

His cinematic impact is very particular. Until he arrives on the screen in An Awfully Big Adventure, Mike Newell's film of Beryl Bainbridge's tale of a stage-struck girl in a local rep theatre in wartime Liverpool, Hugh Grant appears to be the romantic interest. Then whoosh, O'Hara (Rickman) arrives like the bad guy in a Western, roaring up north on a motorbike with a backpack, rendering every other male character, including Grant, insubstantial and homouncular next to Rickman's enigmatic but definitely macho physical presence.

The rise of Alan Rickman was not meteoric, so when he first came within the popular gaze he already had a vintage lived-in look. Before he became an actor at all, he had another life altogether. At Latymer Upper School in Hammersmith (an ancient, independent foundation whose old boys include Hugh Grant, Mel Smith and George Walden, MP) drama and performance were encouraged: every Christmas boys and masters took part in a revue called 'Chantaculum'. It was his form master, the late Colin Turner, who propelled him on stage at the age of eleven: Rickman's performance as Volumnia, mother of Coriolanus, was thought memorable But acting as a career was not considered. He thinks it is mad to have to make lifetime decisions at that age, but when torn between an English degree or art school, he heard a small, quiet voice inside his head (the same voice which, in a restaurant, tells you to have fish and salad, while 'this wild bruiser of a will' goes ahead and orders regrettable things instead) telling him that art was what he should do. He went to Chelsea Art College, then to the Royal College of Art and set up a design company called Graphiti in the late Sixties. They designed LP sleeves, book jackets and a subversive left-wing free-sheet with the misleadingly conventional title of the Notting Hill Herald. They had a studio in Berwick Street, in the heart of Soho: 'with white walls, sanded floors, trestle tables and no capital ... and it was very heaven'.

So how do you throw up graphic design and go to RADA? 'You get a piece of paper and a pen,' Rickman says patiently, in his slow, laid-back voice, 'and you write, "Dear RADA, please give me an audition". And you watch yourself putting it in an envelope, sticking a stamp on it and putting it in the letter box. And you watch yourself doing these things because you have set in motion events which will change your life.'

When I voiced surprise that anyone could walk into RADA off the street and audition, he said, rather crossly, why shouldn't they? That was how it should be. 'It's bad enough now that RADA is going to become just another finishing school, because grants are becoming so difficult only people who can afford to go will go.' I said anyone going into journalism (he tends to voice a ritual irritation with all journalists) would at least have written something first. 'Of course, there is more to it than just walking on to a stage. And the acting profession suffers from not getting as much support or respect for its training as dancers or opera singers, neither of whom would dream of walking on to a stage without working on the instrument.' Quite.

At RADA he won every prize going. Then followed years at Bristol and with the RSC. Thus he was in his mid-forties by the time he played Juliet Stevenson's importunate ghostly boyfriend in Truly Madly Deeply, and gave the Sheriff of Nottingham such amusing overtones in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, and was named Best Actor in the Evening Standard Film Awards.

Last year, BBC2's The Late Show ran a programme devoted to Rickman, filmed in Hungary during the shooting of Mesmer, his first leading film role as the eighteenth-century visionary healer, scripted by the late Dennis Potter. What came across was his intelligent and painstaking immersion in the role, and the intensity of his approach to every detail of the film's development. (It is entirely in character that Rickman enquired why the cast of Hungarian extras, masquerading as the cream of Viennese society in powdered wigs, had been given only bread rolls for lunch while the cast had hot food). But you have not seen Mesmer yet, because it is locked away in a dispute with the distributors. Rickman was caught, during The Late Show documentary, gloomily prophesying exactly this. What went wrong? 'It is possible they were expecting a more commercial film ... with a different ending, a happy ending,' he says. At Potter's memorial service, Alan Rickman read from Mesmer's words; and the next day found himself saying the same things at an arbitration meeting with the film's distributors. So we must wait to be mesmerized by that performance.

Meanwhile, on to something completely different. The first play he has directed, Sharman Macdonald's The Winter Guest - elliptical, elegiac, gently moving and funny - has just opened at the Almeida Theatre in London after first airing at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds. Rickman was himself largely responsible for its being written. As a script-reader for Jenny Topper at the Bush Theatre in the early Eighties he first spotted the potential of Macdonald's When I was a Girl I used to Scream and Shout, submitted under the pen name of Pearl Stewart. Later he introduced Macdonald to Lindsay Duncan, his co-star in Les Liaisons Dangereuses. 'Lindsay is wonderful raconteur, a great natural wit and an immensely compassionate person, and she used to tell stories about her mother, who had Alzheimer's, that were sad and funny in equal measure.' The result is The Winter Guest, with Phyllida Law (Emma Thompson's mother), who gives an exquisite performance as the mother.

Two hours after the curtain came down on the first night of The Winter Guest in Leeds, Rickman was on his way to Gatwick for a flight to Dallas, then to Salt Lake City and the Sundance film festival to launch An Awfully Big Adventure to the American press. After this jet-lagging journey he was disgourged outside a cinema at night in a snowbound street, and as he tried to enter the cinema a heavy hand stopped him and said, 'Hey where's your ticket?'

He laughs. Filming has come 'like a great present' in the last six years. It has improved his stage work, he thinks since: 'You become better acquainted with stillness. On film you put all your energies into a single glance.' That is certainly true in An Awfully Big Adventure; but to say more would be to divulge the denouement.

After the farcically gripping Die Hard in 1988 everyone assumed he would be lost to Hollywood. Hans Gruber was a cartoon character ('You didn't wonder what he had for breakfast did you?') though it must be said, he played him admirably. 'My life became a cartoon too at that point. I'd just finished on Broadway doing this tough play [Les Liaisons Dangereuses] and suddenly I moved from the dark into the neon light.

'It was great fun to do, and the offers did roll in. But you don't always want to do the same thing again. A life of endless repetition wouldn't make sense at any level.' But it made his name bankable enough to let him choose what he wants to do, based almost entirely on a good script: 'You either want to say those lines, or you don't.'

In 1992, he was a notable Hamlet at the Riverside Studios. 'Darling,' says Thelma Holt, his producer, 'I've seen more Hamlets than I've had hot dinners; I spent eighteen months of my life playing Gertrude. I know that play better than any other, and with no disrespect to any of my other Hamlets, Alan Rickman was the Hamlet of my life. He did something rare: he told a story, and it was as if it was a new play. People always wonder what will he do with "To be" and "Rogue and peasant'; yet I could not have predicted how he would say them. Everything was new.'

In the same year, by contrast, he directed his friend Ruby Wax in her one-woman show, Wax Acts. 'People assume she just stands at the mike and delivers routines.' he says. 'But she is the most deeply serious person about her work, tussling with very personal material about herself and her parents. It was achingly funny but you can't be alone on stage for two hours without a sense of structure and a lot of bloody hard work.'

He is a political animal but when I invite him to talk about his politics he says simply 'No'. He explains that he feels superstitious, because of what happened just before the last election when Labour's hopes were so unexpectedly dashed at the eleventh hour. 'I'm watching to see how the Left will redefine itself. But I feel I'm looking down the wrong end of a telescope. I can't quite see it's shape, so I'm not going to talk about it.'

His political views inform all he does: Thelma Holt says his sense of social justice makes him a humane actor and a generous director. He welcomes the change in the council of Equity, the actors' union: 'Equity really is a microcosm of the country: the twinset and pearl brigade right next to the jeans and T-shirts, people of all ages involved in the same activity. Now we've got Michael Cashman and Charlotte Cornwell on the council, so a compassionate voice is there and things are really changing.

'But I feel superstitiousness, a watchfulness and a nervousness about whether the sea change will happen in the country as a whole. If we don't change, almost for the sake of change, then I really believe this is an exhausted nation.'

He is one of the few of his generation who has managed to avoid picking up at least one wife and several children and a dog along the way. He guards his private life with ferocity - hence our meeting on neutral ground - reasoning that no actor's professional standing is enhanced by having his domestic life exposed Hello! magazine-style. 'It's so unfair on the people involved. She [his partner, an academic] has nothing to do with all this. And I really resent it when her name gets mentioned. It makes life hard for her.'

I am reminded of Dame Edith Evans who once responded ringingly to a reporters' question about her husband: 'It is not of the slightest interest to anyone but myself, to know to whom I am married.'

He says he is 'still living the life where you get home and open the fridge and there's half a pot of yoghurt and a half a can of flat Coca-Cola.' Prolonging a student lifestyle beyond all chronological probability? 'It's just a life on the move, really, and that's the way I prefer it. I like to present a moving target.' He has been on the move so much he is the only person in the world who has not yet seen Mike Newell's previous film, Four Weddings and a Funeral. 'Nothing gives me as much pleasure as travelling. I love getting on trains and boats and planes.' He made Quigley Down Under partly because he wanted to see the Australian outback. He went to Russia with The Brothers Karamozov. The Liverpool of An Awfully Big Adventure was recreated in Dublin 'where I was very aware of being a Celt in the land of my ancestors. My blood is awash with Welsh and Irishness which probably explains a lot about a lot.' Meaning? 'What I hope it means is being not closed.'

The camera loves him. 'I can't stand watching anything I'm in, so I have no opinion about that. All I think about acting is, the camera likes you if it can see you thinking and most importantly, listening. All you are is this bundle of half-formed instincts and inadequate technique, aiming itself at the project, hoping something identifiable forms ... and hoping it will involve the audience. You hand yourself over to the medium. I think there's some connection between absolute discipline and absolute freedom. When I am asked about influences, I always say I bow down to Fred Astair, because when you look at him dancing you never look at his extremities, do you? You look at his centre. What you never see is the hours of work that went into the routines, you just see the breathtaking spirit and freedom.

Maybe Alan Rickman is doing too many different things, when the media loves a man to be one thing in one place at one time. Maybe this intensely private man is too unwilling to play the game. In Rickman's vocabulary, "journalism" is a dirty word, and he has granted a interview less because he has one film arriving imminently (this month's An Awfully Big Adventure) and another on the horizon (Mesmer), and more because he's trying something different yet again. This time he's directing a play he was partly responsible for commissioning: The Winter Guest by Sharman Macdonald which runs at London's Almeida Theatre until the end of April.

Rickman has always worked in the serious (as opposed to commercial) theatre, his big break coming when he played the destructive, seductive French aristocrat Valmont in the Royal Shakespeare Company's production of Les Liaison Dangereuses. He was passed over for the role in both film versions - Stephen Frears went for John Malkovich in Dangerous Liaisons and Milos Forman chose Colin Firth in Valmont - but his movie career took off when he played the German terrorist Hans Gruber in Die Hard and, later the Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. Standard Hollywood villain roles, definitely, but Rickman was absolutely riveting in both. Rather than capitalise on what no doubt could have been a very cushy existence in Hollywood, however, Rickman has gone down the less glamorous path of low-budget independents, and his career continues to develop in eccentric fashion.

Mesmer, from a Dennis Potter script about the 18th-century precursor of hypnotism, is Rickman's first solo film lead. It may be some time before it's possible to judge the results: the film is currently locked in a legal row between its makers and its UK distributors, Mayfair, who are refusing to accept delivery on the grounds that it's not the film they paid for. On a happier front, Rickman is sharing top billing with Hugh Grant in Mike Newell's An Awfully Big Adventure. Adapted from the Beryl Bainbridge novel, the story centres on a girl (Georgina Cates) who becomes assistant stage manager at the Liverpool Playhouse, falls in love with its nasty actor-manager (Hugh Grant) and loses her virginity to the motorbike-riding leading man P.L. O'Hara (Rickman) during a production of Peter Pan.

Asked about the differences between directing Hugh Grant and Alan Rickman, Mike Newell has this to say: "Hugh is light and larky and enormously versatile and his playing of this vicious gay actor-manager is a real performance. But with Alan I was very very careful - I'd picked up the vibes that Alan was prickly and immensely choosey, that if he chose you, oh God, what was it that you had to live up to? When you talk to him, he's always a very square peg in a very round hole."

"But he's very charismatic on screen," Newell continues, "and like all the really good ones, he's a collaborator. Alan is neurotic but intense, incredibly focused and authoritative as an actor. All his insecurities as a person are completely healed by acting."

Indeed, say what you will about Alan Rickman, but there is no doubt he is a committed actor who brings both a self-mockery and a sense of incipient disillusionment to every role he plays. Rickman is a master of this heightened distortion between comedy and tragedy that has become a hallmark of late 20th-century acting. A streak of nastiness is also crucial to his appeal: men admire this sardonic power-in-reserve, women respond to its sexual implications, not to mention that voice and those eyes.

Standing today in the Almeida Wine Bar after rehearsals for his play, dressed in a navy blue donkey jacket, red tartan trousers and black boots, Rickman is going through a few script points with a couple of young actors while music reverberates loudly in the background. His voice is resonant but sleepy, and he suggests we transfer to the quiet of the empty Almeida Theatre. For the record - because Alan Rickman will not discuss his private life - he currently lives in Notting Hill with an economics lecturer named Rima Horton; they have no children.

"Oh, I don't mind," he says in a gentle tone, delicately brushing the insect away while making sure not to injure the creature. "Go on, fly away," he tells it tenderly.

It's conclusive proof that the actor who thought nothing of annihilating innumerable humans in such films as Die Hard and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves in real life would not hurt a fly.

Of course, while Rickman is best known for his villainous characterizations, he has had equal success in portraying sensitive, sympathetic sorts in films like Truly, Madly, Deeply and Sense and Sensibility. And now, he takes on another persona, this time assuming a role behind the camera. As the director of The Winter Guest, Rickman tells the tale of four pairs of people and their perspectives on life.

Set in a small Scottish town on the coldest day in history-so cold the sea has frozen over-The Winter Guest's central focus is the contentious yet loving relationship between a mother and daughter, played by real-life mother and daughter Phyllida Law and Emma Thompson. Intertwined into their account are the stories of a teenage couple (Gary Hollywood and Arlene Cockburn) falling in love; two 12-year-old boys (Douglas Murphy and Sean Biggerstaff) embarking on adventures; and two 65-year-old women (Sheila Reid and Sandra Voe) whose hobby is attending funerals of people they don't know. "You're there with [these characters] looking at life through generations," Rickman synopsizes. "And if that sounds a little somber, it shouldn't, because I hope that a lot of it is very funny."

The material itself was commissioned by Rickman after many conversations with Lindsay Duncan, one of his co-stars in the Royal Shakespeare Company's production of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, about her relationship with her mother. Rickman brought some of the ideas that came from these anecdotes to writer Sharman Macdonald, who scripted a stage version, which premiered in England in 1995 and which Rickman directed with Phyllida Law starring.

"When the notion for the piece came," Rickman recalls, "Sharman was the first person I thought of who should write it. I knew that it was her because of the fact that I had read her first play (When I Was a Girl I Used to Scream and Shout) when I was on a script panel at one of London's fringe theatres, and I'd recommended that it should be done. So it's sort of a full-circle thing.

"There's quite a lot of full circles in this piece," Rickman muses, "what with Phyllida not being able to do the play until the time when we did it, because she'd been nursing her own mother and she couldn't do any theatre. And then the absolute moment I rang her to ask her if she would read it was when she was available to do theatre again. And then the fact that when the notion of the film came up, it so happened that the circle was turning and it was exactly the right time for Emma. Five years earlier and she would have been too young."

Having a natural mother-daughter rapport already established with Law and Thompson was a boon, says Rickman, while acknowledging that "it might have been a nightmare. I can think of a few mother-daughter relationships that might not have worked at all on film. They might have been horribly competitive, or their real-life relationship might have been incredibly complicated to shake off in order to play a relationship that isn't theirs. As it happened, that wasn't the case. They're very different people, but they're very complementary. And they both have a huge amount of respect for each other as actors. And truth be told, after a while, you forget that they're mother and daughter, because they're two actors, and it would be an insult to treat them in any way other than as two actors. It's only really when you get to the editing room and suddenly in a shot, you get an echo of two profiles, or you see how fluid they are with each other in a scene where they're close, and the body language gives their relationship away. And then you realize how much of a bonus it has been."

Reflecting on his feature directing debut, Rickman likens the filmmaking process to "an animal with many legs, and you keep finding another pair that you haven't put shoes on. It's a fantastically rewarding job," he adds, "but of course you're not aware of that at the time. When people say, `Do you enjoy it?', you kind of look back and think, `Now, was there a moment where I had time to say, "Am I enjoying this?"

What Rickman is currently enjoying is the advance positive buzz from the Venice and Montreal film festivals. "I'm very happy that when people go and see it, it means a lot to them personally," he comments. "When the film ends, the conversation begins with the audience, and that's a new one every night it plays."

Rickman doesn't have any more directorial projects lined up at the moment, but he says he's "sure I will do it again if and when there is a piece of writing that suggests itself. But it will always be based on the quality of the writing. And so now I will act." His next role will be another typecasting-buster: He'll be playing an angel in Kevin Smith's ethereally-tinged comedy Dogma. "The greatest thing is to be able to do something out of the blue that you couldn't have predicted and is free of any preconceptions. It would be wonderful to think that the future is unknown and sort of surprising."

When asked if he's happy with the evolution of his career, Rickman replies pragmatically, "There's no point in not being, really. Because it's what it is. Chaotic, I suppose. But there's a line in the film when Phyllida says, `You've got to open up your heart and let chaos in.' So maybe that's a lesson that I've had to learn."

He played Hans Gruber, the ruthless terrorist, to Bruce Willis' protagonist in Die Hard; starred as the equally nefarious Sheriff of Nottingham, foe to Kevin Costner in Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves; and appeared as the shy and sensitive Col. Brandon opposite Emma Thompson in Sense and Sensibility.

Now Rickman has reteamed with Thompson for The Winter Guest and has expanded his craft even further by moving behind the camera and making his directorial debut.

Quiet and introspective, The Winter Guest, which opens December 25, examines the strained relationship between a recently widowed Scottish woman (Thompson) and her mother (played by Thompson's real-life mother Phyllida Law).

Mother played part on stage

"Emma didn't do the play, while Phyllida played the mother in it; but whenever the film version came up, it was sort of automatically assumed that Emma would do it, too," he explains.

"Of course, on an obvious level, she helped finance the project, but it's also a great part for her, as well as being a great gift to her mother, as she helped make it possible for a really wonderful performance to be recorded."

Ask the director if there was any sense of competition between his two stars and he laughs. "No, fortunately they get on really well and you actually forget that they're mother and daughter. You just think, 'Here are these two noisy individuals who will not shut up!' You can't keep them quiet. You'd have to hit them over the head."

Why did Rickman choose The Winter Guest as his first directorial effort?

"I'd commissioned it in the theater, and so it was like I was glued to it," he says. "It wasn't a conscious choice, and I certainly didn't think it would be a movie. But then forces combined, and it seemed like a good idea. I definitely wasn't going to let anyone else muck about with it."

Sink or swim

"We shot the whole movie on location in Scotland and had to build the interior in a grain store, so we didn't do anything in the safety of a studio, which proved to be a real problem," he admits. "On top of that, two-thirds of the film (takes place) outside, and most of those scenes are set on a beach with a frozen sea."

In addition, the entire story takes place in just four hours, which means, the director explains, "You can't have hundreds of different sky conditions. And it was shot in October, November and December of last year, so we only had good light from 9 a.m. until 3 p.m., and none of the snow and ice that is such a (substantial) part of the film's background."

Fortunately for Rickman and his team, modern technology in the form of high-end digital visual effects came to the rescue. "I couldn't have done the film without computer graphics," says the director, who claims he knew "absolutely nothing" about the technology before he started and now knows "almost nothing."

"It was a bit like jumping in the deep end on your first film, but I believed in the script by playwright Sharman Macdonald, and it was about something that really mattered to me," he said. "If you're going to be driven by anything, it might as well be passion or belief in what you're doing. And I suppose I saw it as a challenge -- why not take it on?"

Working closely, Rickman and effects supervisor-producer Steve Rundell created more than 75 digital shots for the film.

"All the ice was created digitally. We had some clear blue skies that had to be digitally altered to match the rest, sea gulls were added digitally, and we even extended the natural mist at the end," reports Rickman. "There was one scene where we removed a figure, so it was partly cosmetic, partly incredibly creative -- and completely crucial to the look.

Reliance on special effects

"And I couldn't do the film without knowing that that whole side of it was going to be taken care of. It was either that or go to Iceland, and then it's too cold and you won't get the insurance to put your actors on the ice, and the architecture doesn't match. And we wouldn't have had the budget."

Rickman scouted locations in Scotland "by just driving around everywhere until we found what we wanted. Everyone said we were mad trying to shoot there at that time of year, and I don't know how we ever got insurance or finance, but we did."

The Winter Guest was shot on a $6 million budget.

"We had about two months of preproduction when the art department got set up and the sets were designed and we put the crew together," he reports. "I knew from the very start we'd have to use a lot of effects shots, as the art department could give me maybe 100 yards of snow and ice -- but I knew I needed a horizon, and it had to look like infinity."

Rickman: Restraints spurred creativity

Did such technical restraints limit Rickman's artistic vision? "Not at all," the director says, "because I think that true creativity is also linked to discipline. Even if it's just a budget nailing you down, it helps creativity.

"It was a great experience, and sometimes it was just awful," sums up Rickman, "but I imagine that's true of any film. You can't predict what it's going to be like, but I'm very proud of the results. We even finished on time and on budget. It was a scramble, but we did it."

Is Rickman eager to repeat the experience of directing?

So when it came time for Rickman to make his directorial debut, The Winter Guest, which opens Wednesday, the 51-year-old actor wanted Thompson on board. An adaptation of a play based on an idea of Rickman's, The Winter Guest premiered onstage in 1995 at London's Almeida Theater, in a production directed by Rickman and starring Phyllida Law--a veteran stage actress who happens to be Thompson's mother. And, as the central relationship in The Winter Guest is between a mother and daughter, and Thompson and Law were both available, the casting of the film seemed obvious to Rickman.

Shot last year at the East Neuk of Fife, a string of fishing villages on Scotland's northern shore, The Winter Guest came together so smoothly that it left Thompson and Rickman eager to work together again. And so we find them, at a grand old home in Pasadena that's doubling for New Orleans, which is the setting for Judas Kiss. A thriller written and directed by Sebastian Guiterrez, the film stars Thompson as a hard-boiled FBI agent and Rickman as an elegant detective.

"It's been sort of accidental, but I think we're a good team," says Rickman during a break in filming. "We play a kind of tatty Bogart and Bacall in this film--only Emma's Bogart and I'm Bacall."

"Our sensibilities are similar," adds the 38-year-old actress. "As I was writing Sense and Sensibility, I knew Alan was the perfect person to play Colonel Brandon--it was tough persuading others of that though, because at that point Alan was typecast in dark roles. So, it was gratifying to read the reviews that said, 'There is another side to Mr. Rickman--and here it is!' "

The dark roles Thompson refers to include Rickman's comically diabolical turn as the Sheriff of Nottingham in the 1991 Kevin Costner vehicle Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and his performance as a German terrorist in the 1988 blockbuster Die Hard, which marked his film debut.

"Die Hard was a classic of its kind," Rickman dryly points out, "and I'm happy to have been in it, because I probably wouldn't be sitting here talking to you without it."

Which isn't to suggest this is where Rickman wants to be late in the afternoon of a chilly fall day. An old knee injury has flared up, leaving him in considerable pain, and when he finishes for the day he's going straight to the doctor's. Thompson senses it's up to her to supply the high spirits for the interview and rises to the occasion admirably.

Rickman came to Pasadena from Maine, where he'd been shooting Dark Harbor, an independent film he describes as "a strange love story in the vein of The Crying Game--I play a lawyer and husband.

"I spent most of this year in London doing post-production on The Winter Guest, which wrapped last December, and I'm now in the midst of doing three movies back to back," continues Rickman, who heads to Memphis in February to shoot Kevin Smith's Dogma, which also stars Linda Fiorentino and Ben Affleck.

Thompson came to Judas Kiss from the set of Primary Colors, Mike Nichols' adaptation of the best-selling novel, which wrapped in L.A. in August.

"I adore Elaine May, who wrote the script, and it was a real treat working with those two," Thompson says. "Most of the 14 films I've done, however, have been independents shot in Europe and Great Britain. I've been offered many American films which I've declined, and it's always for the same reason; the script's no good. I'd rather earn my living screenwriting or doing a bit of journalism than act in a film I didn't believe in."

As to what drew her to Judas Kiss, Thompson says "the script was strong, Alan and I have Southern accents, and I get to have a gun--I've never played a gun-slinging woman before!"

New Orleans is a long way in every regard from the Scottish fishing village where The Winter Guest takes place. Set in real time on a day so cold that the sea has frozen solid, the film examines the dramas propelling a handful of lives. We observe a middle-aged woman whose husband has recently died, and the son she ignored while nursing his father. We meet this woman's mother, an elderly lady whose rapidly failing health may soon make her dependent on her daughter. We see two young teenagers as they have their first sexual experience, a pair of young boys who pass the afternoon gazing out to sea while discussing the mysteries of the universe, and a pair of spinsters whose friends have all died.

"There are five sets of couples who have relationships they must negotiate their way around, and my hope is that people will find points of contact in all of them," Rickman says. "Every character has a starting point, something to work through, and some kind of moment of resolution. The film offers no easy answers to the things these people are struggling with; rather, it simply looks at a moment in time when the tide has been temporarily stilled, thus creating a moment of reflection."

Of his first foray into directing, Rickman says, "I expected to be terrified but I wasn't, because I'd surrounded myself with all these experts. One of the pleasures of filmmaking is the cushion of support that inflates around you, and you really feel it as the weeks go on."

Among the experts he recruited was Phyllida Law, who describes Rickman as "a very fastidious director. Alan has a piercing intelligence and he's merciless in his allegiance to the script--he knows every word, and if we inserted so much as a sigh, we heard from him.

"I play a woman close to death, who fears the departure of her daughter will leave her desperately lonely--I'm clutching at her, and she can feel that trap," Law continues. "Emma and I aren't at all ratty with each other, and Alan was concerned we might get on too well, but I don't think our own relationship bled into our performances. I think we're able to work well together, probably because we've had similar problems in life.

"My two daughters aren't virgins about death and have dealt with lots of it within the family. Families can be smug and comfy, but ours hit the bad bits and came through it, and I admire Emma greatly. She's a woman of tremendous courage, which I take no credit for."

Says Thompson: "My mother was widowed at 48 and that had a powerful effect on our family. We have a friendship, really, and we live in adjacent houses and can see into each others' kitchens. My character in the film is at the peak of her resistance to the attentions of her mother, however. She wants to get away from the house where she nursed her dead husband, so when she sees her mother's hand shake she snaps, 'Don't do that!' What she's really saying, of course, is 'Don't be ill and make me stay and look after you.' "

Rickman interjects, "It's a moment that comes to many of us, that point when the roles switch and the child must become the parent.

"You either accept the responsibility and look after your parents, or you don't, " adds the actor, whose own mother died during the editing of the film. "Like Emma's mother, my mother was widowed young--I was the second of four children and she raised us on her own."

All the women in The Winter Guest are without romantic partners, so in that sense they too are on their own. Thompson is quick to point out, however, that their lives are far from empty.

"We've been socialized to feel that anything other than a romantic love relationship is second best," she says with exasperation. "Romantic love has taken precedence over all other relationships, probably because it offers an escape from reality. It's a complete con, of course, because it doesn't last, and anyone who says it does is lying.

"We continue to look for it though because we're like rats in a tunnel looking for cheese where there simply isn't any," she says with a laugh. "The difference between a rat and a human being is that rats finally get the point; human beings, on the other hand, will continue to scurry down the cheeseless tunnel forever, thinking, 'It's gonna happen one day, I just know it.' "

"That would be a great title for a film: The Cheeseless Tunnel," Rickman says with a laugh. "I'd go see that."

The Winter Guest is a small, thoughtful mood piece, and is the furthest thing imaginable from a special-effects film. So it's surprising to hear Rickman say that "technically it couldn't have been made before now. It would be impossible to shoot at a location cold enough for the sea to freeze, so our frozen sea was created in the computer."

Adds Thompson: "The ice is a powerful analogy for our condition. We, too, become static when we're unable to face change, and we're observing these people as something in them is cracking. Some kind of tectonic plate in their psyche is shifting ever so slightly, and it frees them to step out of that frozen moment and move into the next chapter of their lives."

The Winter Guest suggests that one thing these characters are sure to find in the next chapter of their lives is moments of loneliness; in the end, the film is a meditation on loneliness and the things people do--both appropriate and inappropriate--to assuage it.

"The film says that loneliness is there and must be dealt with," Thompson says. "People resist it ferociously, of course, but loneliness is something one does come out of and it can teach you things. One of the nice things about The Winter Guest is that it suggests that whatever human condition you find yourself in, you shouldn't regard it as some sort of sickness. Most American films imply that any form of unhappiness is simply not to be borne and that a happy ending is essential, but I don't accept that.

That night, the elements conspired to assist Rickman. It was cold, it was dark, and it was raining, making even the tinpot Other Place appear cosy, a safe haven. Inside, there was the aura of expectation that you get with an audience comprised mainly of other actors. What Hampton had written was a state-of-the-nation play. Laclos, writing seven years before the French Revolution, had borne witness to a society, driven by appetite, eating itself alive. Like Freud after him, Laclos took sexuality as the substructure of human activity, and through the sexual shenanigans of his Vicomte de Valmont and Marquise de Meurteuil could be inferred the corruption of the superstructure - society. It was a political play, but one dressed with consummate elegance - the iron hand in the velvet glove - something of the essence of Rickman himself.

What I remember of Rickman's performance as Valmont is that his body seemed to be hinged in all sorts of unexpected places, enabling him to fold and unfold it at will. That voice - poised, cadenced, raw and yet musical - came out of a mouth like a cave, creating these tilts of sound and body. He was frightening. Frightening, not because he was immoral, but because he made you want him. Within the moral vacuum that surrounded him - and that nothing could penetrate - he was irresistible.

That first night, as Lindsay Duncan, who played the Marquise, Valmont's partner in crime, has famously said: "A lot of people left the theatre wanting to have sex, and most of them wanted to have it with Alan Rickman." A lot of people must also have left the theatre wondering where the RSC had been hiding an actor of such calibre. In the 1985 season, his two Shakespearean roles were Jaques in As You Like It and Achilles in Troilus And Cressida. Even 12 years on, it still smarts to think of the roles he could have had - Hamlet (which he did at producer Thelma Holt's invitation in 1992), Prospero, Macbeth. And why hadn't the National picked him up - offered him a Chekhov. Or Ibsen. He would make a terrifying Judge Brack.

It wasn't a good time in the big subsidised theatres. There was a machismo among directors, particularly at the RSC, that actors rightly resented. Actresses on the whole fared better, especially if they chose to exploit the traditional male/female power structure. A number of wonderful actors were lost. Some, Jonathan Pryce, for example, simply left classical theatre - never to return. Kenneth Branagh, at the Riverside, and Ian McDiarmid, at the Almeida, established their own actor/manager companies. Rickman almost slipped through the net. As he says, "Perhaps the powers that be should look back at that time and ask if really the best was made of it. It was an amazing bunch of actors." And perhaps it is worth reflecting that Trevor Nunn, the man who ran the RSC then, is the man who runs the Royal National Theatre today.

There is an ancient Chinese proverb. If you sit long enough by the river bank, the body of your enemy may float by. Rickman waited almost 20 years for his first taste of triumph - he was 42 in 1985 when success came. Even then, it must have seemed to him that all too suddenly it was snatched out of his grasp. The part of Valmont in Stephen Frears' film Dangerous Liaisons went to John Malkovich - as Rickman says, "hot at the time". Now he can be philosophical about it. "You have to live in the real world. My getting that part was never on the cards, I know that." Then he was hurt. He never went to see the film: "Why would I?" And, as he points out, it was Les Liaisons that changed the course of his career. When the play transferred to Broadway for its brief, packed-out, American Equity-endorsed, 20-week run, it was seen by film producer Joel Silver, who was looking for a charismatic, serio-comic, sardonic villain to cast opposite his Die Hard star Bruce Willis. Someone has said that not getting Dangerous Liaisons saved Rickman, because it saved his sense of humour. Die Hard gave him it back. Watching Rickman in that brilliant cartoon of a film, he is irresistibly funny. And you see he can gauge the exact temperature at which the camera reacts. He doesn't shout at it - like Branagh - and for all his flamboyance, there is not a lot of fuss. The movements are nuanced, and something he does with the corner of his eye is reminiscent of the great Robert Mitchum. There is a tradition in British theatre for missing native talent, as if we can't tell how good it is until it has crossed the Atlantic. The Americans don't make that mistake. Rickman's next Hollywood film was Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves, with Kevin Costner.

These days, everyone is after Rickman. Theatre offers pour in from the RSC and the National, but so far Rickman has taken none. He can now divide his time between film and theatre at will. He has just returned from Los Angeles, where he was making the film Judas Kiss with his friend Emma Thompson, "A thriller in which she plays an FBI agent and I play a detective, and we're both from New Orleans." He will remain in London for the opening of his directorial film debut of Sharman Macdonald's The Winter Guest, a script he co-wrote with Macdonald, the writer whose first play he promoted when he was a reader all those years before at the Bush Theatre. The film features, among others, Emma Thompson. He plans a film of Maugham's The Moon And Sixpence, adapted by Christopher Hampton ... and so on. Ergo the cast list in his life is pretty constant, he is loyal. "I have loyal friends," he says. He has been in a relationship with the same woman, Rima Horton, for almost 30 years.

People sometimes describe Rickman as aloof, haughty, a 'guru', but instead of some bleak, intimidating oracle, I meet a warm, intelligent man who giggles a lot. He is not easy, he admits it himself ("Good luck with this one ..."). And his first words - following my standard "Pleased to meet you" - are an Eeyorish, "Whoever I may be". But he is candid. He will try to be honest, he says. He can't help it if there's a voice in the back of his head checking everything he says.

To list some of his hates: Talking about himself. "What is it about actors? God knows I get bored with actors talking about themselves." Being asked questions about himself. "I don't think it's right that everybody knows everything about me." From this you could assume that his primary purpose is to hold himself at bay - but the theme that recurs most frequently in his conversation is a horror of isolation. He hates theatres that aren't in cities, "because when you come off the stage, you want to walk out into life". He hates the limos he is routinely accorded in New York and Hollywood because the first time he got in one, "the black windows went up and I knew in a flash what it was all about: to keep me as far away from the next human being as possible - and what a terrible concept that is". The problem, he says, is that success is too often measured in terms of isolation. "In LA it is measured by the height of the walls around your home and by the size of the home inside its high walls. That's a kind of living death to me." The more success you have, the greater the pressure to remove yourself from the real world.

The desire for privacy is an entirely different instinct. Most people are private, he says, "if by private is meant wanting control over the way you are seen". But for an actor, privacy is essential. "Acting is about giving something away, handing yourself over to whatever role you are asked to play. I'm not hiding or escaping or seeking anonymity. I reserve the right not to have a rubber stamp on my forehead saying this is who I am. Because who I am gets in the way of people looking innocently at the parts I play." And he is probably right: it is possible to have too much information.

I remember once hearing a live recording of Elgar conducting Pomp And Circumstance Number Three. "I want you to play this," the old man chuckled, his voice rising to keep pace with that all-too familiar crescendo, "as if you had never heard it before." It was a joke, but it was also a stab at truth. How do you come to something fresh - or, to use Rickman's word, "innocently"? When he is acting Hamlet, he says, and he sees a young woman in the audience wearing a Truly, Madly, Deeply T-shirt, and also present is Juliet Stevenson, there is a clash of realities. It is all about fantasies, he says, the myths that follow actors around. "I cannot take responsibility for people's fantasy. I can't think about it, I can't live with it and I won't dwell on it." So what do you want, I ask him. "I want to be part of the storytelling chain," he says.

He knows that there are no new stories, nothing new under the sun; only new ways of telling them, playing them, painting them, acting them. Listening to him talk about his childhood, I am struck first by its familiarity - love, loss - then by its uniqueness.

I say that I didn't think he'd enjoy being a director because he wants to be loved too much. "Loved," he says, as startled as if I'd just invented the word. "No, it has nothing to do with love." Because, I realise later, love occupies a particular space in his mind. He uses the word only twice.

Of his companion, Rima. And of his mother.

It is by contrasts that we remember things.

A happy time is happy only as distinct from darker times. His early years, he says, were good years - though the family was poor and the house in Acton small and cramped with what became a family of six - his parents were happy. There was something of a clash of cultures - his mum a Methodist and Welsh, his dad an Irish Catholic - and a certain amount of banging and weeping behind doors. But he never doubted, as a child, that they were loved. He is clear about this. "We were not excluded, not at all."

Listening to people, it is hard sometimes not to pre-empt what they are going to say. I thought he said, "We are each the sum of the luck we have." But something about the tone of this phrase struck me as wrong, and when I asked him to repeat it, I heard that he had said "lack": "We are who we are. The sum of the lack we have." His lack - and not just his, but the lack of his two brothers, one sister, and, of course, his adored mum - is the death of his father from lung cancer when Rickman was eight years old, and his siblings nine, seven and five.

With his father's death everything changed. "What do you want me to say? Yes, I remember certain things about him, but the memories I have of my father are those you have as an eight-year-old. Yes, his death was a huge thing to happen to four kids under ten." I asked him if he felt his father as an absence in his life. "No," he said, making it more a question than an answer, "you can't feel that." You can't feel it, he explains, because you have to be present in your own life. You don't will yourself out of your own life.

There are times, he says, when the past appears to him as a snapshot, a frozen moment in time: A small boy in a classroom. The headmaster walking across the front of the class, speaking quietly to the teacher as both turn to look at the boy. "And I know what they are going to say. They are going to tell me to go home, where I will be told that my father is dead."

Or the moment after the funeral, which the children didn't go to, when he saw his mother for the first time since the death. "Some friends drove us to meet her. They said 'Look, there's your mother' and we all said 'Where?' Because we didn't recognise this woman dressed head to foot in black." He describes a scene from Gorky's My Childhood in which a boy opens a door and looks into a long room. At the end of the room sits a woman naked to the waist and wearing a red skirt. In her arms, she is cradling the body of a man who has pennies over his eyes. Her husband, Gorky's father. "Maybe," Rickman says, "my story is not as dramatic as that. But you see. I was always used to seeing my mother in the brightest of colours. For me, that was the biggest shock."

Probably none of us ever recovers from shock. Shock is like a crater in the mind, and you spend the rest of your life trying not to slip over the edge. His mother never got over it. She married again, briefly, for three years. "All that can be said about that is that it didn't work out. There was one love in her life." His mother became fiercely protective of her children, "like a tigress". She treated them equally, he says; there were no favourites.

And then, this happens. He gets a scholarship to a direct-grant school, Latymer Upper in Hammersmith. "A different world, with different rules from the ones I grew up with." He does well, is made a prefect. He discovers that the cool detachment, what he calls "the airiness of the truly English" suits his temperament better than Celtic emotional mayhem. "Latymer was like a cold gust of wind to the brain." And suddenly he finds himself being drawn away from his background. "You want to run away, you know you've got to come to terms with it. You find yourself becoming middle class, and you have to deal with that. You feel guilty and you have to come out the other side of that. And then some success starts to attend ..." In fact, he didn't choose theatre first. From school he went to art college. He wanted to be a designer, and, with a group of friends, he set up a studio in Soho. "We had a great time, even though we didn't make a lot of money." Then, at 24, he looked around him, thought, "Is this it for the rest of my life?" and promptly chucked it in and won a scholarship to RADA.

Looking back, he says, the theatre, acting, was always going to be his world. It wasn't even a conscious desire. "For me, it was simply finding the place where I functioned on all cylinders." It was about discovering himself. "Maybe that's why it took me some time to decide to do it." And though he doesn't say so, acting must have provided him with a way back to his roots. People describe how, in his early years, he was wooden, uncomfortable, diffident on stage. If stage acting is the art of unfurling yourself in public, for Rickman, a self-confessed control freak - "Just ask Juliet Stevenson" - the theatre was the one place where he could be out of control without the emotional chaos spinning him over the edge.

There has never been any jealousy or competitiveness, he says, from anyone in his family. "On the contrary. All I get from them is the fiercest pride. And I for them." They supported him, particularly his mum. "She was incredibly talented herself. She would have had a career as a singer herself - in another world, and given a different mother."

The point he is making is that talent is not enough. What is also needed, apart from dedication, are the conditions in which talent can flourish. His mother gave him something extraordinary from a parent to child - generosity. Talented herself, even if thwarted in her talent, she didn't begrudge him his. As a present for her 80th birthday, he arranged for her to go and see Phantom Of The Opera - it's what she wanted, a musical. Afterwards, there was a huge party that she entered "like the star she was. I've never seen anyone enter a room like that." She died, he tells me, last year. In the middle of the editing of his film The Winter Guest.

His work is his autobiography he says. "If people want to know who I am, it is all in the work." There was a time when he was overtly political, a staunch Labour Party supporter, and prepared to speak out. Less so now. "I find myself becoming less and less enamoured of public statement - I'd rather see it in action."

So if The Winter Guest is autobiographical, in the sense that he means above - not literally - what does it say about Rickman? It is Sharman Macdonald's play adapted for screen, he points out. It is her vision, her words. But clearly, something must have drawn him back to it after directing the play. He is not a man who easily repeats himself. There must have been something new, or something he missed, that he felt he could bring to it the second time around.

The story is a curious, multi-layered, poetic meditation on life and death, a kind of seven ages of man, viewed through the relationships of four couples: mother/daughter; boy/girl; two young schoolboys; two old ladies. There is no father figure - the father has just died - but more interesting than this, there is no mature male character. I ask Rickman what drew him to this material specifically. He is hesitant at first. Being a director, he says, is a job in which you harness other people's talents.

It was a surprising coalition of many different elements in his life, 'a chain'. The idea for the play arose from a story told to him by his friend Lindsay Duncan, whose mother was sick with Alzheimer's disease. "She found her one day in the garden, pruning roses in wellington boots and her wedding hat." Rickman put Duncan in touch with writer Sharman Macdonald. "Years passed, I was filming in America and the Almeida theatre asked if I would like to direct a play. Sharman had completed The Winter Guest and was waiting for an opportunity for me to direct it." In the role of the dying mother, Rickman cast Phyllida Law, Emma Thompson's mother. "What was extraordinary was that it was the first time for five years that Phyllida had been free. She had been nursing her own mother, who was dying." In a way, and if you believe in these things, he says, it was as if the play was waiting for her.

And maybe, he adds, it is to do with becoming successful. "In this world, in which people pass each other without contact, I like the idea of focusing on eight voices, isolated in a small town in a bitter winter. Maybe, as I move increasingly in a world of publicity launches and films and plane travel, I just find it reassuring." There is a point in the film for each couple where one holds out a hand to the other and is rejected. Then comes the moment where the hand is grasped. "And, yes, I like that," he says. "It seems to make some sense of why we are here."

I tell him that I find the end of the film, where the little boys walk out over the ice sheet, terribly depressing. I don't want them to die. "Then they don't die," he says. What is interesting about this is that in the original play it is unequivocal - the two boys walk off into the mist and they die. The film ending is much more ambiguous. It was he, Rickman says, who took that decision. "The play was too explicit, too melodramatic. I wanted the ending of the film to be optimistic. Even joyful."

"Of course," he says, resigned, "I identify with the boy in the film whose father has died." For that boy, what is happening is a sexual awakening - a whole realm of possibility, the rest of his life, is opening up to him. There is a wonderful moment when the young girl comes to his house to make love to him while his mother is out, and she deliberately turns around all the photos, the shrine to his father, as if to absolve the boy from any further guilt or grief. As Rickman says, this is a film about human possibility, one that acknowledges that we can't achieve the impossible - alter the past.

"As we get older," he says, "we are all waiting on the shore. It's the young who walk out into the world we have made for them. That's what I think the film is about. Its last line is 'Wait for me'."

This makes me wonder why he had never had children. It was not a choice, he says. "You should remember I am not the only one involved. There is another person here." He says he would have loved a family. "Sometimes I think that in an ideal world, three children, aged 12, ten and eight, would be dropped on us and we would be great parents for that family." But when I say that he could leave for a 20-year-old starlet, start a family ... "Er, no," he says. Never been tempted? "No."

I am just thinking what an incredibly sensible, level-headed man he is, when he suddenly veers off course. Recently, he tells me, "someone who knows about these things" informed him that all the problems and indecisions in his life stem from the fact that he is a Piscean. "I want to swim in both directions at once. Desire success, court failure." But even worse, he says, is the fact that he has no earth in his sign. "It's all air and water. Nothing to hold me down." I am still trying to work out if he is taking the piss when he says, "Luckily, there is some fire there. That must be from my mum - she was a Sagittarian." So he has a daft side, too.

It seems to him now, he says, that for the first time in his life, all his energies have come together, cohered, "so that whatever this career is that I have, it appears to be acquiring some shape." He is still chaotic, he says. "In the sense that I don't know what I'm going to be doing in the next half hour." But he is enjoying him, the filming, travelling. If success gives you anything, he says, it is the chance to do what you want. What he wants is to live till he is old. "And still be out there as an actor doing something somewhere at 70." But he has no ambitions to move to Hollywood. The things that he likes best are simple things: "Good friends, good food, good wine."

There are those who don't know Rickman and don't like him. And those who know him and adore him. This, a friend of his informs me, is because he is gracious, a real gentleman. "He will hate me for saying this, but he embodies all those old-fashioned Christian virtues." He is also immensely teasable. In the 12 years since Liaisons, he has gained a reputation for playing the sardonic, sexy villain - almost creating his own sub-genre in this role. But mention the word sex to him, and he looks instantly trapped. No, he says, he has never been remotely sexually voracious, whatever that is ... Then, lightening up, "but maybe I'll be sexually voracious next week." His next role, he tells me, is in a movie scripted by Kevin Smith, who wrote and directed Clerks and Chasing Amy. He plays an angel. "Do you know," he says, "angels have no genitals." For some reason, he finds this uproariously funny.

The Winter Guest opens January 9.

Maybe the reason Rickman is relaxed on a recent cold afternoon is that there is no audience except for a lone journalist in the tiny office borrowed from a theater manager. Certainly it helps that he isn't going to have to talk about why women find him sexy or what his next big career move will be. He's playing what for him is a new role: film director. Rickman's debut film, The Winter Guest, about a mother who trudges through the frozen streets of a Scottish fishing village to thaw her recently widowed daughter out of her grief, opens Friday. He's quite happy to remain behind the camera, deferring to his stars, Emma Thompson and her real-life mother, Phyllida Law, who play daughter and mother in the film.

''We only had to film five lines a day,'' Rickman says, purring. ''I was like a kid in a toy shop. Strangely enough, Phyllida, who actually grew up in Glasgow, could not have done this until we asked her two years ago. She had spent the last five years looking after her own aging parents. She and her husband had summered in Scotland with their daughters, Emma and Sophie. Emma and her sister preferred to think of themselves as Scots who just happened to go to school in England. Emma and Phyllida had appeared together in Much Ado and Peter's Friends and were looking for another film they could do together. I suggested to Phyllida, who was in the play the film comes from, that the natural rhythms of mother and daughter might suit them, Phyllida said, `Ask her. She's a sensible girl.'

''When our production designer, who grew up there, showed us the village of Pittenweem, it sort of answered what our problems were. It looked very uninhabited due to the demise of the fishing there. It just felt right. For the frozen sea, we were able to use an airfield 3 miles away, covered with brilliant white foam. We had to relocate a few boats. There were sea gulls. It felt right. Sort of like a Bruegel painting. Emma, who plays a photographer, felt the town was helping you, wanting to be photographed.'' Although he commissioned and directed the original play, by Sharman Macdonald, Rickman says, ''I couldn't imagine anyone was going to throw it at me to direct.

''I found the actual work of directing had very little to do with going up to actors and saying things. My friend Bob Hoskins says filmmaking is like being pecked to death by pigeons. I would use a more violent bird. We could spend hours setting up the beach. Luckily, I was surrounded by experts. You're too busy sensing other people's fear rather than your own. Of course, in the film you have close-ups. That meant I could include a lot of stillness. Having the realistic images made quite a difference. Onstage, we had a steeply raked, stylized surface, quite different. People said of the stage production, `Oh, it's so filmic.' I'm not sure it was much of a compliment. It's not that one medium is more collaborative than the other. One makes suggestions as an actor, although friends in the theater have said that when it's not your name on the program, it's called interfering.''

He'd do it again, Rickman says of directing, if the right project came along. ''But acting is not something I'll stop doing. I can't see how. You're always reacting as well as performing.'' If Rickman's grasp of the respective visual worlds of stage and film is secure, it's because he began as an art student. His focus on acting bespeaks the fact that he's a late bloomer. Rickman, a young-looking 50, glumly saw himself going nowhere at the age of 38. Then along came his breakthrough role as the cruel, silken Vicomte de Valmont in Les Liaisons Dangereuses. It made him a star in London and on Broadway. In 1988, he made his film debut in Die Hard, stealing the film from Bruce Willis as a German terrorist, Hans Gruber, putting steely, rakish spin on cliche after cliche.

He did the same thing three years later as the outrageously entertaining Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. He could have gone on in that vein. Ceertainly he was glad to bid goodbye to the malignant Valmont after playing the role for two years. ''It was time to stop,'' he says. ''You cannot go on playing a self-destructive character night after night without destroying something in yourself.'' Intentionally, he chose a small English film, Anthony Minghella's Truly, Madly, Deeply, disarmingly playing the ghost of Juliet Stevenson's dead lover, then joined Thompson and director Ang Lee in Sense and Sensibility before playing a cold, repressed Eamon De Valera to Liam Neeson's title character in Michael Collins. If the Hannibal Lecter role in The Silence of the Lambs hadn't gone to Anthony Hopkins, Rickman would have been cast. Soon, he'll be seen in another modestly scaled film, Kevin Smith's Dogma, with Linda Fiorentino and the Good Will Hunting team of Ben Afleck and Matt Damon.

''It's a sort of moral debate about Catholicism mixed up with special effects. I play an angel preventing them from getting back into heaven, the issue being that if they get back in, there's no such thing as divine retribution. It's a deeply funny film,'' says Rickman, who more than once has had the bad luck to be described as too intelligent to be an actor. Rickman says he hasn't decided what he'll do after that - ''I've never had a strategy'' - but says he'd like to film a remake of The Moon and Sixpence, W. Somerset Maugham's novel based on the life of Gauguin. He feels a certain kinship with mavericks. He's proud that Thomas Paine completed The Rights of Man while lodging with one of his radical ancestors. Partly, impeccable working-class credentials and Labor Party loyalties keep him at a certain distance from the glitz factor, although, he says, he's not one of those tiresome types who humorlessly fulminate about Hollywood. ''I like David Hare's phrase: `Show business thins the mind,''' Rickan says. ''But I enjoy being in LA. I drive a car there and don't at home. It's disgusting and wonderful, like going to Dunkin' Donuts every day.''

After having been a frightfully wicked Sheriff of Nottingham, a determined Irish leader, a ghostly and exceptionally likable husband, and even a Rasputin, Alan Rickman has come to the Festival to present a new facet of his talent, his first full-length film as a director, The Winter Guest:  an interesting film of frozen landscapes, beautiful images, engaging characters and fine feelings, which has, moreover, carried off the "People's Choice" award at Brussels.

ETM:  More and more actors are wanting to get behind the camera.  Now it's your turn.  Could you describe your motivations?

AR:  There have always been actors who have become directors.  You only have to think of Orson Welles, Robert Redford, Dennis Hopper....I think that we simply want to "write."  Working as an actor in many films allows you to observe directors. It's like taking a film-school course.  You might not learn everything about focal lengths, but you learn enormously about the manner of working on location, on a set.  Moreover, an actor likes to be treated in a certain way, to work in a certain manner.  [Because the actor has] to put everything into place, to observe, to grasp...this work in progress that's hiding from him.  [And] this obviously depends on individual directors, their vision and their personality.

ETM:  You had already directed the theatrical version of The Winter Guest. Now you're directing the film.  Mainly because of the subject?

AR:  It isn't really the subject.  It's more the friendship between Lindsay Duncan (with whom he worked in Les Liaisons Dangereuses, for the Royal Shakespeare Company) and me, all the more so because the work is dedicated to her mother.  I introduced her to Sharman MacDonald (author/screenwriter).  I really didn't know what the work would be.  I didn't even try to guide it, but I was involved from the start in insuring the direction it would take.  I was present at its birth and I had a stake in seeing it succeed.  As time went on I realised that it was a work which fascinated me more and more because...directing [it?] was something that I ought to do....But the subject was also important.  The film doesn't just speak of a frozen seascape, but of all generations.  It's a bit of the life of all the characters, maybe also a bit of ours.  As we approach the year 2000, you don't always look ahead, but you turn equally to the past.  I think of that more and more.

ETM:  Who is the real "winter guest?"  Death, which is close to a number of the characters?  The grief of the main character Frances (played by Emma Thompson)?  Her solitude and that of her mother?  The renewal of life?  Or of love again?

AR:  For [Sharman] MacDonald, I know it's death.  For me, it's rather Frances, who spends so much time at the beach looking for something, or someone, across the mist.  Someone whom you imagine but can't really see. Certainly, in her case, there are the decisions not to go on grieving, to not go away, to accept her responsibilities there where she is, to take into consideration her relationship with her mother and accept it.  For me, the winter guest is a moment, sometimes several, in the life of everyone, where you come face to face with a difficult choice, where you have to grow up quickly.

ETM:  But all the same, the theme of death is important...