Alan Rickman’s enduring snarky charm

[firecat]

I just found out that Alan Rickman’s diaries have been published as a book. The Guardian (yes, I know) has two excerpts:
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/sep/24/alan-rickmans-secret-showbiz-diaries-harry-potter (content warning: JK Rowling)
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/sep/25/alan-rickman-diaries-madly-deeply-part-2-sense-sensibility (earlier years)

Here’s the entry from 9/11/01:

11 September
NEW YORK TRADE CENTER ATTACK.
11.30am Rehearse [for Private Lives, in London, with Lindsay Duncan]. Run Act 1. As the dance rehearsal is about to begin, the first report from New York comes in. Total shock. All rehearsal becomes an acute, flattening irrelevance but we do it anyway.

ACUTE, FLATTENING IRRELEVANCE. So he was a poet as well as an actor and narrator and artist/graphic designer and activist and…[fill in what impressed you about him here].

And here’s 11/12/03:

12 November
Jimmy Kimmel Live.
“So [Love, Actually] is a chick flick?”
“No, it’s more of a dick flick.”
I got beeped but we were away with the horrors of Toby Keith singing American Soldier only minutes away. I’m on the sofa with a stand-up, a boy trumpeter and one of the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Slightly scary.

3/18/98

18 March
[Filming of Kevin Smith’s Dogma in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania]
11 Costume fitting. Versace rules. 3pm Read with Linda Fiorentino … She’s everything she looks and sounds – smoky, dark, a coming-on disposition. Somewhere in the middle Ben Affleck crashes in, later Matt Damon. The room is suddenly full of baseball caps, popping cans of water/iced tea/whatever, peeling oranges, potato chips, cigarette smoke. We bungee-jump our way through the script.

Comments

[bearshorty]

I read this book last autumn and I really enjoyed it. It was fascinating getting a glimpse into his life and what he considered important. His life of travel and different movie sets and theater rehearsals. And a lot of dinners out with friends.

[firecat]

Yes, I’m really enjoying that. There’s something profoundly relaxing about the diary entries for me, can’t explain.

[misbegotten]

What's wrong with The Guardian?

[firecat]

They have crappy trans politics.

Aug 2019
https://www.buzzfeed.com/patrickstrudwick/two-transgender-employees-quit-guardian-transphobia

March 2020
https://www.buzzfeed.com/patrickstrudwick/guardian-staff-trans-rights-letter

July 2021
https://medium.com/@notCursedE/the-guardian-is-transphobic-eebd0d5ea63a

[misbegotten]

I hadn't heard that. So disappointing. Thanks for the links!

[firecat]

Yeah it sucks. It would be nice to be able to like ONE media outlet unreservedly.

[agoodwinsmith]

Now that I am reminded of this book with such tantalizing tidbits, I checked my local bookstore. Argh. Heavy hardback is many pennies, and lighter paperback is not due out until January 2024. I do not know what to do. (Possibly I will dither until January - this has happened before.)

[firecat]

I bought the ebook, but I understand dithering, it would be a heavy hardback.

[greghousesgf]

I always liked him.

[firecat]

<3

[kore]

I loved that book, but it also kept making me sad because I kept thinking how amazing his memoirs would have been.

[firecat]

We lost him way too soon.