The nigh-on 500 pages, compiled mostly from 26 volumes of handwritten diaries between 1993 and the end of 2015, will not radically reinvent Rickman’s public image. They are, however, fascinating and gradually colour in the picture of a performer who put huge amounts of himself into his work ... mostly pithy, always frank ... The weary elan pours off the page ... There are sharp observations in here; sometimes outright digs. Would he have had this stuff published if he had lived? Would he want the world to know how brilliant yet self-absorbed he found Kate Winslet when he directed her in the film A Little Chaos ... at first seems a roll-call of nothing but starry dinners, trips, ventures of varying degrees of glamorousness, lucrative but rejected offers and nice holidays too. It can read like its own Private Eye parody ... Once you’ve stopped applying your own Professor Snape sneer to the name-dropping nature of all this, though, you are forced to think: Well, what else is he going to write about? What else would you write about? There is a sense, only rarely underlined, of the boy from Ealing cooing over all this high life ... somehow, although you know full well it’s coming, that sudden absence leaves you bereft.
He is often a very funny writer but never just for effect - it is always in service of a serious point ... There are fascinating insights into his work on stage and in movies ... His constant complaints about tiredness and builders can get a bit wearying. But the pleasure of reading an unvarnished record of a life unfolding as it was really lived more than compensates ... one last great Rickman performance: challenging, uncompromising, utterly unique and truly mesmerising.
The tone is sometimes gossipy and amusing but at other times anxious and irritable ... There are, naturally, crisp descriptions of colleagues ... It is particularly amusing to read him railing against critics, while himself displaying all the skills required for the job ... But we also get a sense of a man who was loyal and generous ... Quite how gripped the reader will be with these diaries will depend on their tolerance for actors and their fascination with themselves and each other – I couldn’t help zoning out at the lists of famous types spotted or spoken to at assorted parties and awards ceremonies. But just when you think Rickman might be becoming insufferable, he has a knack of bursting the actorly bubble and saying something profound.
A certain sighing impatience dogs him and he doesn’t mince his words, at least in private ... He’s not a full-time moaner and will often write something to make you smile ... From his obituaries I got the feeling he was wonderful company. These diaries confirm it.
... fantastically dull ... It’s unclear if Rickman wanted these diaries published. I bet he would not have. They aren’t embarrassing, but the entries are rarely fleshed out. Much of it reads like an aide-memoire, quickly jotted notes one might return to later for a different sort of book ... Nothing here can be held against him, but they’re a bit depressing, these diaries ... Not a lot of light shines through the windowpanes ... He saw so much but described so little ... It’s possible to go through this book, as if with a metal detector, and retrieve shreds of tabloid coin ... Rickman isn’t good at capturing his fellow humans in a few crunchy words. He’s better on other topics ... In the manner that it takes a large ground crew to put a single fighter pilot in the air, it takes a large company of humans to move a famous actor through his days: makeup and clothing and sets and black cars and interview requests and tickets and reservations and all the rest. I wish Rickman had something, anything, to say about these people, and these processes. He glides as if on a magic carpet ... The last months of entries are moving not because Rickman relates much about his treatment, or his hopes and fears. They are moving because he realizes he’s lived so fast and hard that he’s never had time to look back, to savor it all ... a reminder that, as Simone de Beauvoir wrote, 'What an odd thing a diary is: The things you omit are more important than those you put in.'
Many diary entries feel like notes for a future autobiography, though it is not clear that the author would have wanted them published in this raw form ... We are left with inklings of a tell-all: some tidbits about the author, many about a business where an insufficiency of the inner life is a job qualification. The diaries of a writer or a composer might deepen our understanding of their work. But actors are better students of strangers’ characters than their own. What we want is gossip. Tragically, Rickman is bound by the Code of the Luvvies and a seriously restricted set of adjectives ... This volume’s entries may be brief, but their solipsism is epic. Rickman visits bookshops but never tells us what he buys ... comes with a truly, madly gushing foreword from another shameless luvvie, Emma Thompson...But the impression from these diaries is that Rickman was, like his cartoonish later roles, a lonely misanthrope, and embittered by his journey up the 'cul-de-sac of stardom' to a villa in Tuscany.
Harry Potter fans will enjoy the entries covering filming, especially as it was not all such a big happy family as we thought, and there were some mighty important actors kept waiting around and not too happy ... Alan Rickman is the luvvie’s luvvie, so much so that at times the book reads like one of the satirist Craig Brown’s parodies of a celebrity diary. The actor is forever lunching and gossiping, wants more discussion of motivation for his roles, hates being criticized himself, but loves to criticise others. It is his most marked characteristic ... At times the diary turns into a list of famous people at lunch ... He was much-loved, is much-missed, and was an awe-inspiring actor. The diaries show someone not as funny or as self-deprecating as fans might expect, but that’s hardly his fault. And, you have to pan through a lot of words, but there is true gold in there.
... engaging, salty, sometimes repetitive ... anyone expecting the wholesale bitch-fest that made John Osborne’s autobiographies so indecently addictive is in for disappointment ... Rather than any continuing stream of bile, what we get in Madly, Deeply is a great deal of low-level griping interspersed with long lists of celebrities and exhausting accounts of world travel ... Taylor should, perhaps, have cut out more of the celebrity incantations. After a while, the lists take on the quality of an unintended running gag ... True, the book is full of complaints, but a diary is a good place to work through minor frustrations ... One senses a great and unique energy leaving the planet.
To anyone planning on reading these diaries, I would strongly advise you keep Rickman’s IMDb and Wikipedia pages open on your laptop, plus Google to hand ... The editor had more than a million words of entries to work with and condensing them to 500 pages can’t have been an easy job, but if only he had added some context and background information it would be a less maddeningly opaque read ... Crucially, these diaries were not written for the purpose of publication ... I would count myself as an average fan, however, and by the second half of his diaries was finding it hard not to love him less ... The book is a relentlessly waspish grumble about fellow actors delivering disappointing performances ... He is in danger of casting himself as a parody of a whingeing lefty luvvie ... Unless the diarist is a saint, their unedited thoughts will always look unedifying in public. A diary is a safe space for our worst side. I wouldn’t want people reading my ungracious rants or grandiose quibbles, and felt increasingly uneasy about the posthumous publication of Rickman’s ... The one thing he never, ever grumbles about is his marriage, which sounds like one of the happiest in showbusiness. The book’s final pages are heartbreaking. As the cancer takes grip, the entries shorten and this gloriously expansive life contracts to a bleak checklist of hospital appointments. He died with his wife by his side, and her afterword is haunting.
