‘Potter’ star is ready for ‘Chaos’

By Susan King

Los Angeles Times

LOS ANGELES

Nearly 20 years ago, British actor Alan Rickman fulfilled a dream shared by many in his profession — he directed a feature film. He helmed 1997’s “The Winter Guest,” a critically acclaimed drama starring the real-life mother and daughter Phyllida Law and Emma Thompson.

And then Harry Potter cursed his ambitions.

“I didn’t know there were going to be all of those books and all of those movies,” said the 69-year-old actor who for a decade was committed to playing Professor Severus Snape, the boy wizard’s nemesis in the blockbuster movie franchise.

A real charmer himself, with a warm smile and a hearty laugh, Rickman appears to be fine with putting his Snape days behind him. Though he had performed in plays in London and New York, directed for theater and appeared in several movies during his Potter years, he couldn’t even contemplate directing a second feature until he could clear an 18-month window in his schedule.

And then Alison Deegan’s script for “A Little Chaos” arrived at the opportune time.

Set in 1682 France, the romantic drama stars Kate Winslet as Sabine, a strong-willed landscape designer who is grieving the deaths of her husband and daughter and who is hired by landscape artist Andre Le Notre (Matthias Schoenaerts) to build one of the gardens at Louis XIV’s (Rickman) new Palace of Versailles.

Rickman was fascinated with the romantic relationship that develops between Sabine and Le Notre, who is trapped in a loveless marriage. “And what it has to say about men and women, what people have to do to come together and how they have to find equal paths. There are so many moments in the writing you realize how completely modern it is,” he said during an interview in West Hollywood.

Though Le Notre was a real person, the character of Sabine is fictional. “There would be no woman with a profession at that time,” Rickman noted, adding that he loved the idea of “putting a completely fictitious character in the middle of a known bit of history.”