The unintended memoirs of Paul Newman and Alan Rickman

Do Paul Newman’s privately shared outpourings really constitute a memoir? And would fellow actor Alan Rickman truly have wanted 26 books of personal diaries pruned to present him as an inveterate name-dropper? And does it matter that neither book holds up a truthful mirror to their authors?

The temptation to carp is strong. Amplifying it is the likelihood that neither Newman nor Rickman, now both dead, would have wanted these diminishing books published.

The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man is based on the transcripts secretly preserved — by Newman’s interviewer — of years of angst-ridden tape recordings that the widely admired star deliberately destroyed.

In Madly, Deeply, the gossipy extracts pulled together by Alan Taylor reveal Rickman jotting down everything from his naive belief that the royal family are “a group of people who actually do have fun together”, to the joys of visiting New York’s high-priced burlesque club The Box.

Two of Newman’s six children claim they are setting the record straight with their involvement in his memoir, after a biography they didn’t like and a six-part television series by Ethan Hawke that they sought and endorsed. Rickman’s editor admits that the actor’s motive is “unclear” for preserving a diary Rickman himself considered “resentful”. Just possibly, a public figure needed a private place to vent.

“Nobody should be asked not to like Paul Newman,” the critic Pauline Kael once announced. The director John Huston went further, calling his friend “a moral and ethical man. Superb in every way.” Many would agree.

Sadly for the reader, Newman used his interviews with screenwriter Stewart Stern as therapy, indulging what amounts almost to a mania for self-deprecation. A notably generous giver, Newman shrugs off his philanthropy: “It’s easy to be charitable if it doesn’t actually cost you anything.”

Born into a well-to-do family with a doting mother who longed for him to be “something arty”, he grumbles that he never enjoyed acting and “got no emotional support from anyone”.

It gets glummer. A self-confessed “failure as an adulterer”, whatever that might mean, Newman ascribes his success on stage and screen to the “trust fund of appearance”. Described by one friend as a loving father, he claims to have considered shooting himself in order to ease the pressure on Scott, the lookalike actor son of Newman’s first marriage to actress Jackie Witte: “He wouldn’t have to compete anymore.”

Joanne Woodward, the wife with whom Newman spent 50 “battle-scarred” years, drily observed that racing cars — her husband’s passion — gave him “the peace he used to find in being dead drunk”.

It’s a relief to turn from so much sadness to a star-struck Rickman, thrilled to spot the glamorous Newmans across a crowded room: “Hard not to just stare at this wonderful, generous, ego-free, open, childlike, utterly on-the-ball couple.” While far less famous than Newman, Rickman’s lucrative 11 years of playing the entrancingly gloomy Professor Snape in the Harry Potter films made him a household name and taught him to defend his privacy.

Taylor’s task of compressing the contents of 26 diaries into one hefty book may explain the absence of any hint of a normal life as Rickman glides from suppers at the Ivy to a Lebedev Christmas do. Envying the Russian oligarch’s spacious apartment, Rickman delivers a roll call of fellow guests (Stephen Fry, John Malkovich, Andrew Lloyd-Webber, Hugh Grant — and Nick Clegg) as meaninglessly as he does his backstage visitors (Lauren Bacall, Emma Thompson, Tom Hanks) after a glittering Manhattan opening for — what else? — Private Lives.

“Can’t think what this diary will read like later on,” Rickman reflects after grumbling about damp patches on his bathroom walls. Readers who enjoy a peek behind the scenes will be fascinated to learn that Stoppard’s early plays bored him “rigid”, that the brilliant actor Simon Russell Beale “needs a smack rather than a director”, and that needy friends made Rickman feel like “a personal launderette”. Not all entries are so sharp: Julian Schnabel might be baffled to learn that “he makes good art” because “he is a human being”.

One entry permits a glimpse of the oddity and loneliness of Rickman’s life. While filming an Austen classic, the actor enjoys a quick snifter with the lighting crew: spending time with “the sparks” is, he wistfully comments, “a real pleasure”. So much for Sense & Sensibility. Next week, he’s off to Dublin for the next film — “and there is Julia Roberts.” A tough life, being famous.

Paul Newman: The Extraordinary Life of An Ordinary Man: A Memoir compiled and edited by David Rosenthal, Century £25, 320 pages

Madly, Deeply: The Alan Rickman Diaries edited by Alan Taylor, Canongate £25, 496 pages

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