Katharine Viner: …the play we edited together, My Name is Rachel Corrie, had a greater impact than we ever imagined, with two runs at the Royal Court, a West End transfer, and productions around the world, from New York to Haifa. And on the opening night we each admitted that we couldn’t have done justice to Rachel’s words without the other. We’d been a partnership, we agreed, however crotchety. A friendship was born.
And that was lucky for me, because Alan had a great gift for friendship. He was devoted to a large number of people and would somehow always manage to visit their obscure art exhibition, or phone them at 2am when he heard they were in deep trouble, or attend their opening night even when, as we now know, he was already seriously ill. He threw dinners; he ordered every dessert on the menu if you couldn’t decide.
I once asked if a friend, a teacher from Huddersfield, could cook for him so that she could put it on her CV – “cooked for Alan Rickman” (it made sense at the time). He not only said yes, but acted as her sous-chef and rustled up a top politician and a Hollywood film actress as fellow guests. When asked recently about his proudest Royal Court moment, his answer was not about him: he said it was when he took Rachel Corrie’s parents outside the front of the theatre to show them their late daughter’s name in neon lights. More here.