But despite all the acclaim that Rickman enjoyed for his roles as Hans Gruber, the suave terrorist of Die Hard and the lock'-jawed Obadiah Slope in the BBc's Barchester Chronicles, he is keen to leave his bad-guy image behind.

"You play one of those parts remotely successfully," he says, "and before you know it you've got this label around your neck. And a label is not how I see myself at all. I'm as neurotic as the next person when it comes to being asked constantly to produce qualities which actuallly have nothing to do with you. One longs for a director with a sense of imagination rather than being filed away under 'blond, uptight' or 'dark, sulky' or whatever."

In his two most recent films, both due for releasw this month--Stephen Poliakoff's Close My Eyes (for Channel 4) and Anthony Minghella's Truly, Madly, Deeply--Rickman shatters the mold that was threatening to entomb him. Both films enphatically demonstrates his screen versatility.

In Close My Eyes, Rickman plays a wealthy husband who discovers his wife is having an affair with her own brother. In Minghella's resonant Truly, Madly, Deeply, he plays a romantic, thinking-man's ghost. A gentle, droll and intelligent part, it reunites Rickman with Juliet Stevenson, who played opposite him in Les Liaisons.

"It was an opportunity to find out where life and work briefly challenge each other," he explains. "I've worked very closely with Juliet in many productions. In fact I think we performed the first oral sex scene on radio in another of Minghella's plays, appropriately entitled A Little Like Drowning."

To complete a busy month, Rickman is also preparing for a prodigious return to the London stage. He plays the lead in Yukio Ninagawa's production of Kunio Shimizu's Tango at the End of Winter, a modern Japanese play Ninagawa directed for the 1988 Tokyo season. It's an intruing departure for this near legendary Japanese director, well-known for his ability to cross-fertilise cultures and demolish barriers between theatrical forms. Tango at the End of winter is Ninagawa's first London production of a contemporary Japanese play after flirtations with Macbeth, Medea, The Tempest and Suicide for Love. The director was keen to explore a more naturalistic approach-- hence his debut with a European cast.

"It's a very hard play to articulate about because it touches all sorts of nerve ends," he says. "It does have a narrative but as Ninagawa says: 'We find out about this play by doing it.'" Shimizu's script centres on an acting community in Japan which values European traditions--rather in the manner, I suspect, that Ninagawa chooses to interpret his classical Japanese productions. Curiously, however, the focus is ona particularly Japanese notion of an ageing leading actor (Rickman) who gets to 40 and panics about his fading career because that's when, in Japanese tradition, his power diminishes. Japanese actresses can go on forever, it seems, but the appeal of their actors fades with time. Unlike the RSC's production of Mephisto (Rickman again played an actor), which was firmly rooted in politics, this production concentrates on the actor's personal dreams and nightmares. It is full of those donagerously indulgent games actors like to play with themselves.

"One of the concerns I had about this role was that the play is from a culture which puts its actors on pedestals," says Rickman. "Delving around in an actor's psyche and paranoia is therefore in intrinsically interesting activity. This, of course, is not true in Britain, where actors spend a lot of time working on rubbish tips, standing in dole queues and on whatever the opposite of a pedestal is. But I hope the audience will see the play as more than just applicable to actors. It's also about lying, and how close acting is to madness. It's also a curious thing to be doing becuase the actor I play has not been on stage for three years. I haven't been on stage for four.