Alan Rickman

• 1. Introduction

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  Alan Sidney Patrick Rickman was born on the 21st of February 1946 in Brentford, London, and he spent his early years in the shadow of Wormwood Scrubs Prison on an Acton council estate, raised by a mother who worked at the Post Office to keep four children fed. He had no obvious path to stardom. A graphic designer by training, a late starter by choice, he did not walk through the doors of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art until he was 26. Yet the voice was always there. A vocal coach once told him he had a "spastic soft palate," and that peculiarity of physiology would become, for millions of listeners, one of the most arresting sounds in cinema. How does a man who almost turned down his first film role end up on the AFI's list of the greatest screen villains, play the potions master across eight films of the most successful franchise in movie history, and win an Emmy, a Golden Globe, and a BAFTA along the way? The answers run from the repertory stages of Manchester and Sheffield, through the parlours of Jane Austen's England, to a hospital in London on the 14th of January 2016.

• 2. A Late Vocation

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  At Chelsea College of Art and Design from 1965 to 1968, and then the Royal College of Art from 1968 to 1970, Rickman trained not as an actor but as a graphic designer. He worked on ARK, the Royal College's in-house magazine, and on the Notting Hill Herald. Drama school, he later said, "wasn't considered the sensible thing to do at 18." After graduating, he and several friends opened a graphic design studio called Graphiti, and it was a going concern. He ran it for three years before walking away to write to RADA requesting an audition. He was 26. While studying there from 1972 to 1974, he paid his way by working as a dresser for Nigel Hawthorne and Ralph Richardson. Those two names were not incidental: Rickman was pressing suits for two of the finest British stage actors of their generation while learning how it was done. From RADA he moved directly into the repertory circuit, starting at the Library Theatre in Manchester in a 1974 production of Babes in the Wood, and working his way through the Haymarket Theatre in Leicester, the Crucible in Sheffield, and Birmingham Repertory Theatre. He appeared three times at the Edinburgh International Festival. By the time he joined the Royal Shakespeare Company, he was already a seasoned journeyman of the British stage. His essay about playing Jaques in As You Like It appeared in the RSC's book Players of Shakespeare 2.

• 3. Villains and Valmont

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  The RSC production in 1985 that changed Rickman's career was Christopher Hampton's adaptation of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, directed by Howard Davies. Rickman played the Vicomte de Valmont. When the production transferred to the West End in 1986 and then to Broadway in 1987, it earned him a Tony Award nomination and a Drama Desk Award nomination. He was already a respected stage actor when producer Joel Silver and director John McTiernan came calling for Die Hard in 1988. Rickman almost declined. He did not think it was the kind of film he wanted to make. He took the role of Hans Gruber anyway, and his portrayal of the German criminal mastermind opposite Bruce Willis landed him on the AFI's 100 Years...100 Heroes and Villains list, ranked 46th. John McTiernan, who directed that film, would later say that Rickman was the antithesis of the villainous roles for which he was most famous on screen. Three years later he played the Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, and Entertainment Weekly observed that while Robin Hood "left critics and movie goers underwhelmed, Rickman's gleefully wicked villain became the summer's most talked-about performance." Winning the BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role for that role, Rickman delivered an acceptance speech that was itself a small act of self-awareness: "This will be a healthy reminder to me that subtlety isn't everything."

• 4. Breaking the Mould

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  Rickman bristled at the villain label. In the same year as Robin Hood, he played the romantic lead Jamie in Truly, Madly, Deeply, directed by Anthony Minghella, opposite Juliet Stevenson. Critic Roger Ebert noted that audiences would watch him and struggle to place him, racking their memories "all during the movie without making the connection that he was the villain in Die Hard." He was also in Close My Eyes that same year with Clive Owen and Saskia Reeves; critic Jonathan Rosenbaum called all three performances "edgy, powerful, and wholly convincing, with Rickman a particular standout." Those three 1991 performances, together with his work in Quigley Down Under from 1990, won him both the Evening Standard British Film Award for Best Actor and the London Film Critics' Circle Award for Actor of the Year. In 1995 he was cast as Colonel Brandon in Ang Lee's Sense and Sensibility alongside Emma Thompson, Hugh Grant, and Kate Winslet. Thompson remarked that Rickman could express the "extraordinary sweetness of his nature" precisely because he had played "Machiavellian types so effectively" before. That same year he directed The Winter Guest at London's Almeida Theatre, staging it with Emma Thompson and her real-life mother Phyllida Law before releasing the film version in 1997. In 1996 he gave one of his most decorated television performances, playing Grigori Rasputin in the HBO biopic Rasputin: Dark Servant of Destiny, a role that brought him a Primetime Emmy Award, a Screen Actors Guild Award, and a Golden Globe.

• 5. Snape and the Long Game

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  Severus Snape first appeared on screen on the 4th of November 2001 in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, and Rickman played the character in all eight films of the series, concluding with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Part 2 in 2011. The role's full arc was kept deliberately opaque in the early films. In between, Rickman suffered a health crisis that nearly ended his involvement: throughout 2005 he received treatment for an aggressive form of prostate cancer, culminating in a prostatectomy in January 2006. The operation coincided with casting for Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. He deliberated over whether to return, then decided: "The argument that wins is the one that says: 'See it through. It's your story.'" By the final film, critics were vocal about what he had built across a decade. Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times wrote that Rickman "as always, makes the most lasting impression." Peter Travers of Rolling Stone called him "sublime at giving us a glimpse at last into the secret nurturing heart that... Snape masks with a sneer." Harry Potter creator J. K. Rowling would later call Rickman "a magnificent actor and a wonderful man," and Daniel Radcliffe recalled that Rickman "came and saw everything I ever did on stage both in Britain and America. He didn't have to do that."

• 6. My Name Is Rachel Corrie

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  In 2003, after reading published emails by Rachel Corrie, a US activist who had advocated for Palestinian rights and was crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer in Gaza, Rickman decided to produce a play drawn from her words. He compiled the piece alongside journalist Katharine Viner, directed it himself, and premiered My Name Is Rachel Corrie at the Royal Court Theatre in London in early 2005, with a revival later that October. The West End production won him the Theatregoers' Choice Award for Best Director. When the production was scheduled to transfer to the New York Theatre Workshop, it was postponed indefinitely over fears of boycotts. The British producers called the decision censorship. Harold Pinter, Vanessa Redgrave, and Tony Kushner all criticised the delay. The play finally opened off-Broadway on the 15th of October 2006 for an initial run of 48 performances. Rickman said, "I never imagined that the play would create such acute controversy." He was also careful to report what actually happened in the room: "Many Jews supported it. The New York producer was Jewish and we held a discussion after every performance. Both Israelis and Palestinians participated in the discussions and there was no shouting in the theatre. People simply listened to each other." The episode sat in the context of a life shaped by political conviction: Rickman had described himself as "born a card-carrying member of the Labour Party," and according to his diaries he declined a CBE in 2008.

• 7. The Voice Itself

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  Two researchers, a linguist and a sound engineer, identified what they considered "the perfect male voice" as a combination of Rickman's and Jeremy Irons' voices, drawing on a sample of 50 voices. The BBC described Rickman's "sonorous, languid voice" as "his calling card, making even throwaway lines of dialogue sound thought-out and authoritative." Rickman himself offered a more practical description of the craft behind it. In an interview with BBC Hardtalk in 2010, he said that you "only speak as a human being in life and therefore... you only speak because you wish to respond to something you've heard." He told NPR in 2013 that his core advice for acting was simply: "acting is about accurate listening." That quality extended into the recording studio as well. He appeared in the track "The Bell" on Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells II in 1992, credited as "A Strolling Player," announcing the various instruments at the end of the first part of the piece. He recited Shakespearean sonnets on the album When Love Speaks in 2002. Helen Mirren, who acted alongside him, put it simply: his voice "could suggest honey or a hidden stiletto blade." Emma Thompson remembered something harder to quantify: "the intransigence which made him the great artist he was, his ineffable and cynical wit, the clarity with which he saw most things, including me."

• 8. Final Days and Legacy

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  In August 2015, Rickman had a minor stroke that led to a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer. He revealed his terminal diagnosis only to his closest confidants. His final onscreen performance was as General Benson in Gavin Hood's Eye in the Sky, opposite Helen Mirren, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2015 to a Rotten Tomatoes score of 95% from 175 critics. Critic Stephen Holden wrote in his review: "General Benson is Mr. Rickman's final screen performance, and it is a great one, suffused with a dyspeptic world-weary understanding of war and human nature." Rickman died on the 14th of January 2016 in a London hospital at the age of 69. He was cremated on the 3rd of February at the West London Crematorium in Kensal Green. His last recorded work before his death was a short video made to help Oxford University students raise funds for Save the Children and Refugee Council. Fans built a memorial beneath the Platform 9 and 3/4 sign at London King's Cross railway station within days of the announcement. Johnny Depp, who had worked with Rickman in two Tim Burton films, said: "That voice, that persona. There's hardly anyone unique anymore. He was unique." An edited collection of Rickman's personal diaries, covering 1993 to 2015, was published on the 4th of October 2022 under the title Madly, Deeply: The Alan Rickman Diaries, offering at last some access to the private record he had kept of a career that he very nearly chose not to have.