LONDON, Jan 15 — Alan Rickman, the accomplished British stage actor who brought an erudite dignity to film roles like Hans Gruber, the nefarious mastermind of Die Hard, and Severus Snape, the dour master of potions in the Harry Potter series, died yesterday in London. He was 69.
His death was confirmed by a publicist, Catherine Olim, who said the cause was cancer.
In an acting career of more than 40 years, Rickman, with his sensuous, shadowy purr of a voice and often an enigmatic grin, played a panoply of characters whose outward villainy often concealed more complicated emotions and motivations.
Rickman, who attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, had his early successes in stage works like the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 1985 production of Christopher Hampton’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses, in which he played the manipulative Vicomte de Valmont. He was nominated for a Tony Award for his performance after the show moved to Broadway in 1987.
He gained a worldwide audience the following year in Die Hard, the first of the Hollywood action-thriller franchise, playing Gruber, the devious, well-spoken terrorist whose takeover of the fictional Nakatomi Plaza building in Los Angeles is foiled by the resourceful police officer John McClane, played by Bruce Willis.
Rickman wrung every malevolent drop from Gruber’s boastful lines. (“Who are you?” he asks McClane, who is constantly frustrating his plans. “Just another American who saw too many movies as a child? Another orphan of a bankrupt culture who thinks he’s John Wayne?”)
Some 13 years later, Rickman brought nuance to the role of Severus Snape, a sarcastic, cutting instructor at the Hogwarts school in the Harry Potter series, adapted from JK Rowling’s best-selling novels. The character was introduced onscreen in the 2001 film Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.
Professor Snape seemed at first to be a traditional foil for the titular protagonist, but through Rickman’s increasingly intricate performances over eight films, he would be revealed as having had a more crucial and courageous role in the young hero’s life.
Rickman saw the mysterious Professor Snape as an unusually complex character, he said in an interview with The New York Times in 2012, and he signed on without a clear idea of how the character would evolve over the course of the series, which ended with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows — Part 2.
“With the last film it was very cathartic because you were finally able to see who he was,” Rickman said. “It was strange, in a way, to play stuff that was so emotional. A lot of the time you’re working in two dimensions, not three.”
Though Rickman was never nominated for an Academy Award, he shrugged off awards in general. “Parts win prizes, not actors,” he told IFC in 2008.
“You always know a part that’s got ‘prize winner’ written all over it,” he continued, “and it’s almost like anybody could say those lines and somebody will hand them a piece of metal.”
Yesterday, his life and work were celebrated by his Harry Potter collaborators in emotional online remembrances.
On Twitter, Rowling called him a “magnificent actor.” And Daniel Radcliffe, who played the headstrong Harry Potter, wrote in a social media post that Rickman was “one of the first of the adults on Potter to treat me like a peer rather than a child.”
Whatever people concluded about Rickman from his screen roles, Radcliffe wrote, “Alan was extremely kind, generous, self-deprecating and funny. And certain things obviously became even funnier when delivered in his unmistakable double-bass.”
Alan Rickman was born February 21, 1946, into a working-class family in the Acton area of London. After a peripatetic art career, including studies at different art colleges and a brief involvement in a graphic design studio, he auditioned for the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and was accepted in 1972.
After leaving the academy in 1974, he worked with the Royal Shakespeare Company, appearing in acclaimed 1980s productions of Troilus and Cressida (as Achilles) and As You Like It (as Jaques); in that same period, he also performed in Mephisto as Hendrik Hofgen, a character modelled on the German actor Gustaf Grundgens.
Rickman made his television debut in 1978, playing Tybalt in a BBC version of Romeo and Juliet. He also appeared in a 1980 miniseries adaption of Thérèse Raquin and the 1982 miniseries The Barchester Chronicles, adapted from the Anthony Trollope novels.
Following his success in Liaisons Dangereuses, Rickman travelled to Los Angeles, where he was offered the role in Die Hard by producer Joel Silver.
As Rickman would recall, at a celebration of his career held by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, he was not initially impressed by the movie or its screenplay, credited to Jeb Stuart and Steven E. de Souza.
“I didn’t know anything about LA I didn’t know anything about the film business,” Rickman said, according to The Guardian. “I’d never made a film before, but I was extremely cheap.” He said his reaction to the script was: “What the hell is this? I’m not doing an action movie.”
Rickman said: “I got Joel saying, ‘Get the hell out of here, you’ll wear what you’re told.’ But when I came back, I was handed a new script. It showed that it pays to have a little bit of theatre training.”
Rickman’s many other film roles included the dastardly sheriff of Nottingham in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991) and a married man tempted by his young secretary in Richard Curtis’ romantic ensemble comedy Love Actually (2003). He appeared in the 1999 science-fiction spoof Galaxy Quest, in a role sending up classical British actors relegated to lightweight fantasy fare.
In 2013, he played Ronald Reagan in Lee Daniels’ The Butler and Hilly Kristal in CBGB, a biographical film about the founding of the New York punk-rock club.
The latter portion of his film career was defined by the Snape character in Harry Potter, a franchise that has sold more than US$7.6 billion (RM33.3 billion) in tickets worldwide.
Beneath his ominous exterior, Snape proved to be “unutterably honourable,” Rickman said in a 2011 interview with The New York Times.
Rickman is survived by his wife, Rima Horton. The couple secretly wed in 2012, but had been together for more 40 years, People magazine reported last April.
He is also survived by his siblings Michael, David and Sheila Rickman, Olim, the publicist, said.
Emma Thompson, the actress and writer who worked with Rickman in films like Sense and Sensibility and Love Actually, said in a statement yesterday that it was Rickman’s “intransigence” that “made him the great artist he was,” recalling “his ineffable and cynical wit, the clarity with which he saw most things, including me, and the fact that he never spared me the view.”
“I couldn’t wait to see what he was going to do with his face next,” she said. — The New York Times
