You couldn’t take your ears off him
It was 1962. I was in my last term at Latymer Upper, a West London grammar school with a great tradition of drama. I was in a rehearsed reading of Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance, a cult classic of the time. We complacent old-timers were jolted away from our scripts by the sight, and especially the sound, of an unfamiliar boy, three years our junior, who — Latymer not having yet gone co-ed — was playing a barmaid. The boy’s name, we discovered, was Alan Rickman.
I can still recall the defiant heartbreak with which he imbued a line about being required to cradle a dead lover’s skeleton and “make up song-ballads.”
The same voice, preternaturally deep and hollowed out, was equally eloquent in expressing rage, sarcasm and humiliation. It was already the voice that was to make him a star.
When Alan left school he went to study graphic design. But he also joined an amateur drama group, one in which he met a sharp-witted young lady named Rima Horton, who was to become his companion for the rest of his life. It was obvious he would have to choose between vocations and he did.
He enrolled at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, Britain’s premier drama school. After graduating, he was, as he once told me, never out of work.
His rise in the professional theatre was fast. We’d kept bumping into one another, usually on buses and subways, but he first crossed my professional radar in the early 1970s. I was theatre critic for The Observer and I saw him in regional productions and at the Edinburgh Festival. The voice, even deeper and craggier than before, and the saturnine demeanour, made him ideal for cynical roles in Jacobean drama, and allowed him to lend authority to others as well. He’s probably the only actor to get rave reviews in the usually nondescript role of Friar Peter in Measure for Measure.
You couldn’t take your ears off him. He played mediumsized roles with the Royal Shakespeare Company, left, and returned a few years later as a fully fledged lead, playing the melancholy Jaques in As You Like It and the musclebound Achilles of Troilus and Cressida. The RSC gave him his breakthrough role: the Vicomte de Valmont, career seducer, in Les Liaisons dangereuses, a performance in which he blended languid self-confidence with whiplash wit. The play went from Stratford to London to Broadway, and its success took him to Hollywood, where they seized on his talents as a villain.
I had just moved to Canada when Die Hard opened, and I remember looking at the posters outside a movie theatre. You never expect to see an old school friend emblazoned as a movie star. But there he was. Having grown up poor, it was a status he took to with an air of bemusement. He enjoyed the perks but never took it too seriously.
From a self-satirizing Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves to Severus Snape in the Harry Potter franchise, the villain roles continued. He could do wonders with a sneer and a drawl, and he made evil likable. One of my own favourites among his film roles, though, was his decidedly unvillainous Colonel Brandon in Sense and Sensibility. The portrayal had the same Rickman style, but this time it was deployed in the service of decency.
Offstage and off- screen, that was Alan. He was remarkably loyal, across decades and oceans. He was a generous host and a gracious guest. His relationship with Rima lasted 50 years. They had no children but they were extraordinarily kind to other people’s. An actor friend described Alan as being “like a wonderful uncle.” My own children certainly felt the benefit of that: he gave them career advice and encouragement, took them around the Harry Potter set, even got them work as extras on one of his movies.
He was also one of the most respected figures in the British theatre. Everybody sought his opinion, everybody wanted to act with him or, later, be directed by him. He was intelligent and outspoken and could be more critical than any critic, sometimes outrageously so. He once described a certain stage director as the worst he’d ever worked with. I protested that he always said that. “I know,” he admitted, “but this time I mean it.”
The last time I saw him in person was in Toronto in 2014 when the film A Little Chaos, which he directed, was shown at TIFF. He also appeared in it — reluctantly, he insisted — as Louis XIV. The studio wanted to add his star power to that of Kate Winslet. He couldn’t stop talking about how wonderful she was in it, and he was right. He never seemed to belong to any group or clique. His career straddled media, attracting fans of all generations. He put a personal stamp on everything he did, everything he said. He was unique. And he will be missed.