International fame came five years later, courtesy of the Broadway transfer (1987) of Christopher Hampton’s adaptation of Les liaisons dangereuses (1986), in which Rickman’s Vicomte de Valmont and his ex-lover Madame de Merteuil ( Lindsay Duncan) conspire in the cruel manipulation of those less worldly and cynical. Much later still, he confessed to heavily rewriting his lines with the help of friends Ruby Wax and Peter Barnes.)Ī smattering of television roles culminated in the Anthony Trollope adaptation The Barchester Chronicles, in which his Machiavellian chaplain Obadiah Slope arrived in episode three to offered an early hint of the multifaceted villains that he would shortly make his own (although he later pointed out that he’d barely played a single one after the Sheriff of Nottingham, the popular caricature notwithstanding). “This will be a healthy reminder to me that subtlety isn’t everything”, he cheerfully affirmed as he picked up a Best Supporting Actor BAFTA. (Thirteen years later, Rickman would steal the far larger-scale Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991) even more comprehensively with his wench-molesting, Christmas-cancelling Sheriff of Nottingham. Although a generally lacklustre production, this worked to Rickman’s advantage – his Tybalt jump-started every scene he was in, a feat Rathbone had also pulled off in the 1936 Hollywood version. After running the regional repertory gauntlet, that essential training ground for a British character actor, he joined the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford-upon-Avon, and made his first television appearance in the BBC Television Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (1978). But despite professional success in a creative sphere, he never managed to zap the acting bug, and enrolled at RADA (1972-74) after conquering fears about being the oldest student there (he wasn’t, as it turned out). (His impact on this audience and the distinctiveness of his voice was such that my daughter, then aged five, spontaneously squeaked “Snape!” after hearing him on the radio talking about something entirely different.)Įxcelling at both acting and art at school, Rickman initially favoured the latter as offering more stable career prospects, training at Chelsea Art College and the Royal College of Art and practising as a graphic designer for three years in his own design partnership Graphiti. Later in life, he would garner an equally ardent following of younger fans thanks to his saturnine wizard Severus Snape, Professor of Potions at Hogwarts School in all eight Harry Potter films (2001-11), an apparent villain at first who gradually turned out to have a far more complex and sympathetic backstory, conveyed in increasing detail over a full decade. Rickman was a later developer than Bowie, only taking up professional acting at 26 and not becoming a true household name until the early 1990s, for all the considerable splashes that he made in Die Hard (1988) in the cinema, Les liaisons dangereuses (1986) on stage and The Barchester Chronicles (1982) on BBC2.īut from then on, he was unstoppable, our generation’s James Mason or Basil Rathbone, combining a bearing of absolute authority with a seductive menace so languorously smouldering that you could practically smell the oestrogen emanating from the female-dominated audiences that eagerly tracked his parallel stage career. “And now Alan Rickman – January can do one” said a distraught friend within seconds of the announcement of the actor’s death, itself mere days after the equal shock of David Bowie’s departure at a near-identical age (both men were 69, born just six weeks and only a few miles apart in similarly dilapidated London boroughs: in Rickman’s case an Acton council estate).
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