He's best remembered as the bad guy: emanating coiled fury beneath curtains of lank black hair as potions professor Severus Snape in eight Harry Potter films. But British actor Alan Rickman—whose death from cancer at age 69 was confirmed Thursday—can be said to have fulfilled a larger cultural obligation. Over a four-decade career on stage and screen, he became his own kind of archetype. Call him the Man Who Withheld Approval.
Rickman delivered scene-stealing performances in no small number of big movies, including 1988's Die Hard, 1991's Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, director Ang Lee's adaptation of Sense and Sensibility,and even 2000's Galaxy Quest (where Rickman lampoons his own persona as a Serious Thespian, albeit one who found fame as a Spock knockoff on a sci-fi TV show and hates himself for it). And in them, the actor's distinguishing characteristic was always palpable disdain. In role after role, he seemed to have a stick up his ass and scorn the universe for that discomfort—which was never less than riveting to watch.
Although by many accounts a nice guy in real life, Rickman was, in essence, a consummate and perfectly articulated Hater. Emma Thompson, who appears as his jilted wife in 2003's Love, Actually, praised the actor's "capacity to fell you with a look" but also, more tellingly, Rickman's "intransigence" and "ineffable and cynical wit." A codified description of a Hater if there ever was one.
Perhaps the fulcrum of his haterade can be found in Rickman's supporting turn in the wellreviewed but criminally overlooked 2008 bio-dramedy Bottle Shock. In it, he portrays expat wine snob Steven Spurrier who's brought low in '70s Paris and, in a Hail Mary to save his sputtering business, travels to California to find a New World wine worthy of standing up to venerable French Chardonnays in a blind taste test. Nobody, of course, expects California Love to win the day.
Never more disdainful than when playing a fish out of water, Rickman pulses with scorn examining a piece of Kentucky Fried Chicken. He broods and seethes across the not-yet-famous Napa Valley in a rented AMC Gremlin searching for viable entrants, absorbing alien viticulture and cursing Wild West wine pioneers as savages. In most scenes, he looks like he's digesting a turd sandwich.
So when the character stumbles upon his contender, the struggling Chateau Montelena winery—operated by a shaggy-haired stoner and the son of Mexican farm laborers—the opening of Spurrier's mind arrives as a revelation. It's droll but dramatic, to be sure, but it's also vintage Rickman.
"Why don't I like you?" Pullman's California vintner character asks him in a scene from Bottle Shock.
"You think I'm an asshole," Rickman deadpans. "And I'm not, really. I'm just British, and… you're not."
It works as an epitaph too.