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 in London on Thursday. He was 69.
A family statement published by the BBC said the cause was cancer.
In an acting career that spanned more than 40 years, Rickman, who was born in London and spoke with a sensuous, shadowy purr and often bore an enigmatic grin on his face, played a panoply of characters whose outward and seemingly obvious 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 later earned a Tony Award nomination for the role when the production transferred to Broadway in 1987.
He gained a worldwide audience the following year in “Die Hard,” the Hollywood action thriller, playing Hans 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.
Some 13 years later, Rickman would bring more nuance to the role of Severus Snape, a sarcastic and cutting instructor at the Hogwarts school in the “Harry Potter” franchise, adapted from J.K. Rowling’s best-selling novels.
Though Professor Snape, introduced on screen in the 2001 film “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,” seemed at first to be a traditional foil for the titular protagonist, he would be revealed, over the span of eight films and Rickman’s increasingly intricate performances, to have played a more crucial and courageous role in the young hero’s life.
“With the last film it was very cathartic because you were finally able to see who he was,” Rickman told the New York Times in 2012.
Rowling wrote on her Twitter account Thursday that she had “no words to express how shocked and devastated” she was at the passing of Rickman, whom she called a “magnificent actor” and “a wonderful man.” Daniel Radcliffe, who played the defiant, 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.”
Rickman was not initially impressed by the “Die Hard” movie or its screenplay, credited to Jeb Stuart and Steven de Souza.
He said his reaction to the script was: “What the hell is this? I’m not doing an action movie.” Rickman said: “I got (director) Joel (Silver) 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 theater training.”
Rickman also played the dastardly sheriff of Nottingham in “Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves” (1991), a married man tempted by his young secretary in “Love Actually” (2003), and in 2013, he played Ronald Reagan in “Lee Daniels’ The Butler” and Hilly Kristal in “CBGB,” about the founding of the New York punk-rock club.
Rickman secretly wed Rima Horton in 2012, but the two had been together for more than 40 years, People magazine reported last April.
— New York Times
