Alan Rickman, one of the best-loved and most warmly admired British actors of the past 30 years, has died in London aged 69. His death was confirmed on Thursday by his family. Rickman had been suffering from cancer.
A star whose arch features and languid diction were recognisable across the generations, Rickman found a fresh legion of fans with his role as
Professor Snape in the Harry Potter films. But the actor had been a big-screen staple since first shooting to global acclaim in 1988, when he starred as Hans Gruber, Bruce Willis’s sardonic, dastardly adversary in
Die Hard – a part he was offered two days after arriving in Los Angeles, aged 41.
Gruber was the first of three memorable baddies played by Rickman: he was an outrageous sheriff of Nottingham in 1991’s
Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, as well as a terrifying
Rasputin in an acclaimed 1995 HBO film.
But Rickman was also a singular leading man: in 1991, he starred as a cellist opposite Juliet Stevenson in Anthony Minghella’s affecting supernatural romance
Truly, Madly, Deeply; four years later he was the honourable and modest Col Brandon in Sense and Sensibility, starring and scripted by Emma Thompson. He was to reunite with Thompson many times: they played husband and wife in 2003’s
Love, Actually and former lovers in 2010 BBC drama
The Song of Lunch.
In 1995, he directed Thompson and her mother, Phyllida Law, in his directorial debut, the acclaimed Scottish drama
The Winter Guest. Last year, he reunited with Kate Winslet, another Sense and Sensibility co-star, for his second film as director,
A Little Chaos – a period romance set in the gardens of Versailles.
Yet it was Rickman’s work on stage that established him as such a compelling talent, and to which he returned throughout his career. After graduating from Rada, the actor supported himself as a dresser for the likes of Nigel Hawthorne and Ralph Richardson before finding work with the Royal Shakespeare Company (as well as on TV as the slithery
Reverend Slope in The Barchester Chronicles).
Rickman remained politically active throughout his life: he was born, he said, “a card-carrying member of the Labour party”, and was highly involved with charities including Saving Faces and the International Performers’ Aid Trust, which seeks to help artists in developing and poverty-stricken countries.
Rickman publicly spoke of his unhappiness about the
“Hollywood ending” of 1996 film Michael Collins, a historical biopic of the Irish civil war, in which he portrayed Éamon de Valera, and expressed his
belief that art ought to help educate as well as entertain. “Talent is an accident of genes, and a responsibility,” he once said.
He and his wife, Rima Horton, met when they were still teenagers; she became an economics lecturer as well as a Labour party councillor. In 2012, the pair married, having been together since 1965.
He spoofed his own persona in comedy
Galaxy Quest (2000), in which he plays a Shakespearian-trained actor who has found fame as a Spock-style alien in a long-running sci-fi series and in
Victoria Wood’s Christmas special of the same year, as an upright colonel at the Battle of Waterloo.
Rickman was sanguine about his legions of admirers, who declared their love on countless websites, video tributes and at stage doors. Even scientists were not immune: in 2008,
linguistics professors concluded that the most appealing male voice mixes elements of Rickman, Jeremy Irons and Michael Gambon.
Recent film roles included an art-loving lord in the Coen brothers’ scripted farce
Gambit (2012), as Ronald Reagan in Lee Daniels’s
The Butler – and a humorous, imperious King Louis XIV in A Little Chaos.
Rickman is still to be seen in Eye in the Sky, a thriller about drone warfare that won
rave reviews at the Toronto film festival last year, and repeating his voiceover as
Absolem the Caterpillar in Alice Through the Looking Glass, also due for release later this year.
That Rickman never won an Oscar (he did receive a
Golden Globe, an
Emmy, a
Bafta and many more) became a perennial topic in interviews but did not seem to trouble the actor himself. “Parts win prizes, not actors,” he said in 2008. It was the wider worth of his art to which Rickman remained committed, saying that he found it easier to treat the work seriously if he could look upon himself with levity.
“Actors are agents of change,” he said. “A film, a piece of theatre, a piece of music, or a book can make a difference. It can change the world.”
HIM TOO???!!! 
RIP.... He made hans gruber into a legend...
