Alan Rickman: so long, you silver-tongued devil

When you remember Alan Rickman, the voice comes first. It has to. Everything else about him – his prowling presence, befuddling charm, and extraordinary career – just seemed to effortlessly uncoil from it.

Rickman’s voice fell at the precise midpoint between purr and burr: honey-smooth and homely, but flecked with threat. Its lack of obvious signifiers of time or class was an honest reflection of his own background: a working-class upbringing in Acton, followed by a spell at public school and a single season with the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Implacable as it might have been, its power was beyond dispute – and a single wisp could enchant any room, office, castle, or school of witchcraft and wizardry through which he swept.

It’s impossible to think of another actor who could have been simultaneously exactly right to play Hans Gruber, the German terrorist kingpin from Die Hard, and also Colonel Brandon, the crumpled heartthrob of Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility – let alone Snape, Slope, the Sheriff of Nottingham, and the many other roles that made him instantly recognisable to generations of cinema-goers.

I met Rickman once, shortly before the release of A Little Chaos, a period drama he co-starred in and also directed, and the last of his films to be released during his lifetime. The film is about a landscape gardener enlisted to bring a spark of nonconformism to the neatly ordered palace gardens at Versailles, and the lead role was played by Kate Winslet, with whom Rickman had last worked on Sense and Sensibility, 20 years earlier.

Since then, via films like Titanic, Iris, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Winslet had become an Oscar-winning global star, and Rickman warmly reflected on that, joking that they’d spent the intervening two decades “watching each other get older” and waiting for the right script to pop up that would bring them together again.

They share a scene in the film that’s vintage Rickman. Louis XIV is relaxing in a modest walled garden, out of his kingly regalia, when Winslet’s character, Sabine, happens upon him – and after mistaking him for another gardener, blithely starts chatting about a delivery of perennials that hasn’t turned up.

Rickman’s precision and poise is extraordinary, and the whole scene is beautifully underplayed. From the background of the shot, while sitting on a bench and doing nothing much more than narrowing his eyes and furrowing his brow, he conveys the king’s stunned disbelief at Sabine’s impertinence, then wry comprehension as he understands her error, followed by his carefully masked feelings of delight as he realises this encounter, free from the airs and graces of courtly life, is something precious and to be savoured.

“I find you are the very company I need today,” he says finally. “Nothing would suit me better than for me” – a droll pause – “the kings gardener, to take some advice on perennials.”

It’s the kind of line that Rickman could have made mean almost anything. It’s easy to picture his younger self delivering it with a curl of the lip that would have made Sabine flush purest scarlet. He had the kind of sex appeal that could creep into a performance by stealth – and it was a stage role, playing Valmont an RSC production of Christopher Hampton’s Dangerous Liaisons, that unexpectedly made him one of the hottest actors on the planet. “A lot of people left the theatre wanting to have sex,” his co-star Lindsay Duncan memorably observed after the play’s first night. “and most of them wanted to have it with Alan Rickman.”

That led to his move into cinema, although not in Stephen Frears’ screen adaptation of the play (he was considered for Valmont, but lost out to John Malkovich). Among the play’s Broadway audience had been the action movie producer Joel Silver, who saw that Rickman had what it takes to take an entire Christmas party hostage and threaten to blow up a skyscraper.

The result was Die Hard, which took £100 million, and Rickman became an instant international star. His performance galvanised Hollywood’s suspicions that Brits made the best villains – and also the trope of the under-appreciated thespian slumming it in blockbuster purgatory. (Though there’s nothing purgatorial about Die Hard, and nothing slummy about Rickman’s uproarious commitment to the part.)

Eleven years later, Rickman would send himself up with no little panache in the terrific science-fiction comedy Galaxy Quest, in which he played a Shakespearean actor reduced to playing an alien on network television.

It seemed absurd that Rickman could have been working under the radar in the UK for so long and had to appear opposite Willis in a burning skyscraper to find success. Three years later, when he won a Best Supporting Actor BAFTA for playing another villainous role – The Christmas-cancelling Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves – it felt like Britain’s apology for letting him go.

Yet he went on to make a handful of British films after Die Hard, the best of which was Truly, Madly, Deeply, the debut feature from Anthony Minghella, in 1989. Rickman played the dearly departed boyfriend of Juliet Stevenson, who comes back to haunt her: heartbreakingly romantic at first, until his exasperating spooky behaviour causes her to fall out of love and move on.

It was positioned as a British answer to Ghost, after the similarly themed Patrick Swayze-Demi Moore romantic fantasy that had been released a few months before it. But in fact Minghella’s film had been made first, with a sharper, more grief-literate script that seemed specifically tuned to Rickman’s subtler talents – the eye contact that lingers then breaks, the pointed pauses for breath.

More than Die Hard’s vein-popping bombast, it was those skills that would serve him best when playing Severus Snape, Hogwarts’ resident master of the Dark Arts, in the eight Harry Potter films between 2001 and 2011.

But some older Potter fans wondered if they had already seen a version of the character – the same black cape sweeping down stone gothic corridors – in the 1982 BBC series The Barchester Chronicles, based on Anthony Trollope’s Barchester novels, in which Rickman played the scheming chaplain Obadiah Slope.

To watch Slope’s early moment of triumph now – a venom-tipped sermon in which he all but blows poison darts into the necks of the Barchester clergy from the pulpit – is like seeing a five-minute Snape audition tape. Rowling has never confirmed the connection between the two characters, but Rickman was always her first choice to play Snape, and he was one of only a handful of people trusted from the series’ earliest days with details of his character’s ultimate fate.

There were traces of Snape in his performance as Judge Turpin in Tim Burton’s excellent screen adaptation of Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd, in which he and Timothy Spall, as his sidekick Beadle Bamford, looked like a gravestone with a turnip lantern perched at its foot.

And perhaps there were even traces of the character’s internalised anguish in Richard Curtis's Love Actually, in which he and Emma Thompson played a couple whose quietly curdling marriage defied the film's wincingly sweet tooth.

Everything about Rickman was unmistakeable, but he could slip into any kind of story or role with a gliding ease. That was his unique talent, and it’s why he’ll be missed. We thought we knew him well, but he surprised us every time.