RIP Alan Rick­man – One of the good (bad) guys

Alan Rick­man, who has died aged 69, had a knack for play­ing great cin­e­mat­ic vil­lains. From his very first and arguably most icon­ic bad­die film role in 1988’s Die Hard to 10 years of ser­vice to Har­ry Pot­ter movies as Severus Snape, embody­ing the force of encroach­ing dark­ness just seemed to come nat­u­ral­ly. It was some qual­i­ty in his creaky voice and nat­ur­al down­turned sneer. He nailed the facial expres­sion of a man on the cusp of con­trolled fury as a result of hav­ing tast­ed some­thing deeply unpalatable.

While doing press for Robin Hood and the Prince of Thieves, in which he played Kevin Costner’s mor­tal ene­my, the Sherif of Not­ting­ham, he was asked: ​‘Why are you so good at being so bad?’ He respond­ed: ​“I don’t know. I approach every part I’m asked to do and decide to do from exact­ly the same angle: Who is this per­son? What does he want? How does he attempt to get it? What hap­pens to him if he doesn’t get it. Or if he does.”

From this answer it seems like the way he was cast was some­thing imposed on him. In the same way that clean-cut fea­tures pave the way to mat­inée idol­dom, so Rickman’s face with its haughty hand­some­ness sealed his fate as cere­bral type of wrong-doer. His char­ac­ter actor’s answer to the above ques­tion goes some way to explain­ing why his work was always so absorbing.

Rather than pitch­ing his skul­dug­gery at a hys­ter­i­cal hand-rub­bing Bond vil­lain lev­el, Rick­man played his parts from a place of con­vic­tion, speak­ing his lines with the mer­est hint of rel­ish. He was at his most deli­cious when adding a sliv­er of ice to a ham­my dish: the cad in vel­vet in Robin Hood or embody­ing the cam­ply titled Euro-vil­lain, Hans Gruber.

It’s always strange to look back at an actor’s sud­den­ly finalised list of cred­its. The attempt to try to pin down the role that estab­lished their image and rep­u­ta­tion is more elu­sive when, as with Rick­man, cin­e­ma cred­its only tell a par­tial sto­ry. I wish that I would have strayed from my medi­um and watched him at work in the the­atre. I would have loved to have seen him in the role of seduc­er in Christo­pher Hampton’s stage ver­sion of Dan­ger­ous Liaisons.

The mag­ic of cin­e­ma is in what it pre­serves, the mag­ic of the the­atre in what dis­ap­pears. Part of what Rick­man gave is still present in his film back cat­a­logue while more inti­mate per­for­mances are left as per­son­al mem­o­ries for those that sought them out.