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 on Thursday in London. He was 69.His death was confirmed by a publicist Catherine Olim who said the cause was cancer.
In an acting career of more than 40 years Mr. Rickman, with his sensuous, shadowy purr of a voice and often an enigmatic grin, played a panoply of characters whose outward villainy often concealed more complicated emotions and motivations. Mr. 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, in a leading role, he played the manipulative Vicomte de Valmont. He earned a Tony Award nomination for the performance after the production transferred to Broadway in 1987.
Mr. Rickman gained a worldwide audience the following year in “Die Hard,” the first of the Hollywood action-thriller franchise, playing 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.Mr. Rickman wrung every malevolent drop that he could from Gruber’s boastful lines. (“Who are you?” he asks McClane, who is constantly frustrating his plans. “Just another American who saw too many movies as a child? Another orphan of a bankrupt culture who thinks he’s John Wayne?”)
Some 13 years later, Mr. Rickman brought nuance to the role of Severus Snape, a sarcastic, cutting instructor at the Hogwarts school in the “Harry Potter” franchise, adapted from J. K. Rowling’s best-selling novels. The character was introduced on screen in the 2001 film “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.”Professor Snape seemed at first to be a traditional foil for the titular protagonist, but through Mr. Rickman’s increasingly intricate performances over eight films, he would be revealed as having had a more crucial and courageous role in the young hero’s life.
Mr. Rickman saw the mysterious Professor Snape as an unusually complex character, he said in an interview with The New York Times in 2012, and he signed on without a clear idea of how the character would evolve over the course of the series, which ended with “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows — Part 2.”“With the last film it was very cathartic because you were finally able to see who he was,” Mr. Rickman said “It was strange, in a way, to play stuff that was so emotional. A lot of the time you’re working in two dimensions, not three.”
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