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Alan Rickman Biography

Born: 21 February 1946
Where: London, England
Awards: 1 BAFTA, 1 Emmy and 1 Golden Globe

Filmography: Complete List

People in the UK often complain that the finest British thespians seldom get opportunities to succeed in Hollywood pictures. Often the reason is simple - most great British actors are just SO damned British they're considered only for the occasional role. A butler, perhaps, or a dastardly villain, more often Queen Elizabeth I. And, in the case of Alan Rickman, there is a further problem. To most top-line stars, the man is a positive menace. Absolutely explosive in his work, he's not only ideally suited to cinema but he's a scene-stealer of the highest and most dangerous order. Take his Sheriff Of Nottingham in Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves. Kevin Costner famously cut many of his scenes, and STILL the movie's remembered for Rickman's hilarious outbursts.

His path to prominence has been long and hard. He was born Alan Sidney Patrick Rickman, on a council estate in Acton, West London, on the 21st of February, 1946, to a Welsh mother and Irish father. He had one older brother, then a younger brother and sister. Sadly, his father, a factory worker, died when he was just 8, leaving him to be raised by his mum who, he's said, instilled in him both a sense of decency and a respect for women. As a child, he was bright, and artistic, capable of excellent calligraphy and watercolour painting. Eventually, he won a scholarship to Latymer School (later alumni including Hugh Grant and Mel Smith), and quickly became involved in drama. Latymer was fairly radical in this department. Both pupils and teachers acted alongside each other, an approach that demanded the boys mature rapidly.

Rickman loved acting, but his other artistic talents led him towards graphic design - certainly a safer occupation. "Drama school," he says "wasn't considered the sensible thing to do at 18". So he enrolled at the Chelsea College Of Art And Design, later spending a year at the Royal College Of Art. It was at Chelsea that he met Rima Horton, still his partner today. Both keen to continue acting in some shape or form, they founded an amateur troupe, the Brook Green Players. Rima, sharing Alan's liberal beliefs, would eventually become a politician, serving for many years on the council of Kensington and Chelsea.

Alan continued at the day job, on graduation forming a design company, Graphiti, with some friends. He'd continue taking design work till well into the Seventies. But closer and closer he came to professional acting. He played with another amateur troupe, the Court Drama Group, performing in the likes of Romeo And Juliet and View From A Bridge. Then, at the relatively late age of 26, wrote to RADA, hoping for an in. He got one. Delivering a speech from Richard III at his audition, he was accepted, spending the next three years studying and performing Shakespeare and facing such emotional and technical challenges as Uncle Vanya and Ghosts. For his efforts, he was awarded the Emile Litter Prize, the Forbes Robertson Prize and the Bancroft Gold Medal.

After leaving RADA, Rickman threw himself into any acting jobs going. Though he is, of course, renowned as an extremely serious actor, he played all manner of roles over the next four years, as he gained experience in weekly repertory theatre. With the Library Theatre Company in Manchester, he he took on farce and light comedy, performing in the likes of Babes In The Wood, Lock Up Your Daughters and There's A Girl In My Soup. He was King Rat in Dick Whittington in Bristol, Sherlock Holmes in Birmingham. There were musicals too, Rickman touring with both Guys And Dolls and Joseph And His Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat. There were serious plays too, naturally, like Hamlet and St Joan, but Rickman was grounding himself in every stage discipline - he could be still and desperately intense, magnetic and sexy, outlandish and larger than life. He also had good advice to share, persuading Ruby Wax to be become a comedienne, rather than the actress she was trying to be.

In 1978, inevitably really, he joined the Royal Shakespeare Company. And, just as inevitably, given his age and his rootsy experience, he found their elitist attitudes and traditionalist structures too limiting. He stuck it for only a year, before returning to rep.

It could have been a big step backwards, but Rickman persisted. In 1979, he debuted on TV in a BBC production of the savage and haunting Therese Raquin (well, his debut if you don't count a televised production of Romeo And Juliet), and continued his work within UK theatre. He also gained ground in America, as star and assistant director of Desperately Yours at the Colonnades Theatre in New York. He spent a year between 1983 and 1984 at the renowned Royal Court.

Now came his rise to prominence. In 1982, Rickman had raised his stock with his performance as Brownlow, opposite Alec Guinness in John Le Carre's spy series Smiley's People. He'd also caused a stir in a TV adaptation of Anthony Trollope's The Barchester Chronicles. As the Reverend Obadiah Slope, a slimy, ladykilling politico, he'd provoked a near-unheard-of stream of fan mail, much of it from women. And it was this sex appeal, combined with his fierce intelligence, that now made him a stage star too, as he created the role of the Vicomte de Valmont in Les Liaisons Dangereuses. Between 1985 and 1987, the show was taken to London and then on to Broadway, where Rickman found himself Tony-nominated. Unfortunately, not only did James Earl Jones take that prize, but Rickman was also denied the film role, given instead to John Malkovich.

But Hollywood soon beckoned anyway. Producer Joel Silver had noted Rickman as Valmont, and asked him to play super-terrorist Hans Gruber, leader of a gang who take a bunch of hostages in an LA office block in Die Hard. Rickman recognised that the producers had spent so much on Bruce Willis they needed actors who'd work for next to nothing, but he went for it anyway, and was magnificent - casually vicious, hilariously merciless and masterfully irritated as Bruce foiled his best-laid plans. So effective was his performance that Hollywood would now habitually cast Brits as major villains.

The next couple of years continued his rise. He was notable as Kevin Kline's oddball sidekick in serial killer flick The January Man, and excellent as mean-spirited ranch owner Elliott Marston in Quigley Down Under, hiring gunfighter Tom Selleck to shoot aborigines then going after his reluctant employee. Now two killer roles. First, Anthony Minghella's Truly, Madly, Deeply, where Rickman was Jamie, the dead cello-playing lover of Juliet Stevenson (she'd move the entire nation with her deeply upsetting breakdown scene). Then came Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves, with Kevin Costner. Here Rickman was incredible - smarmy, callous, cowardly and flamboyant, storming through every scene with captivating ebullience This was not simple scene-stealing, it was grand larceny, with so many memorable moments. Swearing he's going to cut someone's heart out with a spoon, he's asked by a minion why a spoon. "Because it HURTS!" he screams. In the final sequence, where he's trying to marry Maid Marian before the Merrie Men take over the castle, it was Rickman himself who came up with the notion of prizing open Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio's legs, as if he were hoping to consummate the marriage with the priest still present. All those years in rep were coming in useful - Rickman won a hugely deserved BAFTA.

Next came the controversial Close My Eyes, where Rickman played the tortured husband of Saskia Reeves as she conducts an incestuous affair with her brother, played by Clive Owen. Then there was the extraordinary, and hard-to-find Closet Land, a movie with a cast of only two. In it, Rickman played a Secret Police interrogator, grilling children's writer Madeleine Stowe on the subversive messages supposedly hidden in her stories. Perhaps even better, now Rickman once again brought his experience in comedy to bear, as the magnificently manipulative spin doctor Lukas Hart III, in Tim Robbins' political spoof Bob Roberts. In one memorable scene, Rickman disengages himself from one sticky situation with a fabulously insincere "Excuse me, I have to go pray". In the same year, Rickman would provide narration for Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells 2.

Rickman's next major role was brilliantly cast. In Mesmer, he played the title role as the 18th Century Viennese physician who touted some thoroughly controversial healing practices, based on his concept of "animal magnetism". The film should have launched him as a leading man, but there were problems. Rickman and director Roger Spotiswoode (Air America, Tomorrow Never Dies) made changes to Dennis Potter's script, with the financiers feeling the completed movie was not the one they'd paid for. Litigation reared its ugly head and Mesmer, pulled from theatrical release, was not aired till 1999, and then on the Romance Channel. A terrible shame for all concerned.

But Rickman persisted and 1995 brought rewards. Onscreen, he was sexy and terribly devious in Mike Newell's theatrical romp An Awfully Big Adventure, set in Liverpool in 1947. Then he was the brave and tortured Colonel Brandon, loving Kate Winslet from afar in Ang Lee's surprise hit Sense And Sensibility. Rickman also directed his co-star from that movie, Emma Thompson, in The Winter Guest at London's Almeida Theatre. The next year, Rickman would make a big screen version of the play - a deep tale of youthful hopes and intergenerational struggles - again starring Thompson, with her mother played by her real-life mum Phyllida Law. Though not a big money-spinner, The Winter Guest would win prestigious prizes at the Venice and Chicago film festivals.

In the meantime, Rickman had made up for disappearance of his hypnotic Mesmer by taking on the equally transfixing role of Rasputin. Of course, Christopher Lee had been superb in Hammer's earlier version of the mad monk's rise to power in the court of the last Tsar of Russia, but Rickman, matching Lee for intensity and outdoing him for intelligence, was magnificent, taking both an Emmy and a Golden Globe. Then, having played such a ferocious libertine and open-hearted zealot, he took on the demanding role of the quiet, complicated and mercilessly pragmatic Eamon De Valera in Neil Jordan's Irish revolutionary epic, Michael Collins. By now, Rickman was confident in his abilities, yet this confidence was tested to its limit when he discovered his first scene involved making a speech to 5,000 Dubliners - with no rehearsal.

Now the offers were rolling in. He played alongside Thompson again, in the New Orleans-set kidnapping drama Judas Kiss. He was suitably angelic as the seraph Metatron in Kevin Smith's hilarious Dogma. And, perhaps best of all, he was side-splitting as Dr Lazarus in the excellent Galaxy Quest, taking the rise out of himself as an arrogant thespian who despises the undying fame he's found as a Spock-like character in a trashy TV show. Onstage, he assumed the leads he so richly deserved, most memorably playing Mark Anthony to Helen Mirren's glorious Cleopatra at the Olivier. Oh, and he provided some much-needed class to the video for Texas's In Demand though, unfortunately for the band, he made singer Sharleen Spiteri seem very small and uncharismatic by comparison.

Like many great stage actors, Rickman stays true to his roots. He reunited with Anthony Minghella and Juliet Stevenson for Samuel Beckett's Play then played the hurt and abandoned hairdresser husband of Natasha Richardson in the Brit comedy Blow Dry. He stays true to his principles too. A keen supporter of the Labour party, he makes many appearances for charity, notably appearing onstage at the Royal Court with Glenda Jackson, at a public birthday party for Aung San Suu Kyi, the Burmese freedom fighter who's spent so many years under house arrest.

Thankfully, Rickman is ambitious still. Though he failed in a bid to buy the Riverside Theatre in Hammersmith, he remains committed to the British stage. And it's to be hoped that, as Professor Severus Snape, teaching potion-making to the young hero of Harry Potter And The Philosopher's Stone, he will secure another series of movie roles. They may not be substantial roles on paper - though it would be wonderful to see him tear the screen up as a Roman Emperor in Gladiator 2 - but, rest assured, once the incomparable Rickman has strutted his stuff, they WILL be. He's the best we've got - arguably, the best ANYONE's got.

Dominic Willis