PHOTO: RIP ALAN RICKMAN [Snape] (2/21/1946 - 1/14/2016)

BRITISH ACTOR ALAN RICKMAN  ("Professor Snape") DIED.  


Mr. Rickman, attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, had early success 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 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.”
Though Mr. Rickman was never nominated for an Academy Award, he shrugged off the value of awards in general. “Parts win prizes, not actors,"    he told IFC in 2008.
“You always know a part that’s got ‘prize winner’ written all over it,” he continued, “and it’s almost like anybody decent could say those lines and some organization out there will hand them a piece of metal.”


 



Alan Rickman set the standard for villains so intriguingly complex and wholeheartedly bad they upstaged the good-guy in film after film.    Whatever people concluded about Mr. Rickman from his screen roles, Mr. Radcliffe wrote, “Alan was extremely kind, generous, self-deprecating and funny.   And certain things became even funnier when he delivered it in his unmistakable double-bass.”  Delivery is the whole thing in acting.

Alan Rickman was born Feb. 21, 1946, into a working-class family in the Acton section of London.   After a peripatetic art career, including studies at different art colleges and a brief involvement in a graphic design studio, he auditioned for the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and was accepted in 1972.
After leaving the academy in 1974, he worked with the Royal Shakespeare Company, appearing in acclaimed 1980s productions of “Troilus and Cressida” (as Achilles) and “As You Like It” (as Jaques); in that same period he also performed in “Mephisto” as Hendrik Höfgen, a character modeled on the German actor Gustaf Gründgens.
Mr. Rickman made his television debut in 1978, playing Tybalt in a BBC version of “Romeo and Juliet.” He also appeared in a 1980 mini-series adaptation of “Thérèse Raquin” and the 1982 mini-series “The Barchester Chronicles,” adapted from the Anthony Trollope novels.
Following his success in “Liaisons Dangereuses,” Mr. Rickman traveled to Los Angeles, where he was offered the role in “Die Hard” by the producer Joel Silver.
As Mr. Rickman would recall, at a celebration of his career held by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, he was not initially impressed by the movie or its screenplay, credited to Jeb Stuart and Steven E. Desouza.
“I didn’t know anything about L.A.    I didn’t know anything about the film business,” Mr. Rickman said, according to The Guardian. “I’d never made a film before, but I was extremely cheap.”
He said his reaction to the script was:   “What the hell is this? I’m not doing an action movie.”
Mr. Rickman said:   “I got Joel saying, ‘Get the hell out of here, you’ll do what you’re told.’   But when I came back, I was handed a new script.   It showed that it pays to have a little bit of theater training.”
 
In 2013 he played  Hilly Kristal in “CBGB,” a biographical film about the founding of the New York punk-rock club.
The latter portion of his film career was defined by the Snape character in “Harry Potter,” a franchise that has sold more than $7.6 billion in tickets worldwide.
Beneath his ominous exterior, Snape proved to be “unutterably honorable,” Mr. Rickman said.
Pointing to more upstanding and honorable figures he had played, like the suitor Colonel Brandon in Ang Lee’s film adaptation of “Sense and Sensibility,” Mr. Rickman said it was a mistake to associate him only with corrupted characters.
“The label gets written because of a very small amount of work that’s had a lot of publicity,” he told The Times.
Mr. Rickman continued to perform on stage in London and New York. He returned to Broadway in 2002 in a production of Noël Coward’s “Private Lives.” 
Mr. Rickman is survived by his partner of 40 years, Rima Horton, who became his wife in 2012.    He is also survived by his siblings Michael, David and Sheila Rickman, Ms. Olim, the publicist, said.