Alan Rickman, 1946–2016

Alan Sidney Patrick Rickman was born in Hammersmith, London, in February 1946. He worked as a graphic designer before training at RADA, the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, in his mid-twenties, a late start, by most standards, for a career that would go on to define him.

The stage came first. He worked with the Royal Shakespeare Company and built a reputation there long before film audiences knew his name, with his Vicomte de Valmont in Les Liaisons Dangereuses, first in London, then on Broadway, remembered as one of the performances that announced him. He returned to theatre throughout his life: a widely discussed Hamlet at the Riverside Studios, a Tony-nominated run in Private Lives, later work at BAM in John Gabriel Borkman. Much of it exists only in memory, or in archival recordings never released to the public, which is what brought this project into being.

On screen, he became one of the most distinctive actors of his generation: Hans Gruber in Die Hard, the Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Colonel Brandon in Sense and Sensibility, Harry in Love Actually, Alexander Dane in Galaxy Quest, the voice of Marvin in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and, for an entire generation, Severus Snape across all eight Harry Potter films, a role he carried with a stillness and precision few actors could have managed.

He also directed, The Winter Guest and A Little Chaos among them, and was known, off screen, for a quiet generosity toward the people he worked with.

Alan Rickman died on 14 January 2016, at the age of 69, from pancreatic cancer. This site, and the letters kept in it, exists because so much of what he gave people through his work was never quite said back to him.