Alan Rickman, the actor perhaps best-known for playing Severus Snape in the Harry Potter series, passed away today, his family has said. He was sixty-nine years old.
Rickman was born in London and began his career as a stage actor. After working with the Royal Shakespeare Company for a spell, he made his first US appearance as the Vicomte de Valmonte in the Broadway production of Les Liaisons Dangereuses in 1987, a role for which he was nominated for a Tony. He made his first film appearance one year later as the villainous Hans Gruber in Die Hard, still one of his most-beloved roles.
Over the years, Rickman would set the bar for screen villainy, a reputation he used to his advantage in his role as the mysterious Severus Snape in Harry Potter. Over the course of his nearly thirty years on screen, he’d portray everyone from The Sheriff of Nottingham (Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves) to Rasputin (the 1996 TV movie Rasputin) to Ronald Reagan (Lee Daniels’ The Butler) to CBGB founder Hilly Kristal (CBGB). He also directed two films: 1997’s The Winter Guest and 2014’s A Little Chaos.
This morning, Daniel Radcliffe called Rickman “undoubtedly one of the greatest actors I will ever work with,” while Kevin Smith, who directed Rickman in Dogma, tweeted “Alan. Gone. Fuck, this one hurts…”
(via BBC News)
