It was the voice that made him magnetic, that nerve-jangling baritone, delivered with the kind of slow, precise, deadpan diction that could carve a word into shards. When he joined the voice to a contemptuous sneer and a slight squint, he could make cement tremble. Alan Rickman was born to be bad, a villain for the ages.
Rickman, who died of cancer Thursday at 69, was one of the great actors who never got a single Oscar nomination. Possibly he was overlooked because his most noteworthy films were blockbusters, or just maybe because he never seemed to break a sweat. His acting wasn’t the kind that announced, “Look at all the research I did!” He didn’t wrestle with his roles, he slipped into them.
Playing Hans Gruber in “Die Hard” (1988) — his first screen role — made Rickman’s name as the perfect heavy, a man who could kill you with sarcasm if not with high explosives. Following up on the arch Euro-villains of the James Bond movies, his Gruber was funny without being campy, a man in control, a worthy adversary for our hero.
Three years after “Die Hard,” in 1991, he was equally strong as the terrible Sheriff of Nottingham in Kevin Costner’s “Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves,” setting him up for his most-seen role: Professor Severus Snape, the Harry Potter potion boffin who is alternately opposed to and allied with the forces of good.
Snape might have been an even better fit for Rickman than Gruber: What in England is called a “donnish” tendency — an aloof inability to conceal the fact that you’re the smartest guy in the room — suited the Londoner’s dismissive sneer. Often the quality is linked with aristocratic arrogance, but Rickman was a working-class boy, the son of a factory worker who willed his way into a spot at the Eton of acting, the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, where he became a noted Shakespearean.
Yet Rickman was a rangy actor who, wary of repeating himself, proved equally able in comedic roles, such as in the “Star Trek” spoof “Galaxy Quest” (1999) and as the voice of a hilariously depressed robot in “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” (2005). In the romantic-comedy epic “Love Actually” (2003), he nimbly stepped aside to let colleagues Emma Thompson and Rowan Atkinson dominate their scenes, though even in a small role, he proved he could bring great pathos to the portrayal of an ordinary husband and dad who is temporarily beguiled by the possibility of an office fling. When he says, “I am so in the wrong. A classic fool,” he provides a kind of hangover moment of rue. Rickman doesn’t grab you by the collar, he simply lets you into his cloud of regret. It’s just one beautifully modulated second in a richly creative career.