Alan Rickman

Alan Rickman

02/21/1946 - 01/14/2016

I wanted to write something about the passing of Alan Rickman, but I wanted to wait for a little while so I could gain some perspective and not write from a place of emotion. It seems strange to me that I even felt like I was coming from a place of emotion but I was. If you watch the show then you may know that I don't normally have a great deal of sympathy for or connection with celebrities because I feel that their lives are already filled with people who spend way too much time and energy worrying about what they are doing. There are however certain celebrities that cause me to feel some type of connection to them. Alan Rickman happened to be one of those celebrities.

Many of us know that Alan Rickman was a spectacular bad guy. He would have this look on his face and you just knew that you didn't want to be on the receiving end of that look. You knew that if he looked at you that way you would surely be dead before you could begin to think of a way to get away from him. Part of you wanted to be as fierce as he was and yet the other part of you was screaming for the protagonist to take him down. For myself and I am sure for many of you Alan Rickman's role in Die Hard as Hans Gruber made him immediately the bad guy who I loved to hate.

Just when you thought, "this guy is the best bad guy I've ever see" you got to see him in Dogma and Galaxy Quest. Then all of a sudden you realized Alan Rickman could be funny and witty and he could throw in this arrogance that somehow made him more endearing not less. He was smug and narcissistic but everything lead you to believe that he obviously had good reason to behave that way. Plus who cared what he was saying as long as he was saying it with that voice. So now you have seen his range and you are beginning to really love his talent. 

Then you get hit with the enormous whammy of Severus Snape. There could never, ever have been anyone else who could have played Snape the way Alan Rickman did. You had already read the books, you had already seen him there in your wild imagination and when you saw him on screen you just knew they had read your mind and plucked him right out of there. He looked at Harry with such disdain that it made your skin crawl, he was always there to dole out insults and punishments and you hated him more and more with each subsequent movie. You read more books, you got to know Snape's true character and then you see The Order of the Phoenix movie and Alan Rickman breaks your heart. You too were that child who was bullied at school, you loved and lost and felt like you could never love again and that no one would ever love you. From that point forward Alan Rickman would forever be Snape in your mind, his sad yet stone cold eyes, his inflection and tone, everything was perfect.

Alan Rickman was great in Sweeney Todd, he was a wonderful Ronald Reagan in The Butler, he voiced Marvin in The Hitchhicker's Guide to the Galaxy, he was so good in so many films and he left behind a legacy that can viewed time and time again. His talent will sorely be missed and so will his voice. For me he will forever be Severus Snape, he will always be one of my favorite actors of all time and even now several days later I feel the blow of this loss. I would just like to throw a heartfelt "Thank you for the characters that you brought to life, you will be greatly missed." out into the universe and I hope maybe he gets it.