At 66, Emma Thompson Finally Speaks About Alan Rickman.
One word, always. That’s the line that broke a generation of Harry Potter fans. The moment audiences finally understood why Snape had looked at Harry that way for eight films. Alan Rickman knew the truth the entire time. J.K. Rowling had told him years before anyone else. On January 14th, 2016, Emma Thompson sent seven words to a journalist because she doesn’t use social media.
I have just kissed him goodbye. For 10 years, she said almost nothing else about him. Now, at 66, she’s finally talking about what he actually meant to her. And it has nothing to do with Hogwarts. Alan Sidney Patrick Rickman was born on February 21st, 1946 in Hammersmith, West London to a working-class family that had more love than money.
His father, Bernard, was a factory worker who died of lung cancer when Alan was eight years old. His mother, Margaret, worked to raise four children alone. The specificity of that early loss, a father gone before you are old enough to understand what you are losing, lives in almost every serious role Alan Rickman ever played. Not on the surface, not in any obvious biographical correspondence, but in the particular way his characters carry grief without announcing it.
The way pain in a Rickman performance tends to show up in restraint rather than expression. He was born with a speech impediment. His jaw did not move fully freely, and the voice that would eventually become one of the most famous instruments in the history of English language cinema was, in its original form, constricted.
He worked on it for years. A drama teacher at RADA, the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, where he trained from his late 20s, told him it sounded as if his voice was coming from under the back end of a drain pipe. He kept working on it. What emerged was not the polished, resonant baritone people recognize now, because it was manufactured from nothing.
It was the specific voice that resulted from a specific person overcoming a specific obstacle over many years of specific effort. You can hear the effort in it underneath the ease. That is part of why it sounds the way it does. Before any of that, though, he had been something else entirely.
He had gone to Chelsea School of Art at 18. He had studied graphic design. He had been genuinely good at it. Good enough to open his own design studio after graduating. But something kept pulling at him that was not satisfied by design. And at 26, he applied to RADA on the feeling, as he would describe it years later, that there was an inevitability about his being an actor since he was about seven.
Other roads had to be traveled first, he said. Finally, a voice in his head said, “It’s time. No excuses.” It was at Chelsea School of Art that he met Rima Horton. She was studying economics. They were both teenagers. They became a couple immediately and with very little drama, which is somewhat remarkable given that the relationship would last for 51 years through his entire acting career, through his cancer diagnoses, through everything before they quietly married in 2012 in New York, walked across the Brooklyn Bridge afterward, had lunch,
and told almost nobody about it for a year. She became a university economics lecturer and a Labour Party Councillor. He became one of the most celebrated actors of his generation. They read side by side in silence. She would read something to him, he once told an interviewer, and they would both start giggling.
Rima Horton, he said, was incredibly tolerant, possibly a candidate for sainthood. He said it with the smile of a man who meant every word of it. After RADA, he joined the Royal Shakespeare Company. This is where the technical foundation was built. The timing, the silence, the understanding that doing less often means doing more.
The discipline that made his face in close-up into something that directors and audiences found almost impossible to look away from. He did Les Liaisons Dangereuses on the West End and then on Broadway, earning a Tony nomination in 1988 and making the kind of impression on serious theater people that gets remembered for decades.
He was already 41. He had not made a film. His first film role was Hans Gruber, not a small part in something forgettable that eased him into the medium. Hans Gruber, the villain of Die Hard in 1988. Calm, precise, faintly amused, playing psychological chess with Bruce Willis’s hapless cop while simultaneously stealing every scene in the film by virtue of the particular quality Alan Rickman had that almost no other actor of his era possessed.
The ability to convey intelligence on screen without explaining it. He did not act smart. He was smart, and the camera found it. The stunt team told him they would drop him on three for the film’s iconic death fall from the skyscraper. They dropped him on two. The expression on his face, the genuine, unmanufactured shock of a man who has just been dropped 40 ft ahead of schedule is the expression that has been in that film for 37 years, and it is the reason that death scene remains one of the great exits in cinema history. Before turning
to Emma Thompson’s side of this story, it is worth spending a moment on what Rickman’s career looked like from the outside because the contrast between the roles he played and the person he actually was is one of the most striking things about him. Hans Gruber, the Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, played with such operatic, theatrical relish that it became one of cinema’s great comedic villain performances, while technically being a straight villain role.
Judge Turpin in Sweeney Todd, cold and morally rotten, without a flicker of pantomime. Snape. And then, cutting through all of it, Alexander Dane in Galaxy Quest in 1999. An actor who trained at the RSC, now trapped in a science fiction franchise he despises, required to say the same ridiculous catchphrase in every episode, playing deadpan misery with such precision that the final scene in which he says the catchphrase with genuine emotion is one of the funniest and most unexpectedly moving moments in the film.
By Grabthar’s hammer, what a savings. He was not entirely convinced about making it, by his own account. Coming from Shakespeare, sci-fi comedy could have felt beneath him. He committed anyway, completely, and turned what could have been a throwaway into something people still quote.
That was Alan Rickman’s relationship to every piece of work he agreed to take on. No throwaway. No phoning in. Everything or nothing. Emma Thompson was born on April 15th, 1959 in Paddington, London to Eric Thompson, the children’s television presenter and writer who gave the world the magic roundabout and Phyllida Law, the actress.
She won an Academy Award for Best Actress in 1993 for Howard’s End and received a second nomination the same year for In the Name of the Father. Nobody else has ever been nominated for acting and writing in the same year. She would do it eventually, but in 1993, she was simply the best actress in the world and everyone was beginning to understand it simultaneously.
The first time she worked with Alan Rickman was Sense and Sensibility in 1995. She had written the screenplay herself, a process that took five years and produced what she has called the best education she ever received in the craft of adaptation. She took Jane Austen’s novel and found the interior life underneath the period manners, the way longing and disappointment and the specific suffering of intelligent women in constrained circumstances moved through the story without ever quite reaching the surface. She cast
Rickman as Colonel Brandon, the quiet, reserved older man whose love for Marianne Dashwood is so restrained and so patient that it registers entirely through what he does not say. It was the first time they had worked together in film, the casting required no explanation. She knew, he knew. The characters emotional architecture was almost perfectly suited to everything Alan Rickman had spent 20 years learning how to do.
On that set, navigating the dual pressure of being both the screenplay’s author and one of its lead performers, she later said something that tells you a great deal about what his presence meant to her. “Alan had a way of being in the room that made you feel you belong there, too.” He offered quiet encouragement, she said, “subtle advice, steadfast presence.
He was on the Sense and Sensibility set, the safe place, when the two roles she was trying to occupy simultaneously became too much to hold.” >> Two years later, he directed her. The Winter Guest in 1997 was Rickman’s directorial debut. A film about a mother and daughter in a Scottish coastal town in winter, grief and connection, and the specific difficulty of loving people across the silences they build around themselves.
Thompson played the daughter, allowing someone to direct you is a particular act of trust, different from simply working alongside them. You are giving over your instrument to someone else’s vision. Emma Thompson gave that to Alan Rickman without apparent hesitation, and what she said about being directed by him was that she had learned from it in ways she was still understanding years later.
“He never spared me the view, she would say later, the view meaning his honest assessment of what she was doing when it was working and when it wasn’t. That clarity, she said, was one of the things she valued most. >> And then came Love Actually in 2003. Richard Curtis cast them as Harry and Karen, a middle-class London couple, long married, slowly coming apart because of something Karen can see and Harry is pretending not to notice.
The film’s most devastating sequence is almost entirely silent. Karen opens a Christmas present she was expecting to be a necklace her husband bought her. It is a Joni Mitchell CD. He has given the necklace to someone else. She goes to the bedroom and she plays Blue and she falls apart. And then she comes downstairs and helps her children get ready for the Nativity Play because that is what mothers do and that is what Emma Thompson does with that scene.
>> She wraps the grief back up inside. The functioning keeps going and the audience sits there quietly wrecked by what they just watched. >> What Alan Rickman does in those same scenes is equally precise and considerably less sympathetic. He plays a man who knows what he has done and cannot stop himself from doing it.
Whose guilt shows up in the quality of his attention to his wife. Too careful, too considerate. The specific attentiveness of someone who is compensating. He told Thompson, she said that he understood this character. >> They had long conversations about betrayal and forgiveness and the quiet desperation that lives inside long marriages.
These were not theoretical debates. They were drawing from somewhere real. He knew how to play Harry because he understood how people hide things from the people they love and how the hiding is visible even when the thing being hidden is not. >> The personal meaning of that for Emma Thompson, whose marriage to Kenneth Branagh had ended in the mid-90s, was not something she discussed in interviews, but she has said that when her marriage ended, it was Alan who showed up with a bottle of wine and sat with her through the night saying very
little. His silence, she said, was not emptiness. It was safety. He offered no advice unless she asked. She did not need to be strong around him. He had that capacity, the capacity to be present without demanding anything from the presence. It is, as qualities go, extraordinarily rare. >> The friendship continued across two decades through the Harry Potter films in which they moved through the same world in different gravitational fields.
She as the wildly eccentric Sybill Trelawney, he as the glacially contained Severus Snape, characters who were almost never in the same scene but who understood each other’s relationship to the franchise in private ways. J. K. Rowling had told Rickman the truth about Snape before anyone else knew it, before the books that revealed it were published, before the directors who worked with him in the later films had any idea.
She told him about Lily Potter. She told him about always, and Rickman carried that secret through eight films, playing Snape’s bitterness and cruelty as the exterior of something that was, at its root, grief. The specific grief of someone who loved a person they could not reach, and spent the rest of their life serving that person’s child while pretending to despise him.
When Deathly Hallows Part 2 finally revealed the truth, audiences who had followed the films for a decade understood in one scene why every single Rickman performance across all the previous films had been the way it was. He had known the whole time. He had played it the whole time. And what he gave in those scenes, particularly the scene in which Harry watches Snape’s memories, and the word always hangs in the air like something too large for the room, was the distillation of everything Alan Rickman understood about hidden love and the cost of
protecting something you cannot keep. He had also in those years been carrying something nobody knew. He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2015, and he did not tell people. He told his closest friends and family, and he continued to work, and he handled it with a dignity that his colleagues would later describe as entirely characteristic and entirely infuriating, because everyone who loved him would have wanted to know.
He appeared publicly as he always had. He made plans. He maintained the illusion of a future that he probably already knew was shorter than he was letting on. He had always been, as Emma Thompson noted in her tribute, imperturbably distant in public, alarmingly present in private. The distance served him in those last months in the most practical possible way.
The last thing he and Thompson did together, she said, was change a plug on a standard lamp in his hospital room. It went the same way as everything they had ever done together. She had a go. He told her to try something else. She tried it. It didn’t work. He had a go. She got impatient and took it from him. It still wasn’t right.
They both got slightly irritable. Then he patiently took it all apart again and got the right lead into the right hole. She screwed it in. They complained about how fiddly it was. Then they had a cup of tea. It took at least half an hour. He said after, “Well, it’s a good thing I decided not to become an electrician.” She is still heartbroken that he’s gone, she wrote in the forward to the published version of his diaries.
But the diaries bring back so much of what she remembers of him, that sweetness, his generosity, his fierce critical eye, his intelligence, his humor. “He was the ultimate ally,” she had written on the morning she kissed him goodbye. In life, art, and politics, she did not choose that word lightly.
Ally is a specific word. It means someone who is on your side, not because they agree with everything you do, but because they have decided by choice and without conditions to be in your corner. Someone who sees the full 360° of who you are, the gifts and the failures, and the particular mess of it, and says, “Yes, anyway.
” Emma Thompson found that in a man who had trained a defective voice into one of the most distinctive instruments in English cinema, who had played monsters with such precision that people assumed he might be one, who had spent his professional life in the service of truth and his private life in the service of the people he loved, who had changed a plug in a hospital room with her the way they had done everything together, together, irritably, imperfectly, in the end, correctly, over tea. She does not yet know what he would
have said about the decade that has passed since he left, what films he would have seen, and what he would have thought of them, whether he would have kept directing, kept writing those diaries, kept pressing the people around him to use their talent fully and stop talking themselves down. She knows what he would have said about the state of the world, probably, because she knew how he thought.
She knows what he would have said about her because he never spared her the view. “We shall not see his like again.” She wrote that 10 years ago, and it remains the truest sentence written about him. There are actors who leave gaps when they go. Alan Rickman left a specific shape, the shape of a person who was fierce and gentle, devastating and supportive, impossible and irreplaceable all in the same breath.
And on the mornings when it’s clearest that the gap is still there, Emma Thompson orders two teas. If this story moved you, if Alan Rickman’s voice or his face in a particular moment in a particular film ever made you feel something you could not immediately explain, leave a comment below. We read everyone.
And here is the question worth sitting with today. Is there someone in your life who has been your ultimate ally, who saw you clearly and chose you anyway? Tell us who that was. We will see you in the next one.