Commanding and languid actor with sense of social justice

Alan Rickman: February 21st, 1946 – January 14 th, 2016

The world became fully aware of the sly, languid and villainous charms of Alan Rickman, who has died aged 69 of cancer, as the self-parodying Sheriff of Nottingham pitted against Kevin Costner in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991). However, the actor had already established himself as a star name at the Royal Shakespeare Company in the mid-1980s and as the hilarious German terrorist, Hans Gruber, in the action thriller Die Hard (1988).

Rickman appeared as the cello-playing ghost in Anthony Minghella's sensual, taut and muted Truly, Madly, Deeply (1990). At the RSC he had been sensational as the predatory, dissolute Vicomte de Valmont in Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Christopher Hampton's 1985 adaptation of Choderlos de Laclos's 18th-century novel.

Having trained and worked as a graphic designer, Rickman was a late starter as an actor, attending Rada between 1972 and 1974 before working in rep and the RSC in small roles at the end of the 1970s. He began making waves as Anthony Trollope's devious chaplain Obadiah Slope in BBC television's The Barchester Chronicles in 1982.

Then he was, for a new generation entirely, the sinister potions master Severus Snape in the eight Harry Potter movies, for a decade from 2001. Snape had secrets, and this inner life infused one of the outstanding performances in the series as he stalked the corridors at Hogwarts like the ghost in Hamlet.

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However, it would be wrong to typecast Rickman as a villain. He was an outstanding Hamlet at the Riverside Studios in 1992, a mature student whose morbidity masked an intense, albeit perverse, zest for life. And in Antony and Cleopatra at the National Theatre in 1998 he was fabulous opposite Helen Mirren – shambolic, charismatic, a spineless poet of a warrior.

Commanding and funny

Tall, commanding, funny when required, he was never above sending himself up and had a glorious voice that sometimes blurred in slack-jawed articulation, if only because everything seemed to come so easily.

He proved also to be a fine stage director, and directed two films. In the second, A Little Chaos (2014), a handsome 17th- century costume drama of love among the landscape artists at Versailles, Rickman presided in his bewigged pomp as Louis XIV, the Sun King.

The son of a factory worker, Bernard (who died when Alan was eight), and his wife, Margaret (née Bartlett), he was of Irish and Welsh descent, raised on a council estate in Acton, west London, with three siblings (he was the second child).

He studied graphic design at Chelsea School of Art – where he first met, aged 18, his future life partner, Rima Horton – and the Royal College of Art. With three friends, he ran a graphic design studio for three years in Notting Hill before going to Rada at the age of 26.

Rickman made his first impact with the Birmingham Rep when he played the upright Wittipol, disguised as a Spanish lady, in Ben Jonson's The Devil is an Ass, in 1976.

Rickman was a lifelong Labour party activist, while Rima, an economist, with whom he lived from 1977, was a Labour councillor in Kensington and Chelsea for 20 years from 1986.

In the early 1980s he was an ideal Trigorin in Thomas Kilroy's version of Chekhov's The Seagull at the Royal Court; a coruscating Grand Inquisitor in Richard Crane's adaptation of Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov at the Edinburgh festival; and a cheerfully stoned pragmatist on a dope farm in Snoo Wilson's The Grass Widow, also at the Royal Court.

Everything about his acting came into sharp focus in the 1985-1986 RSC season, when Les Liaisons Dangereuses was in repertory with three other plays. In As You Like It he was the perfect "seven ages of man"; in Troilus and Cressida Achilles never sulked so mightily; and in Ariane Mnouchkine's version of Klaus Mann's Mephisto he nailed the dilemma of a creative artist in the censorious climate of the Third Reich.

Guided by producer Thelma Holt he played a reclusive actor in a derelict cinema in Kunio Shimizu's Tango at the End of Winter, at Edinburgh in 1991; and buckled down to Hamlet with Robert Sturua.

In the earlier part of his career Rickman had supervised several shows with comedian Ruby Wax and had recommended a play by Sharman Macdonald to the Bush theatre; he expanded his directing with Wax into a new play he commissioned from Macdonald, The Winter Guest (1995), a tone poem in a Scottish seaside town, with no plot. He also directed a film version (1997).

Film takes precedence

Film had begun to take precedence,

Robin Hood

leading to big billing in Tim Robbins’s satirical

Bob Roberts

(1992); Ang Lee’s fine version of

Sense and Sensibility

(1996); and as Éamon de Valera in Neil Jordan’s

Michael Collins

(1996).

Even with the Harry Potter franchise under way, he managed a triumphant return in 2001 to the West End and Broadway in Noël Coward's Private Lives, as the squinting, wounded egomaniac Elyot Chase. His critically acclaimed last stage roles were as Ibsen's John Gabriel Borkman at the Abbey in Dublin in 2010 and as a celebrity teacher in a writing workshop in Theresa Rebeck's Seminar on Broadway in 2011.

In between, he directed My Name is Rachel Corrie at the Royal Court. He compiled the show with Katharine Viner, now editor of the Guardian, from the writings and emails of the American activist Corrie, who was killed by a bulldozer operated by the Israeli army in Gaza in 2003 while protesting against its occupation. This sense of political justice and civic responsibility informed his life as a citizen, too.

Rickman will be remembered latterly as Emma Thompson's husband in Richard Curtis's Love Actually (2003), the voice of Marvin the android in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (2005) and as Judge Turpin in Tim Burton's version of Sweeney Todd (2007).

He was a committed vice- chairman of Rada, patron of the charity Saving Faces, dedicated to helping those with facial disfigurements and cancer, and honorary president of the International Performers’ Aid Trust.

He married Rima in 2012. She survives him, as do his siblings, David, Michael and Sheila.