Much-loved star of stage, TV and films including Harry Potter and Die Hard – and owner of one of the most singular voices in acting ­– has died in London 
 
 'We are all so devastated': acting world pays tribute to Alan Rickman Read more 
 
 Alan Rickman, one of the best-loved and most warmly admired British actors of the past 30 years, has died in London aged 69. His death was confirmed on Thursday by his family who said that he died “surrounded by family and friends”. Rickman had been suffering from cancer. 
 
 A star whose arch features and languid diction were recognisable across the generations, Rickman found a fresh legion of fans with his role as Professor Snape in the Harry Potter films. 
 
 Cast and crew on those movies were among the first to pay tribute to the actor. In a lengthy post, Daniel Radcliffe wrote that Rickman was “one of the greatest actors I will ever work with” as well as “one of the loyalest and most supportive people I’ve ever met in the film industry”. 
 
 JK Rowling, who wrote the Harry Potter books, said: “There are no words to express how shocked and devastated I am to hear of Alan Rickman’s death. He was a magnificent actor & a wonderful man”, while Michael Gambon, who played Dumbledore, said: “Everybody loved Alan. He was always happy and fun and creative and very, very funny.” 
 
 Alan Rickman: the most loyal, playful and generous of friends | Katharine Viner Read more 
 
 The actor had been a big-screen staple since first shooting to global acclaim in 1988, when he starred as Hans Gruber, Bruce Willis’s sardonic, dastardly adversary in Die Hard – a part he was offered two days after arriving in Los Angeles, aged 41. 
 
 Gruber was the first of three memorable baddies played by Rickman: he was an outrageous sheriff of Nottingham in 1991’s Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, as well as a terrifying Rasputin in an acclaimed 1995 HBO film. 
 
 But Rickman was also a singular leading man: in 1991, he starred as a cellist opposite Juliet Stevenson in Anthony Minghella’s affecting supernatural romance Truly, Madly, Deeply; four years later he was the honourable and modest Col Brandon in Sense and Sensibility, starring and scripted by Emma Thompson. He was to reunite with Thompson many times: they played husband and wife in 2003’s Love, Actually and former lovers in 2010 BBC drama The Song of Lunch. 
 
 In 1995, he directed Thompson and her mother, Phyllida Law, in his directorial debut, the acclaimed Scottish drama The Winter Guest. Thompson – who said she had “just kissed him goodbye” – wrote: 
 
 What I remember most in this moment of painful leave-taking is his humour, intelligence, wisdom and kindness. His capacity to fell you with a look or lift you with a word. The intransigence which made him the great artist he was – his ineffable and cynical wit, the clarity with which he saw most things, including me, and the fact that he never spared me the view. I learned a lot from him. He was the finest of actors and directors. I couldn’t wait to see what he was going to do with his face next. I consider myself hugely privileged to have worked with him so many times and to have been directed by him. He was the ultimate ally. In life, art and politics. I trusted him absolutely. He was, above all things, a rare and unique human being and we shall not see his like again. 
 
 Last year, Rickman reunited with Kate Winslet, another Sense and Sensibility co-star, for his second film as director, A Little Chaos – a period romance set in the gardens of Versailles. 
 
 Yet it was Rickman’s work on stage that established him as such a compelling talent, and to which he returned throughout his career. After graduating from Rada, the actor supported himself as a dresser for the likes of Nigel Hawthorne and Ralph Richardson before finding work with the Royal Shakespeare Company (as well as on TV as the slithery Reverend Slope in The Barchester Chronicles). 
 
 His sensational breakthrough came in 1986 as Valmont, the mordant seducer in Christopher Hampton’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses. He was nominated for a Tony for the part; Lindsay Duncan memorably said of her co-star’s sonorous performance that audiences would leave the theatre wanting to have sex “and preferably with Alan Rickman”. 
 
 Facebook Twitter Pinterest Alan Rickman and Lindsay Duncan in ‘Private Lives’ Photograph: Peter Jordan/PA 
 
 He and Duncan – as well as their director, Howard Davies – reunited in 2002 for Noel Coward’s Private Lives, which transferred to Broadway after a successful run in London. 
 
 Other key stage performances included Mark Antony opposite Helen Mirren’s Cleopatra at the Olivier Theatre in London, and the title role in Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkman at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin in 2010 – again with Duncan, and again transferring to New York. The following year he starred as a creative writing professor in Seminar on Broadway. 
 
 Alan Rickman: an actor of singular charm and hypnotic charisma Read more 
 
 In 2005, Rickman directed the award-winning play My Name is Rachel Corrie, which he and Katharine Viner – now Guardian editor-in-chief – compiled from the emails of the student who was killed by a bulldozer while protesting against the actions of the Israel Defense Forces in the Gaza Strip. 
 
 Oscar nominations and Alan Rickman – the Dailies film podcast Read more 
 
 Rickman remained politically active throughout his life: he was born, he said, “a card-carrying member of the Labour party”, and was highly involved with charities including Saving Faces and the International Performers’ Aid Trust, which seeks to help artists in developing and poverty-stricken countries. 
 
 Rickman publicly spoke of his unhappiness about the “Hollywood ending” of 1996 film Michael Collins, a historical biopic of the Irish civil war, in which he portrayed Éamon de Valera, and expressed his belief that art ought to help educate as well as entertain. “Talent is an accident of genes, and a responsibility,” he once said. 
 
 He and his wife, Rima Horton, met when they were still teenagers; she became an economics lecturer as well as a Labour party councillor. In 2012, the pair married, having been together since 1965. The Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn was one of the first to pay tribute on Twitter, followed by former leader Ed Miliband. 
 
 Others offering condolences included Stephen Fry, Eddie Izzard, Charlie Sheen, Mia Farrow and Richard E Grant. Many drew parallels between the deaths of Rickman and David Bowie, from the same disease at the same age and in the same week. 
 
 Rickman was an actor unafraid of the unexpected. He voiced a monarch in an episode of cult cartoon King of the Hill and a megalomaniac pilot fish called Joe in the Danish animator Help! I’m A Fish. In 2000, Rickman appeared as Sharleen Spiteri’s love interest in the music video for Texas’s 2000 hit ‘In Demand’, which involves them tangoing at a petrol station. In 2015, Rickman again featured in the video for one of their singles, this time with vocals. 
 
 
 
 He spoofed his own persona in comedy Galaxy Quest (2000), in which he plays a Shakespearian-trained actor who has found fame as a Spock-style alien in a long-running sci-fi series and in Victoria Wood’s Christmas special of the same year, as an upright colonel at the Battle of Waterloo. 
 
 
 
 Rickman was sanguine about his legions of admirers, who declared their love on countless websites, video tributes and at stage doors. Even scientists were not immune: in 2008, linguistics professors concluded that the most appealing male voice mixes elements of Rickman, Gambon and Jeremy Irons. 
 
 Alan Rickman – a life in pictures Read more 
 
 Recent film roles included an art-loving lord in the Coen brothers’ scripted farce Gambit (2012), as Ronald Reagan in Lee Daniels’s The Butler – and a humorous, imperious King Louis XIV in A Little Chaos. 
 
 Rickman is still to be seen in Eye in the Sky, a thriller about drone warfare that won rave reviews at the Toronto film festival last year, and repeating his voiceover as Absolem the Caterpillar in Alice Through the Looking Glass, also due for release later this year. 
 
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 His final job was taping a voiceover for a short film called This Tortoise Could Save a Life, in aid of Save the Children and Refugee Council. Released in mid December 2015, the film’s audio was recorded at Rickman’s home in London at the end of November. 
 
 That Rickman never won an Oscar (he did receive a Golden Globe, an Emmy, a Bafta and many more) became a perennial topic in interviews but did not seem to trouble the actor himself. “Parts win prizes, not actors,” he said in 2008. It was the wider worth of his art to which Rickman remained committed, saying that he found it easier to treat the work seriously if he could look upon himself with levity. 
 
 “Actors are agents of change,” he said. “A film, a piece of theatre, a piece of music, or a book can make a difference. It can change the world.” 
 
 • ‘We are all so devastated’: acting world pays tribute to Alan Rickman ||||| These crawls are part of an effort to archive pages as they are created and archive the pages that they refer to. That way, as the pages that are referenced are changed or taken from the web, a link to the version that was live when the page was written will be preserved.Then the Internet Archive hopes that references to these archived pages will be put in place of a link that would be otherwise be broken, or a companion link to allow people to see what was originally intended by a page's authors.The goal is to fix all broken links on the web . Crawls of supported "No More 404" sites. ||||| Rickman, who has died at the age of 69 , was irresistible even at his most acid, and leaves behind an astonishing legacy of indelible performances 
 
 Alan Rickman: the most loyal, playful and generous of friends | Katharine Viner Read more 
 
 His aquiline face, with all its magnificent hauteur made him a star: something between an eagle and a big cat. And that rich, resonant voice exerted a hypnotic hold on audiences, a bass rumble which could sound like a creak or a groan or a beckoningly sensual purr. It came from between lips which were kept mysteriously almost closed, like a ventriloquist’s. Alan Rickman morphed from being a Shakespearian leading man to being a character actor of enormous flair — via a wonderful period of being a wildly charismatic bad guy in the movies. 
 
 He stunned Hollywood audiences in the 80s as the villainous terrorist Hans Gruber in Die Hard, facing off elegantly against the sweaty and vest-clad Bruce Willis. And he was an outrageously funny Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves, stealing the scene from a slightly stunned looking Kevin Costner with lines like: “No more merciful beheadings! And call off Christmas!” 
 
 Generations of children came to know him as the menacingly scary master Severus Snape in the Harry Potter movies, although importantly he wasn’t the unspeakable Voldemort: Alan Rickman always had a base-level of unexpected lovability, no matter how acid his barbs. 
 
 Alan Rickman was the classically trained actor and RSC stalwart who made a splash in 1985 as the drawling sexual connoisseur Vicomte De Valmont in the stage version of Les Liaisons Dangereuses. After each performance, audiences were said to emerge from the theatre secretly and not so secretly longing to have sex — most of them with Alan Rickman. 
 
 Alan Rickman, giant of British film and theatre, dies at 69 Read more 
 
 And yet the Rickman roles that I enjoyed were those which showed his gentler, calmer, more romantically vulnerable side. The first time I saw him was in the whimsical romantic fantasy directed by Anthony Minghella: Truly, Madly, Deeply (sometimes nicknamed the “British Ghost”) in which he plays the spirit of Juliet Stevenson’s dead husband, who returns from the spirit world to ease her grief. He was unexpectedly engaging as the ram-rod straight Colonel Brandon in Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility. It was the movie which launched Kate Winslet in the role of Marianne, the young woman with whom Brandon is to fall in love after she has been trifled with by the caddish Willoughby. The final pairing of Winslet and Rickman made audiences smile and was part of the irresistible charm of that film. Rickman’s romanticism was finely judged. 
 
 Interestingly, he was to play a cad himself — a real villain, and not just a stage villain, in Richard Curtis’s sugary romcom ensemble piece Love, Actually, in which he is a man who is deceiving his wife, played by Emma Thompson, caught buying expensive presents for another woman. 
 
 One of my favourite Alan Rickman roles is in a little remembered noirish drama of sexual obsession from the 90s: Close My Eyes, written and directed by Stephen Poliakoff. Rickman plays an extremely clever and wealthy man, absolutely devoted to his young wife (played by Saskia Reeves) and whose world is destroyed by the creeping realisation that she is having a sexual relationship with her brother (played by a young Clive Owen). Rickman is superb at conveying his character’s brooding shock, his steely good manners, his suppressed anguish in realising that his money and prestige and charm are quite useless in the face of this catastrophe. 
 
 But many would say that Rickman’s finest hour was his performance in the comedy masterpiece Galaxy Quest (1999) about the cast of a cancelled sci-fi TV show called Galaxy Quest, now has-beens condemned to making a living signing autographs for obsessive fans, whose lives revolve around a programme in which the stars have long since lost interest and have come to hate. But this show and its hapless players become very important when a race of aliens arrive, having apparently seen the show and taken it for a historical document about reality. 
 
 Rickman is the fantastically self-important British actor Alexander Dane, who plays Dr Lazarus of Tev’Meck, a character with Spock-like levels of intellect. Rickman is wonderful at suggesting this Shakespearian actor’s rage and self-hate at getting no proper work and getting sucked into the lucrative fan world, wearing the stupid costume and make up at these fan-conventions and wearily saying his catchphrase: “By Grabthar’s hammer, by the suns of Warvan, you shall be avenged!” Galaxy Quest came out before the 21st century world of Comic-Con and fan-power and it came out before all stars accepted the career importance of dressing up in lycra and being a superhero or supervillain. Alan Rickman’s Alexander Dane wonderfully sent up the whole thing — and sent himself up as well. 
 
 The last time I saw him on screen was in cameo, as the French King Louis XIV, in the period drama A Little Chaos, which he also directed. I’m afraid I didn’t get on with the film much, but Rickman’s own performance was beguiling: witty and self-aware. 
 
 Rickman was a one-off: a superbly accomplished and generous actor whose vocal caress and physical presence hinted at romantic depths. He was a glorious Cavalier in a world of Roundheads.
– Britain has lost another legend this week: Actor Alan Rickman, perhaps best known as Hans Gruber and Severus Snape, died "surrounded by family and friends" in London after a battle with cancer, according to a family statement. He was 69. He was often picked to play the villain, but he was "one of Britain's best-loved acting stars," per the BBC. Known across generations, Rickman got his start performing with the Royal Shakespeare Company before nabbing roles in Die Hard (a part he was offered just two days after arriving in Los Angeles at age 41); Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves; Love Actually; and the Harry Potter films, per the Guardian. He also showed his softer side in the romance Truly, Madly, Deeply and in the film adaptation of Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility. His last works, Eye in the Sky and Alice Through the Looking Glass, are due out later this year. "Rickman was a one-off ... an actor of singular charm and hypnotic charisma," film critic Peter Bradshaw writes at the Guardian. "He was a glorious Cavalier in a world of Roundheads." On Twitter, British actor Stephen Fry calls Rickman "a man of such talent, wicked charm & stunning screen & stage presence," while Harry Potter actor James Phelps describes him as "one of the nicest actors I've ever met." "A film, a piece of theater, a piece of music, or a book can make a difference. It can change the world," Rickman once said. He leaves behind his wife, Rima Horton, whom he married secretly in recent years after nearly 50 years together, per the Telegraph.