Alan Rickman
Alan Rickman
Alan Sidney Patrick Rickmanwas an English actor and director known for playing a variety of roles on stage and screen. Rickman trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, and was a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company, performing in modern and classical theatre productions. His first big television part came in 1982, but his big break was as the Vicomte de Valmont in the stage production of Les Liaisons Dangereuses in 1985, for which he was nominated...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionMovie Actor
Date of Birth21 February 1946
CityLondon, England
Older people say, 'Oh I loved you in 'Sense and Sensibility,'' and that's the only film they want to talk about. Equally, there are people who only want to talk about 'Galaxy Quest.' And there's a whole bunch of teenagers who only want to talk about 'Dogma.'
One thing I will say - my job gets harder and harder. The more you understand about what you are capable of, the less the instrument can do it physically. It's an inverse equation, if that's the right phrase. I just slammed those two words together. It sounded right.
One longs for a director with a sense of imagination.
On film you put all your energies into a single glance.
Certainly as actors, and maybe as directors, you've got to hang on to something childlike. You've got to know what play is. I haven't worked with Mike Leigh, but I know him very well and there's something open in his eyes about what's in front of him. And the same is true of Alfonso in a Mexican, mad way. There's an enthusiastic response to something. Neil Jordan, the same, when he gets excited . You just want to know there's a human being in there.
My parents certainly didn't have anything to do with the theater. I'm some kind of accident.
Acting is mostly about listening. If you just focus in on what the other person is saying, acting takes care of itself to quite a large extent.
I'm always aware of the camera and it feels like that's the audience.
I never expected to have any kind of film career, to be honest. It was all a bit of a surprise. But I was in a big hit play on Broadway. America, as many people will say, says yes more often than we do. And so I was suddenly surrounded by people saying yes. But I was aware that was 'cause of what I was in. It had a big impact.
There's, like, marks next to an actor's name or something, and boy does that go up and down! Somewhere in there, which always causes my mate Miss Ruby Wax great hilarity, I was offered a biopic of Frank Sinatra. Even I knew that was a bad idea! They'll throw anything at you at certain times. So, you know, to thine own self be true.
I was coming from a very cerebral, dark, difficult, layered play by Christopher Hampton and doing an action movie in Hollywood (Die Hard) with explosions, and I was holding a gun.
I've learned, having been on a lot of sets, the good news is that by definition you are surrounded by experts. They get fired if they're not - unlike in the theatre!
Snow Cake is a lovely film. Really proud of that. We shot it in 21 days. I thought Sigourney was amazing in it. And very, very accurate. I think there was some element that thought she had pushed it too far. But not at all when you do the amount of homework she had done and spent the amount of time she did with adult autistics. She was right on the money. And I think Marc Evans is a terrific director. He's a sweet, open, honest man and a really good director of actors.
The directors you trust the most are the ones, when you ask them a question, they've got the guts to say, 'I don't know.'