Emma Thompson was 66 years old when she finally began talking openly about what Alan Rickman actually meant to her, and it had little to do with the roles they played together. On January 14th, 2016, the day he died, she sent seven words to a journalist because she does not use social media. “I have just kissed him goodbye. ” For ten years, she said almost nothing else about him publicly.
Now she is revealing the depth of their friendship, and the last moments they shared. . . Rickman was born on February 21st, 1946, in Hammersmith, West London, into a working-class family with more love than money.
His father, Bernard, a factory worker, died of lung cancer when Alan was eight. His mother, Margaret, raised four children alone. That early, specific loss, a father gone before you understand what you are losing, lived in almost every serious role Rickman ever played—not on the surface, but in the particular way his characters carried grief without announcing it, how pain showed 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 become one of the most famous instruments in English cinema was originally constricted. A drama teacher at RADA, 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 worked on it for years. What emerged was not a polished, resonant baritone thatcame naturally; it was manufactured from nothing, through specific effort over many years. You can hear the effort underneath the ease. That is part of why it sounds the way it does.
. . Before any of that, he had been something else entirely. He studied graphic design at Chelsea School of Art, and was genuinely good at it—good enough to open his own design studio after graduating.
But something kept pulling at him. At 26, he applied to RADA on the feeling that being an actor had been inevitable 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, with very little drama—remarkable given that the relationship lasted 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, had lunch, and told almost nobody 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. “Rima Horton,”he once said,”is incredibly tolerant, possibly a candidate for sainthood. ”
. he said it with the smile of a man who meant every word.
,After RADA, he joined the Royal Shakespeare Company, where the technical foundation was built: timing, silence, the understanding that doing less often means doing more. He did Les Liaisons Dangereuses on the West End and then Broadway, earning a Tony nomination in 1988. He was already 41. He had not made a film.
. His first film role was Hans Gruber, the villain of Die Hard in 1988. Calm, precise, faintly amused, he played psychological chess with Bruce Willis’s hapless cop whose stealing every scene by conveying intelligence 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 iconic death fall from the skyscraper. They dropped him on two. The genuine, unmanufactured shock on his face, dropped 40 feet ahead of schedule, has been in the film for 37 years, and it is why that death scene remains one of the great exits in cinema history.
. His career between those primes was a study in contrast between the roles and the man. Hans Gruber, the Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, played with operatic, theatrical relish, becoming one of cinema’s great comedic villain performances while technically being a straight villain role. Judge Turpin in Sweeney Todd, cold and morally rotten.
Snape. And then, cutting through all of it, Alexander Dane in Galaxy Quest in 1999: an RSC-trained actor trapped in a sci-fi franchise he despises, required to say the same ridiculous catchphrase every episode, playing deadpan misery so precisely that the final scene, when he says it with genuine emotion, is one of the funniest and most unexpectedly moving moments in the film. By Grabthar’s hammer, what a savings. He committed completely, turning what could have been a throwaway into something people still quote.
That was his 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 who gave the world The Magic Roundabout, and Phyllida Law, the actress. She won the 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. In 1995, she was simply the best actress in the world, and everyone was beginning to understand it simultaneouslyCONTENT:
Emma Thompson was 66 years old when she finally began talking openly about what Alan Rickman actually meant to her, and it had little to do with the roles they played together.
On January 14th, 2016, the day he died, she sent seven words to a journalist because she does not use social media. “I have just kissed him goodbye. ” For ten years, she said almost nothing else about him publicly. Now she is revealing the depth of their friendship, and the last moments they shared.
. Rickman was born on February 21st, 1946, in Hammersmith, West London, into a working-class family with more love than money. His father, Bernard, a factory worker, died of lung cancer when Alan was eight. His mother, Margaret, raised four children alone.
That early, specific loss, a father gone before you understand what you are losing, lived in almost every serious role Rickman ever played—not on the surface, but in the particular way his characters carried grief without announcing it, how pain showed 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 become one of the most famous instruments in English cinema was originally constricted. A drama teacher at RADA, 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 worked on it for years. What emerged was not a polished, resonant baritone thatcame naturally; it was manufactured from nothing, through specific effort over many years. You can hear the effort underneath the ease. That is part of why it sounds the way it does.
Before any of that, he studied graphic design at Chelsea School of Art, and was genuinely good at it—good enough to open his own design studio after graduating. But something kept pulling at him. At 26, he applied to RADA on the feeling that being an actor had been inevitable 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, with very little drama—remarkable given that the relationship lasted 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, had lunch, and told almost nobody 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. “Rima Horton,” he once said,”is incredibly tolerant ,possibly a candidate for sainthood. ”
. he said it with the smile of a man who meant every word.
After RADA, he joined the Royal Shakespeare Company, where the technical foundation was built: timing, silence, the understanding that doing less often means doing more. He did Les Liaisons Dangereuses on the West End and then Broadway, earning a Tony nomination in 1988. He was already 41. He had not made a film.
His first film role was Hans Gruber, the villain of Die Hard in 1988. Calm, precise, faintly amused, he played psychological chess with Bruce Willis’s hapless cop whom stealing every scene by conveying intelligence 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 iconic death fall from the skyscraper. They dropped him on two. The genuine, unmanufactured shock on his face, dropped 40 feet ahead of schedule, has been in the film for 37 years, and it is why that death scene remains one of the great exits in cinema history. .
His career between those primes was a study in contrast between the roles and the man. Hans Gruber, the Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, played with operatic, theatrical relish, becoming one of cinema’s great comedic villain performances while technically being a straight villain role. Judge Turpin in Sweeney Todd, cold and morally rotten. Snape.
And then, cutting through all of it, Alexander Dane in Galaxy Quest in 1999: an RSC-trained actor trapped in a sci-fi franchise he despises, required to say the same ridiculous catchphrase every episode, playing deadpan misery so precisely that the final scene, when he says it with genuine emotion, is one of the funniest and most unexpectedly moving moments in the film. By Grabthar’s hammer, what a savings. He committed completely, turning what could have been a throwaway into something people still quote. That was his 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 who gave the world The Magic Roundabout, and Phyllida Law, the actress. She won the 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. In 1995, 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 Sensibilityin 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 cast Rickman as Colonel Brandon, the quiet, reserved older man whose love for Marianne Dashwood is so restrained and patient that it registers entirely through what he does not say. It was the first time they worked together in film, and the casting required no explanation. 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,andthe 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. She gave that to Alan Rickman without apparent hesitation. “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.
. 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 plays Blue, and falls apart.
Then she comes downstairs and helps her children get ready for the Nativity play because that is what mothers do. She wraps the grief back up inside. The functioning keeps going, andthe audience sits quietly wrecked. What 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. His 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 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. What he gave in those scenes, particularly the scene in which Harry watches Snape’s memories,andthe 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,andhe 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,andthe particular mess of it,andsays,”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,andwhat 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, andit 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. . One word, always.
That is the line that broke a generation of Harry Potter fans. The moment audiences finally understood why Severus Snape had looked at Harry that way for eight films. Alan Rickman knew that truth the entire time. J.
K. Rowling had told him years before anyone else. He knew about Lily Potter. He knew about the love that powered everything Snape did.
And he carried that secret through eight films, playing Snape’s bitterness and cruelty as the exterior of something that was, at its root, grief. The grief of a man who loved someone he could not reach and then spent the rest of his life serving that person’s child while pretending to despise him. When Deathly Hallows Part 2 finally revealed the truth, audiences 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. What he delivered in those scenes—particularly the moment when Harry watches Snape’s memories and” 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. . But that understanding of concealed love did not begin with Snape.
It was built decades earlier, in the particular details of his own life. He was born with a speech impediment. His jaw did not move freely, and the voice that would become one of the most famous instruments in English cinema was originally constricted. A drama teacher at RADA told him it sounded as if his voice was coming from under the back end of a drain pipe.
He worked on it for years. What emerged was not a polished baritone thatcame naturally. It was manufactured through specific effort over many years, andyou can hear the effort underneath the ease. That is part of why it sounds the way it does.
And beneath that voice was a deeper silence. His father, a factory worker, died of lung cancer when Alan was eight. His mother raised four children alone. That early loss, a father gone before you understand what you are losing, lived in almost every serious role he ever played—not in any obvious biographical correspondence, but in the particular way his characters carried grief without announcing it.
He worked on that too, the way his characters let pain show up in restraint rather than expression. He trained at RADA from his late 20s, having studied graphic design first and opening his own design studio before finally applying to drama school on the feeling that being an actor had been inevitable since he was seven. “Other roads had to be traveled first,” he said. Finally, a voice said,”It’s time.
No excuses. ”
. Emma Thompson understood all of this about him. She understood the distance and the presence.
The restraint and the fierce critical eye. She understood that when he was silent, he was paying attention, not withdrawing. The friendship orbegan on the set of Sense and Sensibility, which she wrote and cast him in as Colonel Brandon, the quiet, reserved man whose love registers entirely through what he does not say. It was the first time they worked together in film, andthe casting required no explanation.
She later said, “Alan had a way of being in the room that made you feel you belong there, too. ” Two years later, he directed her in The Winter Guest, andwhat 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,” 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.
,She also understood him better than most because she had seen him in both registers: the containment of his performances and the unguardedness of his private life. When her marriage to Kenneth Branagh ended in the mid-90s, 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 the capacity to be present without demanding anything from the presence. It is, as qualities go, extraordinarily rare.
And when he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2015, he handled it with the same privacy, telling only his closest friends and family while continuing to work and maintain the illusion of a future that he probably already knew was shorter than he was letting on. He had always been, as 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 they did together, she said, was change a plug on a standard lampin 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. He said after,”Well, it’s a good thing I decided not to become an electrician. ” Emma Thompson 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: 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. Someone who sees the full 360° of who you are, the gifts and the failures,andthe particular mess of it,andsays,”Yes, anyway. ” She found that in a man 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. 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. . HOOK:
Alan Rickman spent eight films playing Severus Snape as a man everyone believed was simply cruel.
Only a handful of people knew the truth, and J. K. Rowling had trusted him with that secret years before the world ever heard the word” Always. ” But the role that defined his public legacy was only half of his story.
The other half was a quieter, more private life that Emma Thompson has only now begun to describe in full: a friendship built on silence, honesty, andthe refusal to abandon each other as everything else fell apart. She was there when he died, andshe has since revealed the last ordinary thing they did together, an act so small andso perfectly them that it says more about who he was than any of the roles he ever played. Thompson has called him the ultimate ally, someone who saw her completely and chose her anyway. What did she know about the man beneath the characters that she is only now ready to shareCONTENT:
Alan Rickman spent eight films playing Severus Snape, the character audiences believed was simply cruel.
But J. K. Rowling had trusted him with the truth years before the world ever heard the word “Always,” and he carried that secret through every one of those films, playing Snape’s bitterness and cruelty as the exterior of something that was, at its root, grief. When Deathly Hallows Part 2 finally revealed the truth, audiences understood in one scene why every 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. What he delivered in those scenes was the distillation of everything he understood about hidden love and the cost of protecting something you cannot keep. But that understanding did not begin with Snape.
It was built decades earlier, in the particulars of his own life. He was born in Hammersmith, West London, in 1946, into a working-class family. His father, a factory worker, died of lung cancer when Alan was eight. His mother raised four children alone.
That early loss lived in almost every serious role he ever played, not through obvious biographical correspondence, but through the particular way his characters carried grief without announcing it. He was also born with a speech impediment. His jaw did not move freely, and the voice that would become one of the most famous instruments in English cinema was originally constricted. A drama teacher at RADA told him it sounded as if his voice came from under the back end of a drain pipe.
He worked on it for years. What emerged was not a polished baritone thatcame naturally; it was manufactured from nothing, through specific effort over many years. You can hear the effort underneath the ease. That is part of why it sounds the way it does.
. Before any of that, he studied graphic design at Chelsea School of Art, and was good enough to open his own design studio. But at 26, he applied to RADA on the feeling that being an actor had been inevitable since he was about seven. “Other roads had to be traveled first,” he said.
Finally, a voice said, “It’s time. No excuses. ” It was at Chelsea that he met Rima Horton, who was studying economics. They were both teenagers.
They became a couple immediately, with very little drama, andthe relationship lasted 51 years, through his entire career, through his cancer diagnoses, through everything, before they quietly married in 2012 in New York, walked across the Brooklyn Bridge, had lunch,andtold almost nobody for a year. He once described her as “incredibly tolerant, possibly a candidate for sainthood. ” He said it with the smile of a man who meant every word. After RADA, he joined the Royal Shakespeare Company, where the technical foundation was built: timing, silence, the understanding that doing less often means doing more.
He did Les Liaisons Dangereuses on the West End and then Broadway, earning a Tony nomination in 1988. He was already 41 and had not made a film. His first film role was Hans Gruber, the villain of Die Hard in 1988. Calm, precise, faintly amused, he played psychological chess with Bruce Willis’s hapless cop whom stealing every scene.
He did not act smart. He was smart. The stunt team told him they would drop him on three for the iconic death fall. They dropped him on two.
The genuine, unmanufactured shock on his face, dropped 40 feet ahead of schedule, has been in the film for 37 years, and it is why that death scene remains one of the great exits in cinema history. . His career was a study in contrast between the roles and the man. Hans Gruber, the Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, played with operatic relish, becoming one of cinema’s great comedic villain performances.
Judge Turpin in Sweeney Todd, cold and morally rotten. Snape. And then Alexander Dane in Galaxy Quest, an RSC-trained actor trapped in a sci-fi franchise he despises, required to say the same ridiculous catchphrase every episode, playing deadpan misery so precisely that the final scene, when he says it with genuine emotion, is one of the funniest and most unexpectedly moving moments in the film. By Grabthar’s hammer, what a savings.
He committed completely, turning what could have been a throwaway into something people still quote. That was his relationship to every piece of work. No throwaway. No phoning in.
Everything or nothing. Emma Thompson was born in Paddington, London, in 1959. She won the 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. The first time she worked with Rickman was Sense and Sensibilityin 1995.
She had written the screenplay herself, a process that took five years. She cast him as Colonel Brandon, the quiet, reserved older man whose love for Marianne Dashwood registers entirely through what he does not say. It was the first time they worked together in film, andthe casting required no explanation. She later said,”Alan had a way of being in the room that made you feel you belong there, too.
” He offered quiet encouragement,” subtle advice, steadfast presence. ” He was the safe place on that set, she said, when the two roles she was trying to occupy simultaneously became too much to hold. Two years later, he directed her in The Winter Guest, his directorial debut, a film about grief and connection,andthe 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. “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. .
Then came Love Actually in 2003. Richard Curtis cast them as Harry and Karen, a long-married couple slowly coming apart. Karen opens a Christmas present she expects to be a necklace. It is a Joni Mitchell CD.
He has given the necklace to someone else. She goes to the bedroom and plays Blue,andfalls apart. Then she comes downstairs and helps her children get ready for the Nativity play because that is what mothers do. She wraps the grief back up inside.
What 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. His guilt shows up in the quality of his attention to his wife. Too careful, too considerate.
The attentiveness of someone who is compensating. He told Thompson that he understood this character. They had long conversations about betrayal and forgiveness and the quiet desperation that lives inside long marriages. He knew how to play Harry because he understood how people hide things from the people they love.
For Thompson, whose marriage to Kenneth Branagh had ended in the mid-90s, that understanding was personal. 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 the capacity to be present without demanding anything from the presence. The friendship continued through the Harry Potter films, in which she played Sybill Trelawney and he played Severus Snape, characters who were almost never in the same scene but who understood each other’s relationship to the franchise in private ways.
In 2015, Rickman was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. He told only his closest friends and family, and he continued to work,andhe 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 Thompson noted in her tribute,”imperturbably distant in public, alarmingly present in private. “The last thing they did together, she said, was change a plug on a standard lampin 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. ”
. On January 14th, 2016, he died.
Emma Thompson sent seven words to a journalist that day because she does not use social media. “I have just kissed him goodbye. “For ten years, she said almost nothing else about him publicly. Now she has begun speaking about what he actually meant to her.
She wrote the forward to the published version of his diaries, andin it, she is still heartbroken that he is gone. But the diaries bring back so much of what she remembers: that sweetness, his generosity, his fierce critical eye, his intelligence, his humor. “He was the ultimate ally,” she wrote on the morning she kissed him goodbye. In life, art, and politics, she did not choose that word lightly.
Ally 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,andthe particular mess of it,andsays,”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. 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,andwhat he would have thought of them, whether he would have kept directing, kept writing those diaries, kept pressing people 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, andit 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 in the same breath.
And on the mornings when it is clearest that the gap is still there, Emma Thompson orders two teas.
