A tribute to Alan Rickman

The worlds of film and theater are mourning the loss of British actor Alan Rickman, best recognized as Professor Snape in the "Harry Potter" films

Remembering Alan Rickman 02:25

In his best-known roles, Alan Rickman didn't say his lines so much as drop them in that double-bass voice, a syllable at a time, from on high ... with pauses between words that were weighty and reverberant, full of strange beats.

He was a great actor, and a musical one, icily precise but with a melancholy that washed over you.

Behind the facade, you sensed a vulnerable child.

Rickman died at 69, of cancer, just like Bowie: a bad week.

Fans remember most his Snape from the Harry Potter films -- disdainful, like many Rickman characters, but also a soul in torment.

I saw him first on Broadway in the '80s in "Les Liaisons Dangereuses." You wouldn't think of him now as a Machiavellian seducer, but as he prowled the stage, using charm like a rapier, he was mesmerizing.

That lead to "Die Hard" and supreme villain Hans Gruber -- the joke in how Rickman underplays, firing a bullet into an executive's head with a weary shrug.

Gruber led to Hollywood typecasting, but my favorite Rickman performance was in Anthony Minghella's goofy, ghostly love story, "Truly, Madly, Deeply." He plays a cellist whose sudden death leaves his lover, Juliet Stephenson, bereft. Her grief summons him back, in all his willfulness, with an underlying fear of loss.

I think that cello expresses the soul under the hard shell: plaintive, poetic, sublime.

As a postscript, here is Alan Rickman with Johnny Deep singing "Pretty Women" in Stephen Sondheim's "Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street."

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