No other actor could go from utter stillness to pouncing leonine passions like Alan Rickman. And once you did, you found that he was a big, deep Bronte novel of a crush. You had to appreciate subtlety to appreciate Alan Rickman. He wasn’t low-hanging fruit, that’s for sure. His voice and his accent were singular and a bit affected. Why Alan Rickman? I’ve asked myself that for years. Lindsay Duncan, his costar in the play, famously remarked that people were leaving the theater wanting to have sex, “preferably with Alan Rickman.” One British newspaper columnist tagged Alan “the thinking woman’s crumpet,” which was a nice bit of validation and reassurance for us grown-up women with satisfying real-life relationships who nonetheless inexplicably, sheepishly, fancied a bit of Rickman on the side. It was called “Rickmania,” and women had suffered its pleasures ever since he first slinked onto the stage as the silkily decadent Vicomte de Valmont in Les Liaisons Dangereuses in 1986. There was a name for our affliction, but I didn’t learn it until the Internet came along. We passed a VHS tape of Rickman in “Murder, Obliquely,” an HBO film directed by Alfonso Cuaron, back and forth to each other across the country, sharing our celebrity crush like a couple of pre-teens mooning over a copy of Tiger Beat. For a while, I thought I was alone, until a friend mentioned Alan Rickman in passing and I thought I detected a little something extra in the way she caressed those four syllables. Sometimes it flamed brighter than others, but it was always there, simmering on a low flame. I was pregnant at the time, and I thought, maybe it was my hormonal state. From the moment I saw Alan Rickman on screen as a ghost in Truly, Madly, Deeply, gazing at his leading lady Juliet Stevenson as if there was no one else in the universe, I was a goner. The forbidding, intriguing hawklike profile. The death of this particular actor has hit a lot of women harder than you can imagine, because Alan Rickman wasn’t just an actor - he was our secret celebrity boyfriend. After a relatively late start (he was pushing 30 when he was accepted to London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art), Alan Rickman forged a distinguished career as a stage actor, movie actor, director, mentor and, finally, a most unlikely member of the gigantically-grossing Harry Potter movie franchise, which he likened to being in the Beatles.īut I’m not here to write Alan Rickman’s obituary.

He hit the Trifecta of perfect screen antagonists: Hans Gruber, the prototypical charming European bad guy of Die Hard the Sheriff of Nottingham, rock star as pantomime villain, in Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves and Harry Potter’s inscrutable nemesis Severus Snape, that solitary conundrum.

Handsome severus snape