Alan Rickman playing Severus Snape
(Picture: Murray Close)BFI Southbank hosted a moving tribute to late actor Alan Rickman yesterday. Rickman, who died from cancer in 2016, kept diaries which will be published this week as Madly, Deeply. The book’s title is a play on Truly Madly Deeply, a 1990 film in which Rickman played the ghost of a dead man returning to his lover.
At the event Stanley Tucci recalled Rickman meeting his children for the first time. He asked “are you Harry Potter fans?” and proceeded to talk to them in character as Severus Snape. “He was nothing but sweet and kind to the kids,” Tucci said. “Later he came to the wedding and the kids were a bit older and they sat next to Alan and he was just himself. I remember my daughter Camilla saying ‘who was that man I was talking to? That’s Snape!’”
Emma Thompson, Rickman’s friend and co-star in Love Actually, Harry Potter and Sense and Sensibility, said “his generosity and spirit was unsupspassed and I often wondered if he got any time for himself.” She revealed that he once leaned in for a kiss then plucked a hair from her chin and said she had a beard. “That was Alan. You were never sure if you were going to be kissed or unsettled and you just couldn’t wait to see what was next.”
Sir Ian McKellen recalled the tense atmosphere on set in Hungary when they were filming Rasputin. “When the director was rather harsh with me, it was Alan who immediately came to the rescue,” recalled Sir Ian, “and said you must never speak to my friend like that again, and he never did.”
Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe, who called in through video-link, said Rickman was “incredibly intimidating” when they first met. “It was only when I was older that I realised how incrediblly sweet and self depricating he could be... He came to see every play I ever did and he cut short his holiday to see me in a show.”
“He’s also the man that put a fart machine in my sleeping bag in front of 300 people at age fourteen,” Radcliffe said. “He contained mutiltiudes.”
Eddie Izzard, Timothy Spall, Ruby Wax and Sharleen Spiteri also attended the memorial.
