#SHERIFF OF NOTTINGHAM ALAN RICKMAN SERIES#

In the early 80s, he was an ideal, doggedly English Trigorin in Thomas Kilroy’s otherwise Irish version of Chekhov’s The Seagull at the Royal Court a coruscating Grand Inquisitor in Richard Crane’s adaptation of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov at the Edinburgh festival and a cheerfully stoned pragmatist on a Californian dope farm in Snoo Wilson’s The Grass Widow, also at the Royal Court, laying bare the capitalism of the drugs world as a sort of displaced Howard Marks, alongside Ron Cook and Tracey Ullman.Įverything about his acting came into sharp focus in the 1985-86 RSC season, when Les Liaisons Dangereuses was in repertory with three other plays. Rickman was a lifelong Labour party activist, while Rima, an economist, with whom he lived from 1977, was a Labour councillor in Kensington and Chelsea for 20 years from 1986.Īlan Rickman as the Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, 1991.

Small parts in the RSC season of 1977-78 were followed, in 1980, by leading roles as a distraught sponsor of a pop concert in Stephen Poliakoff’s The Summer Party at the Crucible in Sheffield, with Brian Cox and Hayley Mills, and in Dusty Hughes’s anatomy of the Trotskyite left in Commitments, at the Bush.

Rickman made his first impact with the Birmingham Rep, the first regional company to visit the new National Theatre’s home on the South Bank, when he played the upright Wittipol, disguised as a Spanish lady, in Ben Jonson’s The Devil Is an Ass in 1976, and also at the Edinburgh festival. With three friends, he ran a graphic design studio for three years in Notting Hill before going to Rada at the age of 26. He studied graphic design at Chelsea School of Art – where he first met, aged 18, his future life partner, Rima Horton – and the Royal College of Art. The son of a factory worker, Bernard (who died when Alan was eight), and his wife, Margaret (nee Bartlett), he was of Irish and Welsh descent, raised on a council estate in Acton, west London, with three siblings (he was the second child), and educated at Derwentwater primary school in Acton, a Montessori school, and Latymer Upper. It was his misfortune to have both these great classic performances displayed in productions that met with considerable critical hostility and public indifference. And in Antony and Cleopatra at the National Theatre in 1998, he was fabulous opposite Helen Mirren’s voluptuous serpent of old Nile – shambolic, charismatic, a spineless poet of a warrior. He was an outstanding Hamlet at the Riverside Studios and on tour in 1992, a mature student whose rampant morbidity masked an intense, albeit perverse, zest for life. However, it would be wrong to typecast Rickman as a villain.

#SHERIFF OF NOTTINGHAM ALAN RICKMAN SERIES#

Snape had secrets, and this inner life infused one of the outstanding performances in the series as he stalked the corridors and back passages at Hogwarts like the ghost in Hamlet, smelling a rat at every turn, his noble face contorted with mysterious loathing and curious motivation. Then he was, for a new generation entirely, the sinister potions master Severus Snape in the eight Harry Potter movies, for a decade from 2001. He began making waves as Anthony Trollope’s devious chaplain Obadiah Slope in BBC television’s The Barchester Chronicles in 1982.

Having first trained and worked as a graphic designer, Rickman was a late starter as an actor, attending Rada between 19, and winning the Bancroft gold medal, before working in rep and the RSC in small roles at the end of the 70s.

Alan Rickman’s most memorable roles: From the Sheriff of Nottingham to Severus Snape Guardian

Sheriff of nottingham alan rickman