Alan Rickman’s favourite bands of the 1970s: “One was very shaped by that”
What a loss Alan Rickman is, to so many. Not just Harry Potter obsessives, not just to Die Hard aficionados, not just to Love Actually fans or to those who love Robin Hood.
For a long time, he was one of the finest actors in the world, the kind that you only appreciate once they’re gone, in the vein of Robin Williams.
It’s strange to think that Rickman has already been absent for almost ten years, so fast time is moving these days. He was one of the casualties of 2016, when something like four times as many celebrities passed away as would usually in a year, and at just 69 it was much too early.
While he will be remembered, and watched, for all time for his magnificent ‘Snape’ in the Potter movies, it’s almost astonishing to recall that his turn as Hans Gruber in the first Die Hard instalment was actually his movie debut. So polished was his performance opposite Bruce Willis in the 1988 Christmas/possibly not Christmas classic that he emerged onto the screen with complete mastery; no doubt thanks to his years on stage with the Royal Shakespeare Company, where he picked up a TONY nomination.
Rickman’s Gruber earned him legendary villain status, and he made the most of it very quickly as the memorable Sheriff of Nottingham in Kevin Costner’s Robin Hood the following year. A decade of high profile movie roles followed, including the bereavement fantasy Truly, Madly, Deeply and the underrated sci-fi comedy Galaxy Quest, until in 2001 he donned Severus Snape’s cloak for the first time in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.
Rickman also showed his musical chops when he sang during his role as Judge Turpin in Tim Burton’s musical horror Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street alongside Johnny Depp, and in 2013 he took on a part as the founder of legendary New York punk club CBGB in a movie of the same name with his Harry Potter co-star Rupert Grint.
It was while making that film that he spoke to Huffington Post about the influence music had on him as a young man in the UK and the specific bands he liked the most at the time. He revealed: “Obviously, I was aware of the huge rise of The Police in England, and as an art student, I was very much a fan of Talking Heads. And then Blondie, but I wasn’t a hard punk-rock fan at the time.
“But of course I was also very much around the height of The Beatles and The Stones, so it was like that was the lone star and everything spun off from there. And [Bob] Dylan, very much so. England in the ‘60s and the ‘70s was everything that history has said; it was phenomenally exciting, musically. One was very shaped by that.”
Rickman went back to working in theatre during the last years of his life in addition to starring in the epic finales to the Potter series and the surveillance thriller Eye in the Sky with Helen Mirren. Then just a year later, he was gone, having refused to share his terminal diagnosis with anyone other than a few close friends.
His many awards stand as testament to his talent; a BAFTA, a Golden Globe, an Emmy, a Screen Actor’s Guild award. But really, his films will do that to a far greater degree.
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