At age 26, Rickman decided to apply to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Rickman supported himself through his two years at the RADA by taking freelance design jobs and by working as a set dresser.

"There was an inevitability about my being an actor since about the age of 7, but there were other roads that had to be traveled first."

Alan Rickman

In 1978, Rickman joined the prestigious Royal Shakespeare Company, appearing in The Tempest and Love’s Labour’s Lost, among others, although he disliked the experience:

"They don't look after the young actors ... People are dropping like flies, doing too many shows at once. There ought to be someone who helps them develop."

Alan Rickman

"It's a factory. It has to be. It’s all about product endlessly churned out — not sufficiently about process."

The role that changed everything

How he became a noble romantic

Only in British films did Rickman get to play good guys.

He first starred in Anthony Minghella's drama film Truly, Madly, Deeply. The romantic ghost cellist Jamie came out ironic and endearing.

Labelled by many critics as a "thinking person’s Ghost," Truly, Madly, Deeply is sensitively written and charmingly acted.

It’s the character of Colonel Brandon
in screen adaptation of Jane Austen’s
Sense and Sensibility scripted by Rickman’s close friend Emma Thompson.

A perfect gentleman who is suffering, but keeps his pain to himself, capable of true, deep feeling.

The stately colonel as portrayed by Alan, with a slight squint of his eyes, his peculiar way of speaking and his soft, velvet voice —he conquered all female spectators.

Emma Thompson about Alan Rickman

"His capacity to fell you with a look or lift you with a word."

One of the most powerful scenes in the movie is the one where Colonel Brandon watches young Marianne play the piano and sing.

Reserved and noble, Brandon can express the depth of his love for Marianne with just a look — and the way Alan Rickman played it is admirable.

The Canadian drama film Snow cake, directed by Mark Evans and starring Rickman along with Sigourney Weaver and Carrie-Anne Moss, is heartbreaking and restrained at the same time.

Alan Rickman plays Alex Hughes, a mysterious Englishman burdened by some secret grief, who travels across Canada to meet someone important from his past. But along the way he picks up a chatty young traveling companion Vivienne (Emily Hampshire), and this meeting changes his route and the rest of his life.

Speaking of Rickman’s most successful appearances as romantic leads, it is impossible not to mention the refined
and somewhat art-house TV movie The Song of Lunch.

Alan’s velvet voice narrating the story
is hypnotically mesmerizing, and his ironically raised eyebrow brings you back to earth.

"Rickman is perfectly cast as the narrator, an unnamed writer/editor. Thompson has a key role, but her overall contribution is much smaller as Rickman’s internal monologue makes up the bulk of the film’s spoken words, with actual verbal exchanges between the two few and far in-between, but every word they speak counts."

Nick Hartel, DVD Talk

"As the alcohol flows, mostly into the narrators mouth, his true self springs forth and the boorish letch he becomes is the role Rickman often seems born to play."

Fan recognition