Alan Rickman
Alan Rickman
Alan Sidney Patrick Rickmanwas an English actor and director known for playing a variety of roles on stage and screen. Rickman trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, and was a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company, performing in modern and classical theatre productions. His first big television part came in 1982, but his big break was as the Vicomte de Valmont in the stage production of Les Liaisons Dangereuses in 1985, for which he was nominated...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionMovie Actor
Date of Birth21 February 1946
CityLondon, England
There's a voice inside you that tells you what you should do.
That's it then. Cancel the kitchen scraps for lepers and orphans, no more merciful beheadings, and call off Christmas.
I have a photograph at home of Fred Astaire from the knees down with his feet crossed. It's kind of inspiring because it reminds me his feet were bleeding at the end of rehearsals. Yet when you watch him, all you see is freedom. It's a reminder of what the job is about in general, not just being in musicals.
I'm still living the life where you get home and open the fridge and there's half a pot of yogurt and a half a can of flat Coca-Cola.
With the best intentions, the job of acting can become a display of accumulated bad habits, trapped instincts and blocked energies. Working with the Alexander Technique has given me sightings of another way... Mind and body, work and life together. Real imaginative freedom...
I mean, language fascinates me anyway, and different words have different energies and you can change the whole drive of a sentence.
I think there should be laughs in everything. Sometimes, it's a slammed door, a pie in the face or just a recognition of our frailties.
If only life could be a little more tender and art a little more robust.
It would be wonderful to think that the future is unknown and sort of surprising.
I'm a lot less serious than people think, it's probably because the way my face is put together.
I do take my work seriously and the way to do that is not to take yourself too seriously.
I get stage fright and gremlins in my head saying: 'You're going to forget your lines'.
I have every sympathy for writers. It's a mystery to me what they do. I can edit. I can cross out and say, 'I'm not saying that' or, 'How about we move this to here? Wouldn't that make that bit of the story better?' But where any of it comes from is beyond me. I will never write a play or a novel.
Mellow doesn't describe me. I'm hungry every day.