In all his roles Rickman displayed his Shakespearian background as an actor with a broad-range and striking gestures. He portrayed all his characters, even those that were written somewhat lazily and seemed trivial and one-dimensional, with a strong reference to their human traits and flaws

Graphic designer by profession, who spent several years working as one, Alan Rickman started to act relatively late, as a thirty year old in the 1970’s and early 1980’s. He appeared in smaller and bigger roles in several TV series, among others the prestigious productions such as the one based on Émile Zola’s novel Thérėse Raquin that won three BAFTA awards and the impressive adaptation of the novel by John le Carré Smiley’s People which also won four BAFTA awards. In 1988, he starred in the fascinating thriller Die Hard by John McTiernan, the breakthrough film for the director, main actor Bruce Willis as well as Rickman who portrayed the main bad guy Hans Gruber as a diabolically charming, threateningly courteous and implacably cold and efficient European gentleman with outstanding manners who stumbled upon being the leader of an international gang of high-class criminals pretending to be terrorists. Of course, the fact that Gruber is a German and that his crew consists mainly of Europeans hides the deeper meaning behind the film’s story about German and international capital that is threatening the very essence of corporate America. However, the story was a bit more complex than that – Nakatomi, the company that was attacked in the film is Japanese. Die Hard is an example of a film that seems as original and fresh as it was at the time of its premiere three decades ago. It is an important film that left an important mark on film of the 1980’s and as such had until now four sequels, which differ significantly in their quality, as well as a whole series of imitations, derivatives, impersonating and similar films that more or less successfully toyed with the concept “man alone against a group of terrorists in a limited space” – from Harlin’s Cliffhanger and Hyams’ Sudden Death to Andrew Davis’ Under Siege and Air Force One. Rickman’s character’s name in this film is Hans Gruber, and it is the name of the bad guy in the action comedy Our Man Flint by Daniel Mann. The screenplay is adapted from a sequel to the crime drama Detective by Gordon Douglas, which was already written and in which Frank Sinatra was supposed to play Joe Leland who saves his daughter and grandkids from a skyscrapers of the oil company Claxxon attacked by terrorists. Luckily that film was never made and thus a few decades later McTiernan directed his milestone master piece. It is a film with an exquisite dramaturgy and narrative as well as a precise directing style, a film of great pace and well thought-through composition and framing, an outstanding gallery of characters from the hero    John McClane to Gruber’s last silent man, impressive action sequences with gradual tension and attractiveness that became one of the best and most important films of the 1980’s.

The success and affirmation he received after Die Hard, Rickman used to continue his career in a smart way; at the same time he starred in commercial projects such as the action adventure film with elements of western Quigley Down Under, big office-box hit from early 1990’s Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves in which he portrayed the Sheriff of Nottingham and easily stole the show in scenes with Kevin Costner, and the fantastic comedy Galaxy Quest, as well as some more ambitious projects with an artsy feel to it, such as Bob Roberts, Sense and Sensibility and Michael Collins. In all his roles Rickman displayed his Shakespearian background as an actor with a broad-range and striking gestures. He portrayed all his characters, even those that were written somewhat lazily and seemed trivial and one-dimensional, with a strong reference to their human traits and flaws.

In Kevin Smith’s religious satire Dogma, which the distributor Miramax, at the time of the film’s premiere a subsidiary of  Disney, had to denounce due to the demonstrations and pressure of American catholic fundamentalists who claimed that the film offended the religious feelings of the viewers, Rickman portrayed Metatron, angel and God’s messenger. He delivers the message to the protagonist Bethany, employee in an abortion clinic, that she is Christ’s distant relative and that she has to go on a mission to save the human race. It is a relatively over-estimated film in which Smith's tendency to saturate and emphasize dialogue with the prefix of essayism, his fragmentary narrative, and overly serious addressing of the motive of questioning the ways in which the Catholic Church works, failed to reconcile with the artificial context, resorting to the genre of fantasy and fantasy with elements of horror and a firmer base in the genre of (formulaic) comedy. In it, Smith presented himself as a believer who opposes his personal devotion to faith to institutional religion. However, in spite of non-articulated (or rather not articulated enough) and not always clear treatment of different themes and motives, as well as occasional confusion, one cannot deny the film’s charm, entertainment factor and intriguing content.

It is a pity that Rickman was not used more as a comedian as he had a great potential as a comedian, which he based on self-irony and caricaturing of his own seriousness or even mocking of his image of a serious character actor. Primarily thanks to this, he was great in humorous roles or those with elements of dark-humor, such as those in Love Actually, Sweeney Todd: the Demon Barber of Fleet Street and Gambit. Even when he played more serious roles, he liked to spice them up with some humor and comical elements. In the adaptation of the famous novel „Perfume – The Story of a Murderer“  by Patrick Süskind, which was a project that supposedly interested directors Stanley Kubrick, Tim Burton and Ridley Scott, and that was finally directed by Tom Tykwer and produced by Bernd Eichinger, Rickman played the nobleman Richis, father of the angle-like Laura, one of the girls that becomes Jean-Baptiste Grenouille’s prey. Grenouille was an asocial psychopath and murderer who was born with an unnerving sense of smell in the dirt of a Parisian fish market in 1738. In spite of ignoring and simplifying some of the essential but difficult to film elements from the literary original, the relative lack of detail in the profiling of Jean-Baptiste's character, somewhat mannerist performance by Dustin Hoffman in the role of perfume maker Baldini, and partly overly accentuated and too literal religious parabola in the end, it is a strikingly stylized, colorful, luxurious and visually impressive film achievement with an elegant directing style and an extremely suggestive atmosphere, the scent of which is virtually possible for the viewer to smell. (Josip Grozdanić)