{"id":57151,"date":"2016-01-15T07:00:10","date_gmt":"2016-01-15T13:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=57151"},"modified":"2016-01-14T21:51:51","modified_gmt":"2016-01-15T03:51:51","slug":"rip-alan-rickman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=57151","title":{"rendered":"RIP Alan Rickman"},"content":{"rendered":"

When a great actors dies? \u00a0Well, that’s Sheila O’Malley’s turf. \u00a0And she’s got Alan Rickman’s obit<\/a> over at rogerebert.com. \u00a0I loved the graf about my favorite Rickman film,\u00a0Truly, Madly, Deeply<\/em>, which was his American big-screen follow-up to\u00a0Die Hard<\/em>:<\/p>\n

Rickman could have had a nice career playing villains. But 1990’s “Truly Madly Deeply”, directed byAnthony Minghella<\/a>, upended expectations. Rickman played Jamie, the ghost of Juliet Stevenson’s dead lover. Stevenson’s character had been grieving the loss for a year, and one night she sits down to play the piano. As she plays, a cello suddenly starts up off-screen, and “Jamie,” who had played the cello in real life, is seen sitting behind her. The reunion that follows is one of such wrenching emotion that it puts “Ghost<\/a>” to shame. It’s barely romantic. They clutch and hold, they weep and coo, they sob. As “Jamie,” Rickman is both hilarious (he’s always freezing, always cranky) and tragic (if she can’t let him go, then he really<\/i> can’t let her go.) An entire new world opened up for Alan Rickman, at least in terms of the audience who had only seen him in a gigantic blockbuster as a multinational terrorist-villain. When Jamie says to Nina, “Thank you for missing me,” his tone is quiet and thoughtful, but Rickman filled the line with a sense of almost humility: “This fabulous woman grieved ME this intensely? I have this much value?” His line-reading cracks open the heart of the film.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

A sample of his Shakespearean work:<\/p>\n