For a while, I thought I was alone, until a friend mentioned Alan Rickman in passing and I thought I detected a little something extra in the way she caressed those four syllables. Sometimes it flamed brighter than others, but it was always there, simmering on a low flame. I was pregnant at the time, and I thought, maybe it was my hormonal state. From the moment I saw Alan Rickman on screen as a ghost in Truly, Madly, Deeply, gazing at his leading lady Juliet Stevenson as if there was no one else in the universe, I was a goner. The forbidding, intriguing hawklike profile. The death of this particular actor has hit a lot of women harder than you can imagine, because Alan Rickman wasn’t just an actor - he was our secret celebrity boyfriend.

After a relatively late start (he was pushing 30 when he was accepted to London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art), Alan Rickman forged a distinguished career as a stage actor, movie actor, director, mentor and, finally, a most unlikely member of the gigantically-grossing Harry Potter movie franchise, which he likened to being in the Beatles.īut I’m not here to write Alan Rickman’s obituary. He hit the Trifecta of perfect screen antagonists: Hans Gruber, the prototypical charming European bad guy of Die Hard the Sheriff of Nottingham, rock star as pantomime villain, in Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves and Harry Potter’s inscrutable nemesis Severus Snape, that solitary conundrum. So how you view Snape is also different from how I do.He was an actor of elegance and menace. It's also true that if someone reminds us of someone we once liked or disliked, we project that onto the second person. Harry dislikes Snape, so he will think of him as less attractive than he is. Though everyone seems to get this treatment. But he has a habit of noting people’s physical flaws a lot when describing them. I don’t think Harry is that inaccurate in his description of Snape. The word “ugly” connected with Snape was used only for sentences such as: “Snape made an ugly grimace” or “His face twisted ugly with rage/hatred”. The “overgrown bat” impression comes from Snape's prefference of wearing rather wide black robes, while being really thin himself. Nothing that implies ugliness, unpleasnatness, also nothing that can make a stright teen boy, who hates the guy, to say he is handsome either. “the books are from Harry's perception because he is the main character” In the books narrator tells the story and never says that snape is ugly. Alan Rickman is handsome and he did a great performance as Snape. He has shoulder-length, greasy black hair which frames his face, and cold, black eyes.Īnd Jk Rowling handpicked Alan Rickman for the role.

Snape is described as a thin man with sallow skin, a large, hooked nose, and yellow, uneven teeth.

Handsome severus snape