Instantly recognisable for the commanding air of dignity and knowing wit he brought to roles including Severus Snape and Hans Gruber. Rickman was an excellent actor, but it’s a diary with lots of dates, lots of mentions of famous people, lots of food and restaurants, lots of funerals, comments on acting technique, but not a lot of introspection. Here is Rickman the consummate professional actor, but also the friend, the traveller, the fan, the director, the enthusiast: in short, the real Alan Rickman.

I fear that I will never get the incredibly overused words "lugubrious", "tatterdemalion", or "oleaginous" out of my head. Photograph: 20th Century Fox/Allstar View image in fullscreen Alan Rickman as Hans Gruber in 1988’s Die Hard: ‘I had never seen a suaver, funnier screen villain and I still haven’t.

La lectura de sus memorias resulta en una experiencia satisfactoria para cualquier admirador de su trabajo y del arte interpretativo en sí mismo.

Finally, yes to HP 5,” the actor states, going on to say, “The argument that wins is the one that says: ‘See it through. But he finds it impossible, or impossible for long, to ‘change, discard, shed, rearrange, dilute, simplify’ his existence, as there’s Kate Winslet (‘sweetness and steel’) to see, Daniel Radcliffe to act opposite (‘I still don’t think he’s really an actor’) and Ewan McGregor to be put in his place (‘self-involved to a jaw-dropping degree’). This book contains thoughts written down in the moment rather than a narrative of events, which makes them difficult to listen to and some comments about others perhaps should have been kept private. It’s possible to go through this book, as if with a metal detector, and retrieve shreds of tabloid coin .Madly, Deeply is a rare invitation into the mind of Alan Rickman—one of the most magnetic, beloved performers of our time. His air of dignity, his sonorous voice and the knowing wit he brought to each role continue to captivate new audiences today. Temper and coldness, on the other hand, Rickman does sense in himself — he agrees how on film sets he can be ‘difficult, temperamental, uncommunicative,’ sullen, sulky, ‘brooding and prevaricating’. The boy who grew up on a council estate in Acton had a taste for the high life, and he and his long-term partner Rima Horton are regularly on the move between London, an apartment in New York and a house in Tuscany.

Also sad at the end because he wrote next to nothing about the disease that took him; the entries simply grew shorter, terser - not so much an aid to memory as an attempt to etch things in. Yes he's a bit cantankerous and yes he's pretty opinionated but no, he's never rude or disrespectful. He has sharp words on the matter even for his dearest friends, Emma Thompson, Juliet Stevenson, Ruby Wax. Her afterword, which she read for the audiobook, was very emotional and one of the best parts of the audiobook for me.Meet Rickman the consummate professional actor, but also the friend, the traveler, the fan, the director, the enthusiast; in short, the man beyond the icon.

Sean Mathias, who directed him and Helen Mirren in Anthony and Cleopatra, is “a big pile of Kleenex”; the playwright David Hare is “more self-involved than any actor I have ever met”. As you'll find, Rickman's diaries detail the extraordinary and the ordinary, flitting between worldly and witty and gossipy, while remaining utterly candid throughout. but this isn’t done consistently, and some clarifications are instead given by footnote at the end of the year (which is not very helpful for anyone, like myself, reading an ebook copy). Rather than any continuing stream of bile, what we get in Madly, Deeply is a great deal of low-level griping interspersed with long lists of celebrities and exhausting accounts of world travel . This volume is a ‘distillation of more than a million words’, so what were the principles of selection?Alan Rickman remains one of the most beloved actors of all time across almost every genre, from his breakout role as Die Hard's villainous Hans Gruber to his heart-wrenching run as Professor Severus Snape, and beyond.