Acclaimed British actor Alan Rickman dies at age 69.
This is getting ridiculous.
It seems we’re running an obit every other day.
These past weeks, we’ve lost hard rock warrior Lemmy. Then, we lost PHANTASM legend Angus Scrimm. Over the weekend we said farewell to the visionary David Bowie.
Now, SHOCK is sad to report that beloved British actor Alan Rickman has also passed.
Rickman joins Lemmy and Bowie in that all three were giants in their respective fields. And all three passed untimely in 2016 from some form of cancer.
Fuck cancer. Seriously.
Like Bowie, Rickman passed at age 69, UK’s The Guardian reported today.
And though, Rickman’s mark in cinema and stage wasn’t necessarily associated with horror or darker genre films, he often played a villain and did so smashingly,
Rickman played perhaps the screen’s most malevolent bad guy, Hans Gruber, in John McTiernan‘s 1988 classic DIE HARD. He also played the murderous Sheriff of Nottingham in 1991’s ROBIN HOOD: PRINCE OF THIEVES. And of course, this generation will remember him best as the shadowy Professor Severus Snape in the HARRY POTTER films.
But he did make a mark in the genre in films like 1996’s RASPUTIN, a jet-black historical drama featuring Rickman in the title role, previously essayed by the late Christopher Lee in the Hammer horror classic RASPUTIN: THE MAD MONK.
He also appeared in Tom Tykwer’s underrated 2006 horror film PERFUME and, perhaps most wickedly, he played the irredeemable Judge Turpin in Tim Burton’s masterful and explicitly bloody 2007 horror musical SWEENY TODD: THE DEMON BARBER OF FLEET STREET (pictured above and in the clip below).
Rickman passed away Wednesday, surrounded by friends and family. His presence will be sorely missed.
