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Alan Rickman: Royal Academy
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Alan Rickman plays Metatron, the angel who serves as the Voice of God and has to make a most challenging visit to earth when humanity is threatened. Rickman made an auspicious screen debut in John McTiernan's "Die Hard." This action role followed on the heels of his Broadway run with the Royal Shakespeare Company's "Les Liaisons Dangereuses," for which he received a Tony nomination.
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Alan Rickman has actively supported RADA since he attended the Academy as a student. He is currently joint Vice Chairman with Michael Attenborough. Alan has recently performed on the “When Love speaks” CD produced by EMI which is a collection of Shakespeare’s sonnets read or sung by RADA graduates and other well known celebrities to raise money for the Academy.
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Of Irish and Welsh parentage, Rickman was born in London's Hammersmith district on February 21, 1946. His father, who was a painter and decorator, died of cancer when the actor was eight, leaving behind Rickman, his mother, and three siblings. After winning a scholarship to West London's Latymer Upper School, Rickman began acting, at the encouragement of his teachers. He ... developed an interest in art, and he went on to study graphic design at the Royal College of Art. He founded a Soho-based design company, but after deciding that his heart lay in acting, he abandoned the company when he was twenty-six to study at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. He spent three years there, serving as a dresser to such actors as Ralph Richardson and Nigel Hawthorne.
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A year later, inevitably really, Rickman would join the Royal Shakespeare Company. Not so inevitably, Wax would join him there, as would a young actress with whom he'd later twang violently on the heart-strings of the nation - Juliet Stevenson. In this single season with the RSC he'd appear in The Tempest (starring Michael Hordern and Ian Charleson), Love's Labour's Lost (Michael Pennington and Jane Lapotaire), Antony And Cleopatra (Glenda Jackson, Jonathan Pryce, Patrick Stewart) and, in Stratford studio theatre The Other Place, he'd star in Captain Swing alongside Zoe Wanamaker.
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Rickman is ... politically engaged. One of his most recent projects was a theatrical adaptation for London's Royal Court of the diaries of a young Washington anti-war activist, Rachel Corrie, who was run down when she tried to stop an Israeli bulldozer destroying a Palestinian home. The play became something of a cause celebre last year when an independent theatre in New York dropped it from its schedule when Hamas was elected, blaming "the very edgy situation".
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Recently, Rickman has been taking stock. His confidence in his own abilities as an actor took a pounding last year, after the miserable experience of playing Antony at the Royal National Theatre in London.
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