Behind the scenes of “Love Actually”, Alan Rickman and Emma Thompson, 2002

Alan Rickman about Galaxy Quest:
“I just thought, ‘What a brilliant idea!
How come nobody has done this before?
It’s always a good sign when you keep turning the pages. I kept turning, and I kept laughing. It’s very clever, and I just wanted to do some comedy.”

In the movie, Alexander Dane is a Shakespearean actor who has fallen into the typecasting trap, forever doomed to be remembered as Dr Lazarus.
“I know what that guy could be like and they had designed me an apartment that was so neat and tidy. Because I’m English you get this cartoon English apartment. I walked in and thought, ‘This is ridiculous.’
There were framed portraits of Jane Austen on the wall and photographs of Trafalgar Square and a tin of baked beans in the kitchen.
“I just went round and destroyed it basically; I thought he should be living in a shit heap. Alexander Dane clearly lives in a mess, he hasn’t got anybody that cleans up and he has a terrible diet and a terrible life.”

Rickman also provided input to the bulbous prosthetic that the character wears, which was designed by artists at the Stan Winston studio.
“I thought it was important for it to be good enough to convince the aliens who believe we’re the real thing, but also cheesy enough to imagine that it was something he applied himself.”

“We are playing real people with real lives. You get a glimpse of it, so you’ve got that as your guiding force all the time. It doesn’t matter how ridiculous the situation is - these are people who have to go and buy milk. That’s what guides it - these are real people caught up in an extraordinary situation.”

Parisot and his team have been careful to take a very non-cynical, good-hearted approach.
Even the convention scenes, which include 400 fans dressed as crew and aliens from Galaxy Quest, poke fun without being judgmental.
“I think it’s great that there are people who leave their boring old jobs and get dressed up in costumes and live a fantasy life for a moment,” opines Rickman.
“God knows that’s what I spend my life doing!”

(‘Starburst’, 2000)

"Romeo and Juliet", BBC, 1978

“After RADA he had a rich and varied stage career, entering television through the Shakespeare series. "I was Tybalt in the very first play, Romeo And Juliet, and I was fascinated by television technique. I think I almost gave more attention to that than to Tybalt."

He may also act as assistant director on a play at the Royal Court Theatre in London. “I’m interested in directing just as long as it doesn’t stop me from acting,” he said.
“I don’t want someone to pull ‘director’ out of the label box...”
(“South Wales Echo”, 1983)

David Adams: "I met Alan Rickman in 1967 when I was a journalist, setting up an “alternative” local paper in Notting Hill, west London. Alan was training to be a graphic artist and came on board as the paper’s designer. We shared the same politics and became good friends. I admired him for his beliefs and activism, and not just his acting.

The debut issue of the paper attracted some attention, and Alan’s first appearance on screen was therefore in a television news item, in which he was shown sitting on the floor of my flat gluing together a layout of the paper. The glue slurped onto the carpet and stubbornly stayed there for many years afterwards. But it at least gave my wife and me something to show guests over the next few decades as we pointed out our enduring connection with the great actor.

As Alan began to pursue his stage and film career, we drifted apart – and we met only a couple of times before 1992, when I took a group of students to see his Hamlet at the Riverside Studios in London. Afterwards he behaved as if we had never lost contact, and chatted at length to the students, despite there being a queue of agents outside the dressing room door with scripts for him to read. He was a lovely man: an admirable actor but also a genuine, generous person."
(The Guardian, 2016)

"Hamlet", Riverside Studios, 1992

The New York Stage and Film’s 2010 Winter Gala, New York, 12 December 2010

Alan Rickman as Chief Blackmoon, “Gunslinger”, the Leicester Phoenix theatre, 1976

“Victoria Wood’s All Day Breakfast was broadcast on Christmas Day, and there was even a brief guest appearance by Alan Rickman playing himself. It was the first time he and Victoria had performed together since 1976 when he was Big Chief Blackmoon to her Wild Wilhelmina Fifty Fingers in Gunslinger at Leicester.[…]

In the summer of 1976 Victoria’s career path took a bizarre turn when she visited a friend in Leicester who was a member of the city’s Phoenix Theatre Company.
Her arrival coincided with a dramatic crisis: the musical director of the company’s forthcoming production had dropped out at the last minute.
 The show was Gunslinger, a musical by Richard Crane and Joss Buckley billed as ‘an action-packed celebration of the legendary Wild West’.”
(The book “Victoria Wood” by Neil Brandwood, 2016)

The photo from ‘Leicester Mercury’, June 1976

Comme des Garcons Homme Plus Autumn-Winter 93-94
Paris, France, 29 January 1993

“One doesn’t have to be an art critic to understand Rei Kawakubo’s fall collection for Comme des Garcons Homme Plus. In homage to “artists in their studios,” Kawakubo painted a purple strip down the runway and stirred in several well-known artists — among them, Robert Rauschenber, Mike and Doug Starn and Shakespearean actor Alan Rickman — and sculpted her painterly designs about them. It was a theme and concept that pleased Rei greatly; never have her collection, her choice of music for the show and her colors been more upbeat. In fact, the designer — known for her stoic, frozen facial expression — cracked a small smile on the runway after the show.”

Michael Rickman: "Mother and son"