Died at 80
male
Alan Sidney Patrick Rickman (February 21, 1946 – January 14, 2016) was an English actor and director. Known for his deep, languid voice, he trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London and became a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), performing in modern and classical theatre productions. He played the Vicomte de Valmont in the RSC stage production of Les Liaisons Dangereuses in 1985, and after the production transferred to the West End in 1986 and Broadway in 1987, he was nominated for a Tony Award. Rickman's first cinema role came when he was cast as the German terrorist leader Hans Gruber in Die Hard (1988). He also appeared as the Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991), for which he received the BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role; Elliott Marston in Quigley Down Under (1990); Jamie in Truly, Madly, Deeply (1991); Colonel Brandon in Sense and Sensibility (1995); Eamon DeValera in Michael Collins (1997); Alexander Dane in Galaxy Quest (1999); Metatron in Dogma (1999); Severus Snape in the Harry Potter series (2001–2011); Harry in Love Actually (2003); Marvin the Paranoid Android in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (2005); and Judge Turpin in Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007). Rickman made his television acting debut playing Tybalt in Romeo and Juliet (1978) as part of the BBC's Shakespeare series. His breakthrough role was in the BBC television adaptation of The Barchester Chronicles (1982). He later starred in television films, playing the title character in Rasputin: Dark Servant of Destiny (1996), which won him a Golden Globe Award, an Emmy Award and a Screen Actors Guild Award, and Alfred Blalock in Something the Lord Made (2004). Rickman died of pancreatic cancer on 14 January 2016 at age 69. His final film roles were as Lieutenant General Frank Benson in the thriller Eye in the Sky (2015), and reprising his role as the voice of the caterpillar from Alice in Wonderland (2010) in Alice Through the Looking Glass (2016).
Alan Rickman
Prior Philip
for Prior Philip in Pillars of the Earth
Suggested by seanleonard
Before this novel was published, Follett was known for writing in the thriller genre. The Pillars of the Earth became his best-selling work. It was made into an 8-part miniseries in 2010, and a video game in 2017. The book was listed at no. 33 on the BBC's Big Read, a 2003 survey with the goal of finding the "nation's best-loved book".[1] The book was selected in the United States for Oprah's Book Club in 2007. It is the first book in the Kingsbridge Series - the others being a sequel, set 150 years later, entitled World Without End (2007),[2] and A Column of Fire (2017) set in Elizabethan England. A fourth novel, The Evening and the Morning (2020), a prequel set in 997 AD, was released on September 15, 2020.
