Madly, Deeply: The Alan Rickman Diaries

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Including a foreword by Emma Thompson and a selection of diary entries from the beginning of Alan's career in 1974 - 1982.

Beginning as Hogwart’s Potions professor before moving on to Defense Against the Dark Arts and eventually, Headmaster, Snape harbors deep resentment toward Harry Potter (Daniel Ratcliffe) and his friends. I fear that I will never get the incredibly overused words "lugubrious", "tatterdemalion", or "oleaginous" out of my head. Anyway, I think this book will appeal to many, but it is not for me, and it has nothing to do with Alan Rickman's thoughts, feelings or writing.

However, he did have some complimentary things to say about the franchise, shouting out future Oscar winner Alfonso Cuarón for doing “an extraordinary job” directing Prisoner of Azkaban. After a screening of Galaxy Quest, the 1999 sci-fi spoof which was an unexpected smash, all he can think about are the scenes he was in that have been cut. This is a fraud of a book and I would NEVER recommend it to anyone in fact, I'm more likely to tell people to AVOID it like the plague. My favorite detail here may be that he insisted on picking up even the largest checks in restaurants while uttering the words “Harry” and “Potter.

Madly, Deeply also includes a foreword by Emma Thompson and a selection of Rickman's early diaries, dating from 1974 to 1982, when his acting life first began. The actor is forever lunching and gossiping, wants more discussion of motivation for his roles, hates being criticized himself, but loves to criticise others. The one thing he never, ever grumbles about is his marriage, which sounds like one of the happiest in showbusiness.The diaries show someone not as funny or as self-deprecating as fans might expect, but that’s hardly his fault. We are left with inklings of a tell-all: some tidbits about the author, many about a business where an insufficiency of the inner life is a job qualification. In his diaries, Rickman revealed that he sometimes felt ambivalent about his classic turn as Severus Snape, Hogwarts's gloomy potions professor, and that he considered walking away from the franchise multiple times. Much later, after having lived through the entire experience with these young actors, he meets Radcliffe for lunch and seems to respect him much more, leading the reader to believe he saw Radcliffe evolve as an actor in a way Rickman didn’t expect.