Alan Rickman has been disdained. For those of you who are unclear who I am speaking about, I am of course referring to the actor who portrayed Professor Severus Snape in all eight of the Harry Potter films. Recently the nominees for the 84th Academy Awards were announced. For Best Actor in a Supporting Role, the nominees are: Kenneth Branagh, Jonah Hill, Nick Nolte, Christopher Plummer and Max von Sydow. Notice Alan Rickman was not nominated.
To me, this is an unbelievable mistake. While the role of Severus Snape in the first six novels and films was rather stoic, readers were caught off guard with one of the most revealing twists in a novel not seen since Agatha Christie wrote And Then There Were Six. Warning, if you haven’t read the novels or seen the films, the rest of this column will be one giant spoiler.
Readers grew to dislike Snape, simply because Harry disliked Snape. And considering his old employment was being a Death Eater, a certain amount of suspicion was understandable. Snape disliked Harry as much as, if not more than, his father. No attention was paid to this relationship, none at all, until around Half-Blood Prince, when it’s discovered that James Potter caused frequent emotional and sometimes physical pain to Severus during their time as students at Hogwarts.
Add to that the fact that Severus was in love with Lily Potter practically all of his life and you begin to see why the boy who was bullied and lonely grew up to be a man capable of such profound apathy. Not only did he see the love of his life get married to the grown-up boy who bullied him, but also murdered at the hands of the man he swore his allegiance to.
So when given the chance by Albus Dumbledore to protect Harry, the only connection left to Lily, he accepted. But when finding out Dumbledore’s grand scheme involved Harry submitting himself to death, the last link to Lily severed, it was almost too much to grasp. “You’ve been raising him like a pig for slaughter!” said Snape. “Don’t tell me now you’ve grown to care for the boy,” said Dumbledore. Snape then produces a patronus of a doe. Not coincidentally, this was Lily’s patronus as well. Even Dumbledore was taken aback. “Lily…after all this time?” “Always,” says Snape.
Alan Rickman brought the magnitude of this entire situation to life exponentially. You see Alan Rickman weeping, rocking Geraldine Somerville’s limp corpse (Lily Potter), not wanting to let go. You begin to understand, only as a viewer, not a reader, the depth of Severus Snape’s character. This was only made possible through Alan Rickman. You realize then, that it was never about Harry. Tom Riddle, the same man who killed the love of his life, eventually murders Severus Snape. But as you see Alan Rickman lay dying, his last glimpse of life was of Harry Potter and his green eyes…the same green eyes as Lily Potter.
This isn’t about Harry Potter. It’s about an actor single handedly making the series worth watching all the way through. Without Alan Rickman, the profoundness of the entire series would have been lacking. Yet instead of him receiving an Oscar nomination, we have Jonah Hill. There has been no greater shame in Hollywood.
