How Fame Corrupted Alan Rickman

“Arwen Holm phones,” writes Alan Rickman, “to tell me of a nasty little piece in the Telegraph saying how unsmiling I was in the local deli.” This is from his diaries Madly, Deeply, which are published posthumously — he died in 2016 of pancreatic cancer. The name is based on the film Truly, Madly, Deeply, in which Rickman plays Jamie, a dead, cello-playing Labour activist, who returns from the grave to console his devastated lover. Jamie is closer to Rickman than any of his other parts: not only was Rickman also a Labour activist who played the cello, but he was similarly needling and obsessive.