There's that voice. Alan Rickman has a voice so richly distinctive that fellow English actors Benedict Cumberbatch and Tom Hiddleston do entertaining impressions of him that can be found on YouTube.
It is an attribute that has become well known since his scene-stealing movie debut as a German villain in the landmark action movie Die Hard in 1988. "You know my name but who are you?" he says to Bruce Willis' heroic New York cop. "Just another American who saw too many movies as a child? Another orphan of a bankrupt culture who thinks he's John Wayne? Rambo? Marshal Dillon?"
Rickman has delivered often deliciously droll performances in more than 40 movies. He has a knack for putting the emphasis on just the right word to show a character's caustic intelligence and black humour.
Cynical though many of his characters may be – the funereal Severus Snape in eight Harry Potter movies, the not-entirely-faithful husband Harry in Love Actually and the cruel Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves – Rickman's range extends much further than the curt one-line summary I read to him from a well-known movie website: "Often plays depressive intellectuals in heroic roles."
"Oppressive did you say?"
Depressive.
"Oh, 'depressive'." He laughs on the phone from London. "I love playing comedy as well. I don't know if you've ever seen Galaxy Quest [he plays an actor in the 1999 sci-fi comedy]. I don't think I'd call him an intellectual. Depressed, definitely. Depressed in a rubber hat."
Despite his classical training – he studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and was once a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company – Rickman sees getting a laugh as no bad thing.
"I got a lot of laughs when I played Hamlet," he says. "It's not about gags. If you can get people to smile or laugh through recognition – something recognisable about human nature – then I think any part is fair game. But I'm not above a custard pie in the face or a pratfall, I mean, if it works."
Not long after Die Hard, Rickman shot a film in Australia, the Tom Selleck western Quigley Down Under, and remembers it as one of the happiest times of his life. "It was five hilarious weeks in the outback," he says. "The outback was magnificent and unforgettable. The unfortunate thing about it [is that] it was in the middle of a pilot's strike so I couldn't see much of Australia.
"At the end I had to get an army plane to get back to Sydney. We have close friends in Sydney and I remember getting a boat from where they lived and turning round a bend and seeing the bridge and the Opera House and thinking life was perfect."
Rickman is heading back to Australia soon in a different role – launching a film he has directed. He directed his first film nearly two decades ago; The Winter Guest was a Scottish drama that starred Emma Thompson and her mother, Phyllida Law.
Rickman has returned to directing with A Little Chaos, a lavish romantic drama set in 1682, about a female landscape gardener, played by Kate Winslet, who creates one of the grand gardens at the new Palace of Versailles for King Louis XIV, played with typically droll charm by Rickman.
A famous landscape artist, played by Matthias Schoenaerts from Rust and Bone, employs Winslet's character to create an outdoor ballroom after seeing the fresh way she thinks.
"I like the idea of chaos within a world of order," Rickman says. "The two things need to sit side by side somehow. In our film, it's great that somebody who's so wedded to formality asks somebody who isn't to join them and create something that's more of a celebration or more anarchic. I'm all for that."
Rickman was originally approached to play the landscape artist, Andre Le Notre but preferred to direct. "When you pick up a script, what happens is that images start jumping off the page when there's something you either want to act in or direct," he says. "You can imagine the kind of images that were jumping around with this script because it's so visual.
"I thought, it's so freshly written that it's not going to be some tedious bio-pic. It's got a period background but hopefully it feels like a story that's happening now."
While Le Notre is real, Winslet's character, the spirited Sabine De Barra, is fictional. "There could never have been a woman with a job at that time," Rickman says. "The garden she built in the film is a pretty close replica of an outdoor ballroom at Versailles that does exist.
"But in order to make it a love story, we've had to slice 35 years off La Notre's age. Yes, he designed the gardens of Versailles. Yes, there is an outdoor ballroom. But he was 70 at the time and there was certainly no woman involved."
Rickman knew that Winslet, who he had acted with in the 1995 adaptation of Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility, was perfect for the role. "She doesn't care about gettin' wet and dirty," he says. "In fact, she quite enjoys it and is effortlessly beautiful when needed. Also she's a fantastic listener as an actress and that's crucial to me because you've got to watch this person grow and learn about herself.
"What interests me about the [film's central] relationship is that neither of them expects it to happen. They've both got big brick walls in front of them that might stop it happening so they've got to have their ears open and their eyes open all the way through the story. And Kate's brilliant at this."
Once Rickman was down to direct, he took some convincing to play Louis XIV, the French sun king who was so revered that 80 people would watch him sleep and 20,000 candles had to be lit every night at Versailles.
"It was really only an arm up my back from the producers that had me playing in it," he says. "The idea of directing a movie and acting in it, I don't know how people do it, to be honest."
Why so long between directing films? "I got caught up in this thing called Harry Potter," Rickman says. "When I started it there were only three books written ... Each time a book came out, I was still in it. I was only shooting seven weeks a year and I was doing other things – directing in the theatre, doing a Broadway run, appearing in other plays and other movies – but none of them take the year of your life that directing a movie does.
"I was just not able to commit to it until I'd finished work on that series."
Now 69, Rickman grew up as one of four children on a council estate in London, with his factory worker father dying when he was eight. He is wary about seeing his upbringing as a factor in his choice of career.
"I think people become actors because their body tells them to – or some mixture of their body and their brain or whatever it is that's running around inside you. You just find this thing you do. I don't think it had anything to do with my upbringing.
"I mean actors these days come from all over the shop. Like everybody, your life is what it is. It's the reality you know. And like everybody, you just get on with it. I had an incredibly loving family."
While he was always interested in acting, Rickman worked as graphic designer before going to RADA at 25. "It was always what I loved doing most. But I was at a school that was very academic and so the pressure was to go to university and read English at 18 – I had a lot of people pushing me that way – or the other thing was to go to art school.
"It would have been, with hindsight, a big mistake for me to go to drama school at 18. I wouldn't have been ready for it at all."
When he finally went to drama school, it set him upon a sometimes surreal path, where his life is public property. An internet reference says Rickman and his wife Rima Horton, who has stood for election as a Labour candidate and lectured in economics, have been together since 1965. "That's a lot of cobblers," he says. "I don't know where people get all that from. But we have been together a long time, like quite a lot of other happy people."
Given the ups-and-downs of an actor's life, that's to his great credit. "More hers," he says.
It's humour so dry that he must have fitted in well shooting Quigley Down Under in the outback. "It's true," he says. "I was having a jokey email exchange with Kathy Lette yesterday and I started it by saying 'no worries' and put in brackets 'practising my Oz speak'.
"And she came back saying, 'You're doing very well. You've got to learn that "not bad" means "actually pretty good" and "not bad at all" means "amazing".' So I'm learning.
"That's back to Jane Austen really. She's the greatest, driest wit you'll ever find, I think."
So is the filmmaker who has re-created the magnificent gardens at the Palace of Versailles a gardener himself?
"I look at them," Rickman says in that voice. "I go, 'Very nice'."
Alan Rickman presents A Little Chaos at Spectrum Now at the Hayden Orpheum in Cremorne on March 12 and 13. A Q&A with Garry Maddox will follow the screening. The film opens in cinemas on March 26.
