from Facebook: not Alan Rickman!

WHAT?!

First David Bowie and now Alan Rickman. Not a good start to art :(

Tim Curry is also 69. I’m really worried.

Alan Rickman was a wonderful actor, but let’s talk about something else: His first film role was when he was forty-six years old. Rickman ran his own graphic design company in his late twenties, and then quit to start taking acting lessons. He didn’t have a lead role on stage until he was 42, and then four years later he got cast as the villain in some action movie starring a sitcom actor. Was this a sensible thing to do? What man in his late twenties leaves a paying job to take a huge risk like that, and keeps going despite all the setbacks?

Well, I guess I did. I left my home state after thirty years, quit trying to be a teacher, and went back to graduate school. I moved two thousand miles away and started a whole new path at thirty-one years. I’d think of Isaac Newton, who by my age had already invented Calculus, and wonder if I was too old to do any real math. Or, for that matter, Isaac Asimov, who’d been published dozens of times by my age, and wonder if my first novel would ever see the light of day. The lesson I’d take from Rickman’s life is: It’s never too late to follow your dreams.

:-(

Of course, we never hear from the people who followed their dreams all the way into abject failure, poverty, and misery.

It appears his piece reached its end… onwards…