Alan Rickman: 5 Awesome Performances And 5 That Sucked

1. Elliot Marston - Quigley Down Under

He's fondly remembered as one of cinema's best bad guy actors, but as we've seen Rickman actually didn't play the bad guy many times. Back in March 2015, he reportedly told Den of Geek that he'd only been a villain twice, presumably referring to his best known roles of Gruber and the Sheriff. However, it would seem Rickman himself had forgotten one other villainous role: that of Elliot Marston in 1990's Quigley Down Under.

And if Rickman had indeed forgotten all about that, we certainly shouldn't hold it against him. It's entirely understandable that he might have wanted to erase this particular film from his memory.

As previously stated, one of Rickman's greatest strengths was his unwillingness to play it safe, and his preference for nuanced characters. Seeing him in this film, then, as a completely two-dimensional bad guy facing off against a hero who clearly outmatches him in every respect, is disheartening in the extreme.

It's a rather odd film to begin with, casting Tom Selleck in the title role as a sharp-shooting cowboy who travels to Australia at the promise of a job from Rickman's Marston, but finds himself at odds with the tyrannical British landowner.

Rickman just seems bored out of his mind throughout, and one suspects that his later reluctance to play the Sheriff of Nottingham - and his insistence on being allowed to make that role his own - may have had something to do with what a dull, thankless part he got laboured with in this dull, thankless movie, which has long since been quite rightly confined to the landfill site of film history.