Before Alan Rickman passed away, Emma Thompson arranged his hospital room to make him feel more at home. The star died in January 2016 at the age of 69, just months after receiving a pancreatic cancer diagnosis.
Rima Horton, who married the actor in 2012, has now spoken candidly about the final days of her husband’s life, revealing that he received greetings from friends who wished to bid him farewell and even organized his own farewell.
“I think he wanted to say goodbye to his friends and have it under control,” she said to the Sunday Times newspaper. “He even organised his own funeral because he didn’t want it to be a mess.”
According to Horton, one of Rickman’s frequent guests was his old friend Dame Emma Thompson, who helped the actor feel at ease by bringing in blankets and an upright lamp.
Horton elaborated: “[Thompson was] creating a salon around him while he was in bed. She brought in a standing lamp and throws so that it didn’t feel like a hospital room.” “The first thing he ever said to the oncologist was: ‘I don’t want to die in pain,’ and they made sure he didn’t,” she said, explaining that Rickman had one request from his physicians.
The actor didn’t want anybody to feel sorry for him, so the two of them resolved to keep his illness a secret. Horton acknowledges that she made an effort to avoid researching the illness online.
She added, “We didn’t tell anybody apart from our families at first. Alan didn’t want people to look at him and say, ‘Oh, how sad.’We knew it [the cancer] was fully grown and had spread. I didn’t Google it or anything; I didn’t want to know, but we knew what it meant. We knew the chemo wouldn’t work, but you live in hope. You say, maybe we’ll be the exception where it does.”
