Alan Rickman gave the greatest gift to my late daughter, Rachel Corrie

My family and I were saddened on Thursday morning to learn of thedeath of Alan Rickman – too sad to write our feelings at the time. Alan, of course, is famous as an actor and director, both on stage and in film. But we first came to know him when, with Katharine Viner (now editor-in-chief of the Guardian), he edited our daughter Rachel’s writing into the play My Name is Rachel Corrie. The care Alan took for our family, his courage to take on this particular project and, most of all, the respect he showed for Rachel and her writing, impress me still as truly extraordinary. Imagine a person of Alan Rickman’s talent, stature and experience stepping into the space between a recently bereaved family, the Israel/Palestine conflict and a young woman’s private email and journals. Voluntarily. I could not imagine such a thing had Alan not done exactly that. As My Name is Rachel Corrie concluded its first run in New York late in 2006, I told Alan: “You know, you were working without a net. There was a very real risk that no matter what you did with Rachel’s writing, our family would not be in the emotional state to approve of it.”