For a guy who played probably the best bad guys of our generation, he was such a gentle man.
After I got to know him, I wondered about Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi, because Alan was so far from any of the characters he played. He was so soft-spoken and so sweet. But he had such a gift for playing such terrifying people.
It must have all been a reversal. In his imagination, he must have been somewhere so vulnerable to cruel and evil people and felt so frightened of them that it gave him this amazing gift for constructing them. It was just astonishing.
