Maureen Paton

ALAN RICKMAN

The Unauthorised Biography

CONTENTS
     
     LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
     ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
     PROLOGUE: VINEGAR IN THE SALAD			1
     1. THE FAUSTIAN GIFT				19
     2. THE SURROGATE FATHER				33
     3 'HE'S VERY KEEP DEATH OFF THE ROADS		53
     5. 'I WANT WOMEN’					87
     8  VALMONT IN CURLERS				103
     7. A DEAL WITH THE DEVIL				111
     8. HOW THEY SHOT THE SHERIFF			137
     9. IMMORTAL LONGINGS				157
     10. THAT SINKING FEELING				173
     11. ANIMAL MAGNETISM				195
     12. 'GOD DIDN'T MEAN HIM TO PLAY SMALL ROLES	213
     13. ROCKET TO THE MOON				233
     14. THE BLEAK MID-WINTER				243
     15. SHRIEKS ACROSS THE ATLANTIC			253
     16. THE SLITHERY SLOPE TO SNAPE			265
     CHRONOLOGY OF ALAN RICKMAN CAREER			283
     INDEX						285
     
     

ILLUSTRATIONS

Alan Rickman's school nativity play (C. Hulloh)
Alan Rickman in Guys and Dolls, 1975 (Haymarket Theatre)
Alan on tour with the rep in Ibsen's When We Dead Awaken (Gerald Murray)
First stint at the RSC with Glenda Jackson and Juliet Stevenson (Shakespeare Centre Library/Joe Cocks)
As Antonio in 1979 (Shakespeare Centre Library/Joe Cocks)
As Achilles in Troilus and Cressida (Shakespeare Centre Library/Joe Cocks)
The cast of Lucky Chance As Vicomte de Valmont in Les Liaisons Dangereuses (ShakespeareCentre Library)
First cinematic role in Die Hard (Peter Sorel) Truly Madly Deeply with Juliet Stevenson (ÂÂÑ/Film Four)
Close My Eyes with Saskia Reeves and Clive Owen (Kobal) As the psychotic Sheriff of Nottingham (Morgan Creek)
The ultimate challenge - as Hamlet in 1992 (Nottingham Playhouse/ Donald Cooper)
Taking the lead role in Dennis Potter's Mesmer (The Ronald Grant Archive)
As Colonel Brandon in Sense and Sensibility (Kobal)
With Rima Horton, his partner (Rex Features)
In Galaxy Quest (The Ronald Grant Archive)
As Professor Severus Snape in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (The Ronald Grant Archive)
With Mel Smith at the Latymer Arts Centre (Latymer Upper)


ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

       In November 1994. 1 asked Alan Rickman via his agent whether he would be interested in co-operating with a biography to be 
published in the landmark year of his 50th birthday. In January 1995, .Alan wrote me a scrupulously polite refusal in what the 
denizens of Wayne's World would call 'most excellent" handwriting; the influence of his art-school training is immediately apparent 
in me calligraphy.
       Mal Peachey. my editor at Virgin, was so persuasive, however, that I decided to go ahead with the book. I informed Alan of 
my intentions, jokily begging him not to reach for the elephant-gun or the smelling-salts. He sent me another handwritten letter. 
'Looking backwards is a strange thing to do - I will do it, but not now. It would take the smelling-salts, the elephant-gun and a 
large dose of hindsight to change my mind . . .' Looking back is, indeed. a strange thing to do; but in this case, it has been a 
fascinating and worthwhile exercise to study this unique actor and director. And when Virgin asked me to update the biography six 
years after the first editions, the case for a second edition seemed overwhelming in view of Rickman's output since 1996.
       I am particularly indebted to the following people for their help: Peter Barnes. Stephen Davis, Jenny Topper, Thelma Holt. 
Blanche Marvin, Jonathan. Powell, Catherine Bailey. Jules Wright, Jane Hackworth-Young, Stephanie Penneil. Gwenda Hughes. Michael 
Bogdanov. Clare Vcnables. Richard Wilson. Howard Davies. Ruby Wax, Christopher Hampton. Maggie Todd. Christopher Biggins. Dusty 
Hughes, Mike Newell, Feicr James. Stephen Poliakoff. Harriet Walter. Adrian Noble, Emma Hardy. Nigel Hawthorne. Simon McBumev. Man 
Whiitingdale. Roger Spouiswoode. Clif-ford Williams, Stephen Crossley. Johnny Perkins. Trevor Nunn. William Burdett-Coutts. Saskia 
Reeves. James Sluw of the Shake-speare Birthplace Trust, Dave Granger, PaddvWilson, Chris Taylor. David Rich of Channel 4. Nigel 
Orton and Chns Hammond of Latymer Upper School. Edward' Stead. Matthew Bond. Barry Burnett. Wendv Ducon of West Acton Primary 
School. Charlotte Tudor, Charles Prater of Silverdade. Theres, Hickey, Ian Francis.
and Jonathan Donald of the Kensington News. John Frebble. Robert Cushman. Robert Holman. Ang Lee. Susanna Homg. Simon Langton. June 
Winters and Judy Arthur of Home Box Office. Iain Coleman. Peter Savage, Martin Reddin, Sheridan Fitzgerald, Susie Figgis, James 
Shirras of Film Finances Services Ltd, Ian Herbert of Theatre Record, Max Stafford-Clark. Snoo Wilson, Philip Hedley. John Byer and 
others who wished to remain anonymous.
       Finally. I would like to thank my editors Mai Peachey and Kirstie Addis and my agent Judith Chilcote tor their rigorous 
encouragement and advice, and my husband Liam Maguire for putting up with me.









 1. PROLOGUE: VINEGAR IN THE SALAD                            	1
     
     Call him a luvvie at your peril. According to one of his oldest female friends, he's the epitome of passive aggression. The 
passive-aggressive syndrome in psychology sounds impressive, but needs to be demystified. It used to be known as 'silent 
insubordination' in the Army: in other words, good old-fashioned bloody-mindedness. This syndrome says everything about the 
stubborn temperament of the internationally renowned British actor Alan Rickman. You can see just how this tall and scornful 
perfectionist, the nonpareil of nit-pickers, came to embody a formidable intelligence and reined-in power. He could never play a 
weakling. At just over 6ft lin and big-boned with it, he has the haughty bearing of a natural aristocrat. All his showiest roles 
point to a sense of innate superiority, from the terrorist Hans Gruber in Die Hard and the Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin Hood: 
Prince Of Thieves to the megalomaniacal Rasputin in the film of the same name and the disdainful Professor Severus Snape, scourge 
of the schoolboy wizard, in the Harry Potter films. It's a look that says he's a member of the theatrical master-race.
     Which is a problem, since he's also a member of the Labour Party. Paradoxically, this enigmatic actor is a painter and 
decorator's son from working-class Irish and Welsh stock who was raised on a west London council estate. Given his high-profile 
support of socialism, he's oddly private about his humble background and doesn't do the cloth-cap-and-clogs routine. He has a 
rarity value, since he gives little away about himself. Alan Rickman, as all his many friends in the business testify, has a horror 
of anything that smacks of self-promotion. He backs shyly into the limelight. At the same time that he simultaneously opened in 
Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone and in the West End with an acclaimed revival of Noel Coward's Private Lives, Alan 
Rickman's sepulchral rasp could also be heard as the Genie of the Lamp for the Christmas pantomime Aladdin in one of the poorest 
boroughs in London. He recorded the performance for free on the condition that there was a publicity black-out.
     Rickman has a strange aura around him that is extremely successful. However, he's also known to be socialistic and has

2
     avoided the honours trap. So he trails this remarkable integrity by being very Jesuitical about publicity; yet on the other 
hand he's a famous actor.
     Indeed, on screen and stage, he can project everyone's idea of seigneurial decadence; an impression that gained hold when he 
played the first and best incarnation of the vicious Vicomte de Valmont in the acclaimed Royal Shakespeare Company production of 
Les Liaisons Dangereuses. Yet Alan Rickman longs to be thought of as a true man of the people. Inevitably, there is a conflict 
between his past and his present that he has never quite resolved.
     Those narrow Grand Vizier eyes, the colour of pale amber, seem to look down his long nose. There is something of the Marquis 
de Sade in his anachronistic appeal to women as an arrogant, feline fop. His sudden gestures can be transfixing: Rickman has the 
most extraordinary way of laughing quietly with a sort of silent snicker, a grimace that contorts his face.
     His personality is piquantly flavoured sweet-and-sour, Chinese style. The two phrases that crop up most about him are: 'He 
doesn't suffer fools gladly' and 'He's a guru.'. They are by no means mutually exclusive; one has the feeling that, for many 
admiring acolytes, the rigorously principled Rickman has the elevated status of a jealous god who is just as likely to smite the 
sinful with a plague of boils as to reward the godly with his gracious approbation. They look up to him even though Rickman himself 
has admitted that his main vice is 'a wounding tongue. I'm working on it; perhaps it's the Celt in me.'
     In a notoriously insecure industry, he is regularly paged for advice as if he were a Delphic oracle. 'He likes to be 
everyone's guru,' says the playwright Stephen Poliakoff. Rickman keenly feels the powerlessness of the actor's passive role, which 
is why he's a great organiser of support networks for fellow thespians. He espouses causes. In his heart, he's Don Quixote; in his 
head, he's Sancho Panza.
     Yet he has his own raging insecurities, which may account for the public sulks when he can seem a spectacular misery-guts. 
There is the recurring stage fright that affects this most theatrical of animals: 'I get gremlins in my head, saying, "You're going 
to forget your lines",' he told The Times magazine in 1994. Film was a liberation in more ways than one. In June 2002, after a 
triumphant Broadway opening with an acclaimed, award-winning
     
3
     London revival of Noel Coward's Private Lives that reunited the Les liaisons Dangercuses team of Rickman, Lindsay Duncan and 
director Howard Davies, Rickman told the US TV interviewer Charlie Rose: ‘I think I'm better at the stage work because of film 
work. The trouble in the theatre is that there's this huge fear. It's something that I guess is connected to adrenaline and focus 
and energy, but it's a useless thing - like some gremlin that sits on your shoulder and tries to make you fail. And often succeeds. 
At least on film if you screw up, you know there's another take. And it [the fear] doesn't get any better. I'm seriously thinking 
of trying to find some kind of hypnosis that will get rid of it.'
     Sometimes there's a sense of simmering resentment underneath his surface calm; if he's the proverbial cold fish (given that 
there's no such thing as a warm fish), he is one that swims in hidden depths.
     Occasionally, a bitterness breaks surface: 'Some actors have opportunities and shapes given to them,' he once said to John 
Lam-in Woman's Journal, January 1993. 'Not me. I've had to guide my career and seize any opportunity that came my way.' He made his 
first film, Die Hard, at the late age of 42 because he came cheap.
     One publicist remembers with a shudder how rude Rickman was to her when he was still unknown. Perhaps it was simply her 
proximity to the Press, because he detests the snap judgements and pigeon-holing tendencies of the Fourth Estate. Yet scores of 
actors and writers testify to his warmth and kindness, even if he's not nearly so supportive of directors as a breed. 'All his 
roles have attitude,' as one former associate, the theatre director Jules Wright, puts it. 'Directors fear to take him on.'
     'Alan has a lot of attitude . . . which is another aspect of control,' says his playwright friend Stephen Davis. I get the 
impression it's a bit arbitrary. He does have this awesome side to his character. Alan Rickman is the only person I know who will 
make me nervous about what I'll say next. He won't let you be self-pitying or gratuitous.'
     In Hollywood, he has achieved the status of a brand-name: they now routinely refer to 'an Alan Rickman role' whenever they 
want someone with the gift of playful evil.
     This multi-faceted man, who also created the comedienne Ruby Wax and discovered the award-winning playwright Sharman 
Macdonald, has walked away with film after film by turning his
     
4
     villains into warped tragic heroes with an anarchic sense of humour. Indeed, he's had such a spectacular career in grand 
larceny on screen that no one would guess he was born with a speech defect- It has made him so self-conscious about his voice that 
he still fears death by review as his frustration and despair at the critical mauling for his National Theatre debut in Antony and 
Cleopatra in 1998 showed only too clearly. After that disaster at the age of 52, he told one friend that he felt like never going 
back to the theatre again — even though he will say to people dial he never reads reviews. Yet Rickman's bravura assurance and 
style has given him a greater following than Hugh Grant, fifteen years his junior.
     'Alan has a quality which is attractive to both men and women. It's what makes star quality. it means that everyone is looking 
at you,* points out Jules Wright. 'Ian McKellen and Mick Jagger have it too; so do Alan Howard and Alec Guinness. There's an 
ambivalence: they're not macho, but they're not particularly feminine, either. There's an ambiguity there.’
     The bizarre downside to the public fascination with this intriguing maverick comes in the form of sackloads of intrusive and 
obscene mail from otherwise respectable women, for whom he represents some kind of sexual release from repression- A typical letter 
to Alan Rickman goes: 'Dear Mr Rickman, I have always considered myself a staunch feminist, but you have a very disturbing effect 
on me ...'
     Even worse was the malicious correspondence from a (male) grudge-bearer who found out where he lived and made a point of 
sending him any bad reviews he could find.
     For no one ever feels tepid about Alan Rickman. He inspires fierce loyalty, admiration and widespread affection, but some are 
highly critical of his apparent intractability.
     'He's too intelligent to be an actor,' is the blunt opinion of one friend. That sets up a constant tension, partly because 
Alan is a frustrated director and partly because he entered the business at a relatively late age.
     He has acquired a reputation for being difficult, culminating in damaging publicity on die litigation over the film Mesmer. 
The movie that was to provide him with his first lead role in the cinema became mired in law-suits. Rickman stood accused of 
intellectual arrogance; yet the real truth about Mesmer is more complex than mere tantrums. Alan himself, always his own fiercest 
critic, did
     
5
     concede in front of a packed audience for a question-and-answer session at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in 1995 that fame had 
probably corrupted him 'to some extent' by causing a mild outbreak of childish foot-stamping. Yet he had told Duncan Fallowell in 
the Observer a year earlier, There are plenty of people more "difficult" than me. Juliet Stevenson, for example. I would say that 
"difficult" means a highly intelligent human being who asks pertinent questions and tries to use her or himself to the fullest 
extent.' So there; trust Rickman to answer his carpers by turning the criticism into a compliment and throwing it back at them as a 
challenge. Even, it has to be said, at the risk of pomposity.
     There is also an extraordinary allegation that, in the wake of the so-called Rivergate fiasco that lost him the chance to ran 
his own London arts centre, Alan Rickman was seen handing out copies of a published letter of support from leading drama critics to 
a bemused queue at a fashionable London fringe venue. Not to mention a stand-up row in the foyer of another theatre with his rival 
to run Riverside, which had never - until this book - been reported. There's even talk of a confidential document that went 
missing.
     Despite his languid image, there is clearly a lot of the street activist left in this former art editor of a radical 60s 
freesheet that was based in London's answer to San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury: Netting Hill Gate.
     'Having done something else before acting made him a better actor,' says the writer Peter Barnes, a long-standing friend. 'It 
was a very deliberate U-turn.' The theatre director Michael Bogdanov, another mate, agrees: 'It's often an advantage in starting 
late as he did. Actors go to drama school far too young.' Alan has all the doubts of the late starter, with an understandable 
neurosis about his age: no one in his inner circle knew in advance about his landmark 50th birthday in February 1996. 'His age was 
a closely guarded secret,' says Stephen Poliakoff. 'Actors are much more secretive about their. Age than actresses.'
     At the age of 38, a gloomy Rickman was in almost Gogolian despair about his long-term prospects in a wayward career that 
seemed to be going nowhere. Jules Wright remembers one outburst in Sloane Square at two in the morning after a meal. 'Alan suddenly 
said to me, "Nothing's ever going to happen for me. No one will ever notice me. My career isn't going to go anywhere." '
     
6
     He also told GQ magazine: 'I lurch from indecision to indecision. All I ever seem to do is smash up against my own 
limitations. I have never felt anything but "Oops, failed again".’
     As with all great actors, he takes a lot of calculated risks that have inevitably meant several brushes with failure. After 
learning his trade and paying his dues in provincial repertory theatre, he joined the Royal Shakespeare Company for a short and 
unhappy season in which he thought himself an unattractive misfit. He felt compelled to leave because, as he put it, he wanted 'to 
learn how to talk to other actors on stage rather than bark at them.'
     As a television unknown in the early 80s, he went on to steal the BBC drama series The Barchester Chronicles as an ambitious 
young clergyman whose divine unctuousness upstaged such major players as Donald Pleasence, Geraldine McEwan and Nigel Hawthorne. 
Later he explained that, typically for Alan, he based Obadiah Slope on all the Tory politicians he detested, starting with Norman 
Tebbit and Margaret Thatcher. That was the first of many defiant challenges. Rickman rarely gives interviews; but when he does, 
they can be more like military skirmishes.
     His shiftiness had become a star turn, yet he was still a recognisable face rather than a name. Only when he was invited back 
to the RSC in 1985 for a second chance did he reveal his true range in the leading pan of the Vicomte de Valmont.
     However, playing a professional seducer in Les Liaisons Dangereuses for almost two years nearly drove him mad: the political 
ideals that now make him feel guilty about his immense Hollywood bankability also make him yearn to be thought of as one of life's 
good guys. Yet there he is, playing a rapist or a murderer. It offends his puritanical streak.
     We had a harmonious relationship: affection is important to him,' insists the film director Mike Newell, who worked with him 
on An Awfully Big Adventure. 'He has private demons,' admits Peter Barnes.
     One of them is his ambivalent attitude towards the sexual power that has played its pan in making him a major star. 'Alan is 
incredibly aware of his professional sexual charisma,' says Stephen Davis. 'He has hordes of women writing to him. There is 
evidence that it gets in the way, and he wants to avoid being cast for it.
     'He's not an exploitative person in his private life, not in the remotest a sexual predator. He's vexed by this image, this
     
7
     matinee-idol hold over the audience. In his personal life, he has enormous self-control . . . unnervingly so.' Alan was to 
remark tartly: 'I have never been remotely sexually voracious, whatever that is ... but maybe I'll be sexually voracious next 
week.' In the grand old tradition of keeping them guessing, it was another example of his dry sense of humour.
     For Rickman is a one-woman man who has known Rima Horton, his first and only girlfriend, for more than three decades. Their 
fidelity to each other is a legend. 'He's similar to John Malkovich, though not, perhaps, to Valmont in Les Liaisons, the character 
they both played, except in one important respect. Alan is quite unpromiscuous - which is very rare for actors,' says a friend, the 
playwright Dusty Hughes. Like Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir or the late Peter Cook and his last wife, Alan and Rima keep 
separate establishments within a mile of each other. In 1989 they split up in order to stay together - but apart.
     I interviewed Alan Rickman over the telephone in 1982 for a feature in the Daily Express on his performance as the oleaginous 
supercreep Obadiah Slope in The Barchester Chronicles. This breakthrough role introduced him to millions and made women, in 
particular, aware of his perverse sexiness. In that role, he sulked for Britain. He sounded suspicious to the point of hostility 
until I started inserting a few jokes about Slope into the conversation to lighten the atmosphere. I could almost hear the 
Titanic-sized iceberg slowly cracking up and defrosting at the other end of the line as the voice relaxed.
     Given that he was playing a woman-chaser with such slithery conviction, questions about his own domestic set-up seemed 
justifiable, especially since he had managed to reach the age of 36 without the ritual march to the altar. In appropriately 
churlish Slope mode, Alan refused to discuss his private life. Later, someone told me that he had lived with the same woman for a 
long time. Just how long, not even their best friends knew.
     1 was subsequently to discover that Rima Horton and Alan Rickman have been together since the mid-60s, an impressive record by 
any standards whether in or out of wedlock He met Rima, a labourer's daughter who became an economist and politician, at Chelsea 
College of Art in 1965. They appeared on stage in various amateur productions when he was nineteen and she was a year younger. That 
early shared interest plus his exact
     
8
     age - Alan is as vain as the next man - and his second name of Sidney were his most closely-guarded secrets. Not even Rima's 
friends knew that she was once an actress in the dreaded Ham Dram; perhaps she is too embarrassed to mention it in the same breath 
as Alan's career.
     They are considered to have one of the strongest relationships in the business despite - or perhaps because of - the absence 
of children. It has survived the setting up of separate flats, when Alan decided he needed his own space and moved out of Rima's 
apartment to buy a maisonette.
     Though the decision alarmed all their friends for quite a while, the arrangement seems to suit them both. So far they are as 
solid as ever. If he is a pessimist, she is an optimist. 'Rima has a very sunny nature, she's very pragmatic with her feet on the 
ground,' says Peter Barnes. 'It helps that she's not in the profession herself, a great help.' Espousing the easy-go attitudes of 
the 60s, they have never bothered to get married. Who needs a ring for commitment? Yet Peter Barnes, Alan's oldest friend after 
Rima, told me when I met up with him again over a plate of oysters in August 2002 that he had a gut feeling Alan and Rima would 
suddenly surprise everyone and tie the knot one day after all. ‘I’m expecting their marriage to happen; it's the old romantic in 
me. And as he goes up the aisle, I shall be laughing madly,' Peter added fondly. Such steadfastness is remarkable in Rickman's 
peripatetic profession, since he necessarily spends much of his time abroad on location. 'Rima and Alan are like-minded people - 
it's a common-law marriage of true minds,' says the playwright Stephen Davis. They were once in CND together. They argue a lot 
about politics.' Indeed, a fervent political discussion is their idea of a good night in.

     Alan has acknowledged that the reason for their relationship's longevity is that Rima is 'tolerant. She's incredibly, 
unbelievably tolerant. Possibly a candidate for sainthood.' And why, pray, does she need to be so tolerant? 'Because I'm an actor,' 
he added, only too aware of the self-obsession and insecurity that his profession breeds. 'I've never learned that trick of leaving 
business behind in the rehearsal room; I bring all problems home, I brood. But Rima just laughs and goes straight to the heart of 
the matter. No matter what problems she has, she puts her head on the pillow and goes straight to sleep.' Sounds like the perfect 
personality for politics,
     
9
     an arena where only the calm (or thick-skinned) survive. Actors, on the other hand, can, and certainly do, use their neuroses 
in their work. As the film director Mike Newell was later to say: 'Alan is neurotic but intense, incredibly focused and 
authoritative as an actor. All his insecurities as a person are completely healed by acting.'
     Certainly it was impossible to imagine the mean-spirited, calculating Slope, forever in pursuit of rich widows and richer 
livings, as having a stable home life. Obadiah was anybody's, if they were wealthy enough. But Alan's remote air gives him an 
unattainable quality, which makes him a challenge; hence the intense female interest in him.
     As the theatrical agent Sheridan Fitzgerald, his former leading lady at the RSC, remarks: 'Women are always falling in love 
with the unattainable.'
     'Alan's too serious to be flirtatious,' says Jules Wright. 'He's not aware of his attractiveness, which of course is what 
makes him really sexy on stage. He's very grunge to look at in his private life, he doesn't run around flashily at the Ivy,' she 
adds, referring to the famous showbusiness restaurant in London's West End.
     Rickman slops around in blue jeans and polytechnic-lecturer jackets in real life, looking deliberately downbeat. With his hair 
brushed forward over his forehead, he is almost unrecognisable. There are times when he looks as if he shops at Oxfam, although 
Peter Barnes, whose only sartorial concession to his own success has been to grow a beard, playfully points out that 'if he dresses 
down, he dresses down very expensively these days. But he's more or less the same Alan.'
     'You won't find Alan guzzling champagne in some nightclub or driving a fast car,' says another friend, drama-school principal 
Peter James. 'He's like Bob Geldof - scruffy, yet asking serious questions.'
     The forces of political correctness maketh the New Man, of course, and actor Christopher Biggins has the feeling that Alan is 
'.. snobby. I often see him at dos and I think he looks like a maths teacher. He comes across as a sexual animal; you feel he's 
going to be brilliant in bed. But you wouldn't think he's an actor. There's no reaction. No sense of humour. Of course, he may be 
very, very nervous.'
     (And with Mr Biggins - who has quite an edge to him under that jovial exterior - glowering at the apparent reincarnation of 
his least
     
10
     favourite teacher who can blame him? But Biggins was right about the sexual aura, if a later remark by Rickman himself is 
anything to go by. ‘Sitting around a table with good friends, some sympathy, nice wine, good talk, what could be better than that? 
Except sex? Or getting it right on stage,' he said, leaving us in little doubt how highly he placed sex as a priority. Because 
Rickman would never include any other leisure activity in the same order of importance as stage acting without meaning exactly what 
he said.)
     There is a chip on the shoulder. It doesn't surprise me that he was brought up on a council estate; so was I. But you either 
have a chip or you deal with it," says Christopher, who makes no bones about being a true-blue Tory. 'These champagne socialists 
are very odd. I have a feeling that Alan surrounds himself with a close circle who are very protective. Some people don't want 
fame. They like it; but they don't want it.' he adds shrewdly.
     Rickman's first property purchase back in IQ89 was a spacious maisonette, part of an elegant Italianate terrace of Victorian 
houses in west London's fashionable Westboume Grove. In 2001. he sold up and moved on to an even larger flat nearby. When he can. 
he pops over to France to a holiday cottage.
     Until his mother's death in 1997, he lived just three tube stops away from her neat council house, only a few streets from 
Wormwood Scrubs prison with a bingo palace. DIY superstore and snooker hall nearby. His mother and younger brother Michael bought 
this trim semi-detached home together under the Right To Buy scheme introduced b) the Tones and deplored by all Old Labourites. 
Alan visited her regularly; he has always had a good relationship with his family, even though he keeps those two v. odds separate 
most of the time.
     Though he would always see his mother, he seems to find it difficult to come to terms with his background, to fit his family 
into his life as an actor.
     His elder brother, David, works for a graphic design company and Michael is a professional tennis coach. They live quiet and 
modest lives far away from showbusiness circles, though they gel on well with the famous member of the family.
     'Class has been a bizarre accident that happened to Alan, observes Stephen Davis. 'We were the post-Beatles generation: we 
invented ourselves. Alan's background is a major influence on him. though. He moves in a privileged world but refuses to forget his
     
11
     past. He wants to be sure that he's not confused in his own shaving mirror about who he is.'
     Peter Barnes has a different perspective: 'My own feeling is that Alan has created himself. The persona has created him; the 
mask becomes the face. His family look very different. Actors have created themselves, they know exactly who they are. I haven't 
got the same confidence he's got on the phone, but then everyone recognises his voice because most actors have distinctive voices. 
Whereas I always feel I have to introduce myself by saying, "It's Peter, Peter Barnes."'
     Another friend, Blanche Marvin, agrees: 'Alan likes to feel he's his own creation.' In other words, this fiercely independent 
man won't be beholden to anyone.
     In some ways Rickman is a man born out of his time: there's a dark and disturbing retro glamour about this saturnine actor 
that really fires up an audience's imagination.
     He's the antithesis of the bland boy-next-door with an Everyman persona, with whose unthreatening ordinariness millions of 
moviegoers will identify. And costume roles particularly suit Rickman because of that air of patrician superiority. It goes with 
the sometimes frightening-looks that recall a well-known portrait of the writer, scholar and intriguer Francis Bacon whose 
unblinking gaze was once likened by a contemporary observer to the stare of a watchful viper.
     In an age that lets it all hang out, Rickman is famous for giving audiences more fun with his clothes on. And this despite the 
fact that, back in 1983, he let it all hang out in a nude scene for Snoo Wilson's play The Gross Widow, later recalling, 'It was a 
very strange thing to do. You have to pretend that it's not happening to you.' Because of that very public early lesson in the 
vulnerability of standing on stage with no clothes on, he is a past-master at portraying the art of sensual anticipation and sexual 
control. In tact, Rickman's Valmont, a role for which he seemed to have been waiting all his life, was carefully based on a 
seventeenth-century rake he had played on stage with the disconcerting name of Gayman.
     'He looks like a Russian Borzoi dog, one of those silent wolfhounds with a long neck and silky white coat. You always wonder 
whether you should speak to a Borzoi, as well . . .' says Peter James. 'It's his frame and physical look, a quality of stillness.
     
12
     It reminds me of some astonishingly aristocratic faces I saw in Russia, who looked as if they came from a different race. How 
appropriate. then, that he should later take on the role of Rasputin.
     Yet. for all his air of seigneurial self-control he has big vulnerabilities. Alan was born with a tight jaw. hence the 
slightly muffled drawl: it must be one of the sexiest speech defects in the business. 'He doesn't have an active up-and-down 
movement of his jaw.' says Blanche Marvin, a former drama teacher.
     ‘It's the way that he's generally physically coordinated he has ; lazy physical movement and a lazy facial movement He's big 
boned, and it's hard for him to move in a sprightly way.' Hence his lifetime's obsession with trying to move with the fluidity of a 
Fred Astaire.
     Despite the working-class upbringing, that honeyed-buzzsaw voice was perfected at private school: Latymer Upper in 
Hammersmith, also Hugh Grant's Alma Mater
     Rickman. a clever child, won a scholarship there at the age of eleven.. The process of reinventing himself, of keeping his 
past at arm's length, began as English teacher Colin Turner became his mentor, much as the playwright Ben Jonson. stepson of a 
bricklayer, was 'adopted' by his teacher Camden. Alan was only eight when his father died of cancer, and Turner filled that gap in 
his life.
     Latymer Upper has been almost as great an influence upon his life as Rima continues to be. He emotionally attached to the 
place that gave him such a superior start.
     In the autumn of 1995, this former star pupil had a minor falling-out with his old school when he refused to allow his 
photograph to be used in a recruitment drive. His political convictions simply wouldn't allow him to publicly endorse a private, 
fee-paving education. Rickman melodramatically asserts that he was born 'a card-carrying member of the Labour Party", but he only 
finally joined in 1987 after he and Rima had enjoyed a relatively frivolous youth in CND.
     Rumours attach themselves like barnacles to Alan Rickman- who is famously economical with the facts about himself. There was 
once a wild story that this friend of former Cabinet Minister Mo Mowlam and millionaire Labour supporter Ken Pollen was a member of 
Vanessa and Conn Redgrave's Workers' Revolutionary Party. Yet Rickman is far too straight and astute to get involved
     
13
     with the lunatic fringe. He is an idealist, but he's also startlingly pragmatic.
     Rima, an economics lecturer at Kingston University (formerly Polytechnic) in Surrey, who took early retirement in 2002 at the 
age of 55, is a Labour councillor and former prospective parliamentary candidate for Chelsea, the safest Tory seat in the country . 
. . hence her defeat in the 1992 General Election.
     She subsequently endured the indignity of losing another battle. Despite the fact she was selected as Labour's candidate for 
the Mayoral elections in Kensington and Chelsea in 2001, friends now believe she is no longer looking for a safe Labour seat in 
Parliament but has forced herself to be philosophical. She still looks young enough to stand for election; Rima and Alan are a 
striking couple who could pass for a decade younger than they are. Not having had any children probably helps; so, too, does 
Rickman's thick, dark-blond hair, which for years he wore slightly long.
     It is Rima who dictates the political and intellectual agenda. This is borne out by Peter Barnes, who recalls Alan deferring 
to his girlfriend's greater judgement when the two men met up at the funeral of the director Stuart Burge. After the service, Peter 
started raging on about the 'iniquities' of Tony Blair's New Labour government, but Rickman refused to take the bait. 'I'm very Old 
Labour and I think Alan is. At least, I hope he is. But he got very defensive at that point,' remembers Peter, 'and said that it 
was more Rima's area.' Alan, who graduated from two art colleges with diplomas in art, design and graphic design, is the creative 
one; Rima is the academic one of the two.
     Rickman is very far from being the humourless grouch that his famously cross-looking demeanour suggests. Always droll, he has 
mellowed a lot over the years as success has given him more confidence. His sense of humour alone would have kept him out of the 
paranoid ranks of the WRP, which seemed to expend most of its energies on slagging off other far-Left groups.
     'He's a bit of a Wellington with his ironic bon mots and his raised eyebrows,' says Stephen Poliakoff. 'He's self-critical and 
he doesn't have a naturally sunny disposition. But he's very life-enhancing, despite the pessimism: it's a curious combination. 
People find his dangerous wit attractive. He's quite lugubrious, but he's also quite leasable. Some people find him intimidating, 
but he just has to be provoked out of a pessimistic view of the world.
     
14
     'Acting is a very serious for him, but he's more relaxed now. He loves to talk. He likes to feel things are controlled; he 
doesn't like to feel too exposed.'
     In his fifth decade, at times Rickman resembles the late Frankie Howerd, especially when his large, crumpled face is split by 
a great pumpkin-head grin.
     One of the more endearing aspects of Alan Rickman, who is not an immediately cuddly person, is that he has never bothered to 
get his crooked and discoloured bottom teeth fixed. When he became a Hollywood star at a relatively late age, it didn't go to his 
head (or his teeth).
     'He was never one of the lads,' according to his old friend, the theatre producer Patrick (Paddy) Wilson. Alan has no interest 
in the stereotypical male pursuits of pubs and sports, hence his vast number of close female friends.
     'New writing and politics are his life. He has no car, no interest in sport,' says Peter Barnes, although Alan watches 
Wimbledon out of loyalty to his tennis-coach brother Michael. 'He's interested in politics and the wider world,' says Stephen 
Poliakoff.
     All this may make him sound like the career woman's ideal consort, yet he surprisingly admits that he had to have male 
feminism knocked into him; he was once a primitive model.
     Now, surrounded by a seraglio that includes the actresses Juliet Stevenson and Harriet Walter, the comedienne Ruby Wax and the 
impresario Thelma Holt, he is everyone's theatrical agony uncle. 'He's got the widest circle of friends and acquaintances I have 
ever known,' says Peter Barnes. 'In the theatre, he unites opposites -because he knows so many people.'
     'The only person I know who has more friends than him is Simon Callow,' says Jenny Topper, Artistic Director of London's 
Hampstead Theatre and a friend of Alan's since 1981.
     'It feels nice to be around him. He has a very loyal group of female friends: not a harem, but very intense. Alan is very 
loyal, very protective and very kind. He has strong views. He listens: he has that concentration, hence the female friends. He's 
also very proper: he cares about fans at the stage door and those who seek his advice and support.
     "That gliding movement of his is almost balletic,' adds Jenny of the man who would be Fred Astaire. 'He's a great comic actor: 
the secret is timing. But his humour is very dry: he doesn't suffer fools gladly.'
     
15
     'I associate him with complete integrity,' says Harriet Walter. 'He is a central figure in a lot of people's lives. He's not a 
guru as such; I don't think of him as a saintly, priestly person. It's not all grovelling at the feet of the effigy. He just makes 
you laugh. He's like a good parent . . . there's a feeling that Alan won't let you get away with things.
     'He can be intimidating, though he doesn't realise how much. But there are precious few people whose judgement you trust, and 
he is one of them. I do argue with him; we don't always agree. He has pretty tough standards, but he's a very good listener. He 
takes you seriously, you feel encouraged.'
     'Actors are always being judged on their physical qualities, which makes them very vulnerable,' says Stephen Poliakoff. 'And 
Alan has big vulnerabilities.'
     This business gives you the impression you have to be a pretty boy and be successful before you're thirty in order to 
succeed,' says Royal Shakespeare Company head Adrian Noble. 'Alan Rickman was never a pretty boy and was not successful before he 
was thirty.
     'He never courted success, but his success now gives people hope in a society that adores youth in a rather sickening and 
dangerous fashion. Its very good news for those who are not the prettiest people in the world. It gives people hope, that Alan was 
a play-reader at a tiny Fringe theatre like the Bush and all those other things, before he became famous.
     'He has a good mug: that big nose. You need a big nose and big hands to be a good actor: look at Michael Gambon. And in the 
Green Room, Alan is always surrounded by women.'
     Ah, yes. One can't get away from the women in the Alan Rickman Factor. When he played a licentious Caesar in Peter Barnes' 
1983 radio play Actors, Rickman received more ardent letters from teenaged girls than for any of his other roles.
     However, it was the Vicomte de Valmont that first made his name on both sides of the Atlantic, establishing that 
all-important, crowd-pleasing quality of sexual danger.
     Lindsay Duncan, his co-conspirator in Les Liaisons Dangereuses, said wryly to Allison Pearson in the Independent on Sunday in 
1992: 'A lot of people left the theatre wanting to have sex, and most of them wanted to have it with Alan Rickman.' Of all the 
original RSC cast in Howard Davies' famous, much-travelled production, Rickman is the only one to have made it on the world stage. 
He was
     
16
     nominated for a Tony award, as was Lindsay; and it rankled heavily with Rickman when he lost the role in the 1988 film version 
Dangerous Liaisons to the younger (.and balder but heavily be-wigged) John Malkovich.
     Instead, the real turning-point for Rickman came when he was offered the role of the German terrorist leader Hans Gruber in 
the Hollywood big-budget thriller, Die Hard. Alan's (frightening degree of menace, allied to a fastidious humour, marked out a 
major stylist who outshone the film's star. Bruce Willis. Rickman became an international name overnight as a result of his 
first-ever movie, since when he has conducted a dangerous flirtation with screen villainy.
     He could see himself falling into the trap of being typecast and deliberates changed pace with a performance of tremendous 
warmth and sensitivity as the mischievous returning spirit of Juliet Stevenson's dead lover in Anthony Minghella's 1991 low-budget 
hit Truly Madly Deeply.
     It became Britain's answer to Ghost. And Rickman's wry, doomed romanticism in the role eventually led to his casting as 
Colonel Brandon in the highly successful. Oscar-winning Sense And Sensibility.
     Truly Madly Deeply offered the closest insights vet into the real Rickman, capturing that quality of benign boss mess which 
those who know him find both endearing and exasperating. Close friends confirm that he is indeed the character he plays in the 
movie. It established Rickman and Stevenson as one of the great screen partnerships, building on a friendship that began at the RSC 
in the company of Ruby Wax
     With her irregular but arresting looks, the jolie-laide Juliet could almost be Rickman's twin. They are brother and sister in 
socialism, vet brigadier's daughter Stevenson is a left-winger from the right side of the tracks. It says much for Rickman's 
panache, however, that he always seems just as classy as she.
     Rickman's next feature film was lose My Eyes, the story of an incestuous affair between a brother and a sister in which Alan 
took an uncharacteristically passive role as the heroine's cuckolded husband. Nevertheless, he still stole the show with an 
unforgettable combination of silent rage and vulnerability.
     He returned to Hollywood to add another rogue to his gallery. the Sheriff of Nottingham, in 1991's Robin Hood: Prince Of 
Thieves. Rickman says he tried to make him 'certifiable and funny,'in which
     
17
     enterprise he wildly succeeded. So hilariously flamboyant was he that the films star Kevin Costner reputedly played the 
villain in the editing-suite and chopped a number of Rickman's scenes to try to correct the inbalance between lead and support. 
This was the role chat established Rickman's 'dark and dirty' attraction for millions of otherwise respectable females. Rickman's 
occasional flashes of camp only add to the intrigue of his personality.
     Blanche Marvin, whose Hollywood producer daughter Niki acted in repertory theatre with Alan at Leicester back in 1975, 
describes Rickman as ' . . a very male man. So many men in the theatre are bisexual or homosexual, but Alan is intensely 
masculine".
     That feral charm and mesmeric hold over an audience marked him out for his role as Rasputin, an offer that had been hanging 
around in his life for a long time. His casting as the deranged monk with the malign influence over the last Tsarina of Russia once 
again attests to Alan Rickman's unique alchemy.
     'He has very strange looks, not necessarily what you would cast as the romantic lead,' admits Carlton TV's Jonathan Powell, 
one of the first to spot his screen potential. He looks like a magus, which is why he has often been suggested for Shakespeare's 
capricious magician Prospero: a complex, tormented man whose nature is divided between the malign and the benign.
     People talk of his so-called cold smoulder, his sharp features give him an alien look, despite the lush and passionate lips. 
At one stage, Steven Spielberg had him in mind to play the timelord Dr Who on American TV, but Rickman didn't want to be locked 
into a long-running series. He keeps his options wide open. Those spiky looks, however, plague him. He hates being judged on his 
appearance, arguing that an actor is a blank canvas on whom one ought to be able to paint a portrait of anyone. He himself is a 
living contradiction of that.
     He is the most individual of performers, quite unique and inimitable. No one can clone Alan Rickman; no one approaches his 
qualities. He is instantly recognisable, and there is a piece of himself up there on the screen every time.
     There is always an extra dimension to his characterisation that creates a mythic quality, like all the cinema greats, he has a 
very strong sense of sell. Rickman has long fought an inferiority complex: once upon a time, he seemed like a misunderstood misfit
     
18
     from a classic fairy-tale, an ugly duckling who has been transformed into an attractive man by the flukes of an extraordinary 
career. He was not easily marketable; and he was in despair at ever achieving lasting success. It was twenty years a-coming.
     As with all the best character actors, it took him time to grow into his face and learn his strengths. More than anything, 
maturity made a major star of Alan Rickman. The toy-boy syndrome among ladies of a certain age is much exaggerated. Grown women 
tend not to fall for pretty youths as a rule; they appreciate character and experience in a man.
     'In many ways, he's a European actor, 'observes director Jules Wright. And there is a French expression that sums up the 
paradoxical appeal of life's jolies-laides: I like a little vinegar in my salad.'
     Most assuredly. Alan Rickman is the astringent vinegar in the salad.
     
     
l. THE FAUSTIAN GIFT	19
     
     'He does have this power and charisma,' says playwright Stephen Davis one of Rickman's oldest friends. Alan, Rima and 
sometimes their friend Ruby Wax spend weekends with Stephen's family in Gloucestershire, a county where, according to Davis, the 
British class system is in its death throes. 'In Die Hard and Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves, he was acting the cosmos off the 
screen and Hollywood was opening a five-lane highway to him.
     The thing about actors is that they have a tremendous effect on people: Alan does in particular. He has an extra effect which 
he is aware of, but which he isn't always planning. He has a huge sexual charisma, but in real life he doesn't aim for that effect 
at all. This is what makes his personality so complex. It's a bit Faustian, cutting both ways.
     When you talk to him, you feel there are a lot of notional audiences in his mind. You never catch him off-guard. He always 
knows his lines. It's a very actorly quality. It's like being the friend of some of the characters he plays.
     'He is enigmatic, not least with his friends. Really, I should write a play about him. He's an important figure in the lives 
of all his friends, but one could do without the stardom bit. It would do him good to be less written about. When close friends 
become stars . . . All of us are leveraged on the amount of attention we get. And Alan can be contradictory, moody.
     'When he has problems, he broods. He was doing an extraordinary number of mundane tasks at the bottom of my garden once, 
digging and so on, while he brooded about something. If I had something on my mind, I would have told the entire village about it. 
But he internalises things while presenting this equanimity to the world. Ian Richardson shares that quality a little, too.
     'Alan dominates rehearsal rooms and productions: he's very critical, and he thinks very hard. There's a stormy element in 
self-absorption that becomes very critical. It's hard working with successful people. Alan is not necessarily   the kind of actor I 
ought to want to work with, because he defends the role of the actor. Actors have an illusory power in society, but they don't 
write their own lines. They are ventriloquists' dummies
     
20
     'I don't really understand the impulse to act. You are disappearing into another person, and yet you are exposing yourself. In 
a way, actors don't really exist.
     'By that, I don't mean that Alan is artificial - far from it,' Davis adds hurriedly. 'He has one of the most positive and 
strong presences I've ever met. But he doesn't really empathise with people who are off-balance: it's as if he's working from a 
script:
     Alan Rickman's 'script' began in 1946 with a busy New Year in the modest London suburb of Acton, then in the county of 
Middlesex. On 12 February, the local newspaper carried the story that a woman had hanged herself with a ventilator cord. A weapons 
amnesty for wartime firearms had also been announced: unlicensed pistols brought home as souvenirs by Forces personnel were to be 
presented to Acton Police Station by 31 March to avoid prosecution. The only other direct reminder of the recent world-wide 
conflict was a chilling report in the 1 March issue of the Eagling And Acton Gazelle on a talk that a girl survivor of a 
concentration camp had given to the Acton Business And Professional Women's Club. 'You do not know what a man is unless you see him 
with absolute power,' this pale, quietly-spoken wraith told the assorted good ladies in their tailored business suits, cut from 
wartime utility cloth. 'If he has absolute power and is kind: then he is a real man.'
     Couples were dancing to the sound of the Carroll Gibbons Blue Room Orchestra at Ealing Town Hall, and those who stayed at home 
grumbled that coal was rationed to 34 hundredweight for twelve months. Thieves had broken into a solicitor's house and stolen three 
suits plus a copy of Archibald's Criminal Pleading; and two builders were charged with an armed robbery of two Maltese seamen.
     In the weepie Tomorrow Is Forever at the East Acton Savoy Cinema. Orson Welles (of all people) was listed dead in the war but 
returned home with a new face to find his 'widow', Claudetle Colbert, had married again. Not that the romantics among picture-goers 
were completely ignored by the programme for the week beginning 18 February. Roy Rogers and Trigger - the horse that could do 
everything except wear a cowboy costume - shared top billing and a capacious nosebag in Don't Fence Me In.
     Prominent 'Keep Death Off The Roads" advertisements in the Gazette issued dire warnings about motorcar accidents, giving the 
impression that west London was full of road-hogs. And on 21
     
     
21
     February, Alan Sidney Patrick Rickman was born at home at 24, Lynton Road, Acton ... the second son for painter and decorator 
Bernard Rickman and his wife Margaret Doreen Rose, nee Bartlett.
     Their first boy, David Bernard John, had been born during the last year of the war while his father was working as an aircraft 
fitter.
     The family had rented a flat in an imposing red-brick Edwardian semi-detached house in a central Acton backwater, just one 
street away from the railway line. Alan's Irish father and Welsh mother belonged to what was once proudly known as the respectable 
working classes, steady workers with lower middle-class aspirations. Number 24 was a multi-occupied house: other rooms on the 
premises were rented by an elderly lady, Hester Messenbird, and by a married couple, Rupen and Violet Oliver. The Rickmans were 
always staunch Labour voters who put the red posters up in the window as soon as an election was announced.
     Alan has always felt influenced by a prominent radical Rickman from an earlier age: Thomas Paine's friend and biographer 
Thomas 'Clio' Rickman (1761-1834) who was a bookseller and reformer. He was the son of Quakers and was apprenticed with a doctor 
uncle to study the medical profession. At seventeen, he met the freethinker Thomas Paine who worked as an exciseman in Rickman's 
birthplace of Lewes, Sussex. They both joined the Headstrong Club, which met at the White Han Inn. Rickman's precocious taste for 
poetry and history earned him the sobriquet 'Clio', which became one of his pen names. Disowned by the Sussex Friends because of 
his friendship with Paine and his early marriage to a non-Quaker, he left Lewes and became a bookseller in London: first in 
Leadenhall Street and, later, at Upper Marylebone Street.
     Paine completed the second part of The Rights Of Man while lodging at Rickman's house. The two friends formed a circle of 
reformers with such eminent names as Mary Wollstonecraft and Home Tooke; Rickman sketched them all in his biography The life Of 
Paine, published in 1819. Frequently in hiding as a result of selling Paine's seditious books, he fled to Paris several times. The 
friends finally parted at Le Havre on 1 September 1802, when Paine sailed to America.
     A satirist from the age of fifteen and a composer of republican songs, Rickman's pieces often appeared in such weekly journals 
as
     
22
     The Black Dwarf whose title was revived by the counter-culture of the 60s. He died on 15 February 1834, and received a Quaker 
burial at Bunhill Fields. There is no evidence that Alan's family are direct descendants, but Thomas Rickman's reputation 
'resonated' (to use a favourite expression of Alan's) down the years and made Alan a searching, well-read child acutely aware of a 
radical world elsewhere. No one would ever be able to claim 'Forever Acton' as his epitaph.
     The working classes made him, but it was The Ruling Class that revolutionised Alan Rickman. He melodramatically told his old 
friend Peter Barnes that the latter's first hit play, later filmed in 1972 with Peter O'Toole as a mad aristocrat, had 'changed his 
life'.
     The Ruling Class was premiered in Nottingham in 1968 and quickly transferred to the West End, opening at London's Piccadilly 
Theatre. It was one of those rotten-state-of-the-nation plays that proved uncannily prophetic, with a peer of the realm 
accidentally killing himself by auto-erotic strangulation in the first scene. With its great leaps of logic, this flamboyant attack 
upon the British class system was also hugely, and ambitiously, entertaining. Peter aimed to create 'a comic theatre ... of 
opposites, where everything is simultaneously tragic and ridiculous'. Since he and Tom Stoppard both began writing plays around the 
same time, it is debatable who influenced whom. Both are great showmen, vaudevillians with serious things to say.
     Nearly three decades later, the Tory MP Stephen Milligan was found dead in similar circumstances; only then was the 
pleasurable purpose of this bizarre and dangerous practice duly explained to a bemused general public by the sexpetts of the 
popular Press. But Barnes' anti-Establishment audacity, at a time when few dared acknowledge the fact that hanged men get hard-ons, 
had deeply impressed the young Rickman in 1968. After all, it was only three years since capital punishment for murder had been 
abolished: although death by hanging has remained on the statute-books for piracy and, as critics of the late Princess Diana's 
former lover. James Hewitt, love to keep pointing out, for treason.
     Bernard and Margaret Rickman were to have two more children. Alan's younger brother, Michael Keith, arrived 21 months after 
Alan on 21 November 1947. The only daughter, Sheila, was born on 15 February 1950.
     Alan was later to describe himself as a 'dreamy' child, wrapped up in his own little world as he scribbled and doodled. David 
and
     
     
23
     Michael, too, had artistic leanings, with the same beautiful handwriting. 'Alan is a very talented water-colourist. He has 
this elegant, flowing, effordess calligraphy,' says Stephen Davis.
     He was the clever, petted one of the family, the future scholarship child, although Alan the egalitarian took pains to 
emphasise in a Guardian interview with Susie Mackenzie in 1998 that his parents had no favourites and treated them all equally. His 
slow way of speaking meant that he received more attention: his parents had to listen carefully to his every word. Alan was 
particularly fond of his father Bernard. Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuits, famously said: 'Give me the boy at the age of 
seven and 1 will give you the man.' Alan's confident masculinity and self-contained air of assurance were shaped by that early 
closeness with the saintly-sounding Bernard.
     When Alan was only eight and the youngest, Sheila, was just four, their father died of cancer. Alan subsequently talked of 
'the devastating sense of grief in the household; they were rehoused by the council and moved to an Acton estate to the west of 
Wormwood Scrubs Prison, where his mother struggled to bring up four children on her own by working for the Post Office.
     She married again briefly, but it lasted only three years. Clearly Bernard had been the love of her life, although Alan 
recalled the relationship between his Methodist Welsh mother and his Irish Catholic father had often been volatile: the clash of 
cultures would sometimes end in sounds of banging doors and weeping behind them. But, despite their lack of money and their cramped 
surroundings, the little family of six were happy.
     Everything changed with his father's death. 'His death was a huge thing to happen to four kids under ten,' he said, 
remembering how his headmaster had come into his class and spoken in an undertone to the teacher as they both turned to look at 
Alan - who already knew what they were going to say. He was being summoned home, where he was to be told that his terminally ill 
father had died. It was thought best that the children should not go to the funeral, but they were shocked afterwards by the sight 
of their mother, who loved colourful clothes, dressed all in black for the first time.
     In 2001, with the benefit of much hindsight into that ghastly time, he told interviewer Tim Sebastian on BBC News 24 that he 
had long since reached the conclusion that 'my mother was so distraught that she couldn't have coped with having her children
     
24
     there as well But it was a strange thing not lo he there. It's not explained to you.' he said, adding that, in those days, 
everyone unquestioningly believed in the 'ethic' that 'children should be seen and not heard'
     Alan has never forgotten the sense of loss that bereaved people have, of being 'deserted' by a dying parent it is a mixture of 
sorrow and resentment on the part of the person left behind to mourn; a child, in particular, cannot grasp the dread inevitability 
of a terminal illness and feels bewildered by its outcome. By never marrying Rima, despite their long-term relationship, Alan 
instinctively protects himself against the possibility of loss or betrayal. The same goes for his position as a 'guru' to his many 
friends. It empowers him to be seen as someone who doesn't need conventional props, who generously gives but rarely requires 
anything in return. It was a power, a privilege that he never had as a poor child. He rarely lets people get too close; otherwise 
panic sets in.
     Bernard's untimely death also thrust the family into an alien environment. Alan hated the stigma of growing up in what he 
perceived to be a working-class ghetto, particularly when he won his scholarship; homogeneous local-authority architecture was 
instantly recognisable as cheap mass public housing.
     There was far more anonymity, and therefore more scope for an aspiring child's imagination, in a privately rented flat in 
Lynton Road, where you could always pretend you owned the entire house. Years later. Alan shuddered to his friends about the 
awfulness of growing up on - whisper who dares - a council estate It is a strange kind of snobbery, perhaps peculiar to Britain 
because of its obsession with home-ownership. I remember feeling the same way when my mother and I were finally assigned a chilly 
but functional flat on a spartan council estate after we had lived happily for twelve years in my aunt and uncle's bathroomless, 
terraced Victorian house, a cosy slum by any other name. There was far more character in the latter, despite the lack of mod cons. 
but council estates seemed to mark you out in some way as a loser. They were not designed for the enrichment of the working 
classes; it was thought sufficient that their lives were enhanced by having a bathroom and an inside lavatory.
     Alan's mother Margaret had always been a strong character. spiritually connected to those indomitable matriarchs that feature 
in Sean O'Casey's slum-life plays. Working-class families tend to
     
25
     be verbally and physically undemonstrative; you get on with life, you don't agonise about it. What's the use of talk? It 
doesn't get you anywhere. She carried on grimly.
     The passive-aggressive type is one who digs his heels in, who wants things his own way, but not in a loud way. Very often 
there has been an early battle in childhood, but he rebels quietly. He smiles on the surface but won't comply. His mother is always 
a matriarchal figure. There is also an inherent narcissism, which is certainly true of Alan. It's not just in the way he always 
wears his enviably thick, lustrous hair slightly long, but also in wanting to be the wise man at the centre of a group. Alan was 
very influenced by Margaret's will to survive at all costs. His later role as an adviser to a wide circle of friends is based upon 
holding the balance of power, just as he saw his mother do. In effect, he became both parent and teacher following the example of 
his mother and his influential Latymer Upper teacher and mentor, Colin Turner.
     Until her death in 1997, Margaret Rickman lived in the same modest house that she had made her own with replacement windows 
and a smart new fence around the front garden. Under the Tories' 'Right To Buy' policy, she and her youngest son, Michael, jointly 
purchased the council property after years of renting. The novelist, Peter Ackroyd, was brought up not far away in a street with 
the Anglo-Saxon name of Wulfstan and proudly claims that Wormwood Scrubs cast a longer shadow over his beloved childhood home. But 
then Ackroyd always did revel in the macabre. In one of those cheek-by-jowl arrangements between very different neighbourhoods in 
which London specialises, Alan was based only a few miles away from his mother.
     Alan visited his mother regularly until the very end, particularly when her health first began to decline in 1995; he once 
turned up at an RSC Christmas party at the then Artistic Director Adrian Noble's house in north London, with some of Margaret's 
mince pies in Tupperware boxes. She had pressed them upon him at the end of his visit, not letting him go until he had taken 
something home with him 'to keep him going'. It's a very working-class thing: providing hospitality even for passing guests who 
stay five minutes, let alone your own grown-up children, is a huge matter of pride with working-class matriarchs.
     Rickman himself told Mackenzie that his mother was as fiercely protective of her children as a tigress; similarly, his 
brothers and
     
26
     sister have had nothing but 'the fiercest pride' for the famous member of the family - 'and I for them'. His mother, he said, 
'was incredibly talented herself; she would have had a career as a singer in another world.' Which is why he took her to see the 
Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Phantom of the Opera for her 80th birthday, with a party afterwards that Margaret entered 'like the 
star she was I've never seen anyone enter a room like that,' he added

     'He doesn't hide his family,' Stephen Davis told me a few years before Margaret Rickman's death. 'His mother is a real 
matriarch, and he takes a lot of care with her. Strength of character is genetic, Alan tells funny stories about her sometimes.' 
Yet another friend says that Rima feels Alan has never quite come to terms with his working-class background. Way over to the east 
of the 'Scrubs', Rima's outside interests - her work as a grass-roots local politician enables her to keep close to the people in 
the way that an actor can do only through his fans - have included the governorship of Barlby School and North Kensington Community 
Centre.
     Alan's younger brother, Michael, is also a west Londoner; and his older brother David lives in nearby Hertfordshire. The vast 
majority of actors come from comfortable, impeccably bourgeois backgrounds, and Alan is all too aware that he came from tougher 
roots. When he goes back to them, he takes care not to flaunt his lifestyle.
     Peter Barnes says he saw a lot of his own mother (who died in 1981) in Margaret Rickman. 'Alan and 1 came from the same 
background; both of us weren't in a position to buy property until quite late. Writing is as precarious as acting, and I had been 
struggling for twenty years until I made my name in Hollywood.
     'I was born at Bow, so I'm an authentic Cockney. I recognised my mother in Alan's mother. My mother remarked at the first 
night of The Ruling Class, my first big success, that I could have gone into the Civil Service instead . . .
     'It was a struggle for Alan and me to go off at a tangent and be artistic. In fact, I had even passed the local government 
exams for the Civil Service, just to please my mother.
     'She was widowed too, and I was so taken with the comparison with Alan's mother. I met Mrs Rickman at the Die Hard premiere: 
when I said how marvellous Alan was in the role, she just said, 'Yes, yes, he's very good". It was as if something was niggling 
her. ;he wasn't quite comfortable with it.
     
27
     They are terrified of boasting about their children's achievements, as if people might accuse them of showing off and aiming 
above their station in life. So they go to the other extreme Alan sent his mother on a winter cruise: her comments mirrored my 
mother's when I sent her to Gibraltar. Never grateful - grudging comments, finding fault with the food. But still proud of her son 
in a reserved sort of way. She wouldn't like to make a show of things.'
     It reminds me, too, of my own mother's reaction when I told her that I wanted to go to university. 'You're aiming above your 
station,' she said, automatically reaching for the hand-me-down phrase. And she was very uneasy with the cruise 1 sent her on, too! 
The working classes take years to shake off the serf mentality, the hopeless feeling that some things are just not for the likes of 
them. Alan Rickman's mother knew he was remarkable in many ways: he was her Alan, but he was also his own person to an almost aloof 
degree. He had to cultivate that sense of separateness and be quite ruthless about going his own way, or he would never have 
succeeded.
     He certainly schooled her from the beginning of his acting career in how to talk to the Press; Alan, nervous about coming from 
the 'wrong background to such a middle-class environment, was very concerned about saying the correct thing. An early cutting from 
the Acton Gazette of 26 May 1977 features a studio portrait of a fresh-faced Rickman and a careful quote from his mother. 'He was 
always keen on acting and even at school achieved recognition,' she told the Gazette almost primly. Clearly not one to gush about 
her boy, who was on tour at the time.
     Mr Rickman has not been lured into television yet, preferring to tread the boards in repertory where he gets an immediate 
audience response to his performances,' concluded the anonymous reporter, having been fobbed off with a standard response by both 
Alan and his mother. It was the kind of routine guff they teach you in your final term at drama school
     'My mother would come out with all sorts of bigotry against unions and strikes and foreigners on the TV. and then go out and 
vote Labour. She wouldn't think twice about it. She wouldn't see any contradiction in that,' says Peter Barnes
     'I do think that Alan still has a working-class view of life in a way,’ he adds. 'He was round to dinner one night, and my 
wife was
     
     
28
     nagging me at the dinner-table about my eating and my weight Alan said, "I would never let Rima speak to me like that." He 
said it in front of my wife, which I thought was a bit reactionary. It's very working-class.
     'He said that his mother was like mine, would sit in front of the TV' set and say that British workers never do any work, it's 
the unions . . . and then she would go out and vote Labour after all this bigoted, reactionary, right-wing nonsense. Working-class 
prejudices linger on.
     'I would just say to mine, "Shut up, mother ..."' adds Peter fondly, finding it all rather amusing and touching.
     It took Alan years before he sheepishly admitted to The Times magazine on 12 March 1994: 'I've had feminism knocked into me, 
and a jolly good thing too . . .' Margaret was a very strong role-model for the female sex; and he became very close to her. As a 
result, he has always been relaxed around women.
     Alan also had another lucky start in life that money couldn't buy, since his local state infants' school just happened to be 
the only purpose-built Montessori school in Britain.
     Officially opened in 1937, the building was designed on open-air lines with each classroom leading to a glass-roofed verandah. 
It followed the pioneering principles of the Italian educationalist, Dr Maria Montessori, in encouraging each child to learn and 
develop at its own individual rate with 'instructive play'.
     To the traditional curriculum of the three Rs were added such social skills as self-expression - vital for a future actor - 
charity work and consideration for others plus classes in music, movement and dance, singing, craft, art, cookery, gardening, 
nature study and basic science, poetry and physical education.
     At the age of four and a half, on 13 September 1950. Alan enrolled at what is now West Acton First School in nearby Noel Road. 
Play areas were dotted with flower gardens on a five-acre site.
     The school served the new residential roads near Western Avenue plus the adjacent garden estate that had been built between 
the wars by the then Great Western Railway Company to house its workers.
     In 1995 I went to meet the headmistress Wendy Dixon, who called the first school'. . . the seed-bed, which biographers so 
often ignore.
     
29
     'Alan had a big advantage at the very beginning in going to a Montessori school, because visitors came from all over the world 
to monitor its progress. So children would always be presenting themselves in front of an audience,' she explained. They were 
making history all the time: they would have become quite sophisticated. You can always recognise a Montessori-educated adult: they 
have inquiring minds and a sense of wonder. They're not just chalked and talked like the rest.'
     The Montessori method gives a precociousness,' agrees the playwright Robert Holman, another of Rickman's long-standing 
friends. And Alan was a very precocious child.
     His first acting experience came with The Story of Christmas on 12 December 1951, a short Nativity play and carol service 'for 
the mothers' as the school diary notes. Fathers were not invited; this was an afternoon performance when the men were deemed to be 
at work. Two years later, he first felt what he was to describe as the acting 'sensation' when he starred in the school play King 
Grizzly Bear (eat your heart out, Sheriff of Nottingham). At the age of seven, Alan Rickman had already made the crucial discovery 
that he could dominate an audience.
     With low-ceilinged classrooms giving an inspirational view of the sky, plenty of fresh air in outdoor activities and the 
beginning of what is now known as 'child-centred education', this was a creative hothouse far removed from the high-ceilinged, 
daunting Victorian schoolhouse tradition that was still the norm across the country.
     One very large window that reached to the floor enabled Alan and his classmates to step over the sill and straight into one of 
several playgrounds. There were no barriers to the outside world in this enlightened child-friendly environment that encouraged 
pupils to feel in control of their lives. Or, as Dr Montessori wrote: 'Education must be a help to life . . . and at this period of 
growth (3-5 years) should be based on the principle of freely chosen activity in a specially prepared environment.'
     Rickman's future partner, Rima Horton, was to be equally fortunate in the early years. She went to an old-fashioned dame 
school, St Vincent's in Holland Park Avenue, which was run by an enlightened mother and daughter team, Mrs Reid and Mrs Bromley. 
Despite its name - St Vincent de Paul was the revered 'people's priest' who founded the charitable Orders of the Dazarists and the 
Sisters of Charity - it was not a Catholic school.
     
30
     An old classmate remembers Rima as 'a very bright kid. a clever girl. She was the elfin type, petite but feisty. My mother 
said. "What a pretty little girl she is." There were only 40 in the school. It was very strict, with very good teaching - we would 
parse sentences and read Shakespeare from an early age, or there would be a rap over the knuckles.
     'Mrs Reid and Mrs Bromley were incredibly intellectual women We were all protected from the outside world in that school; it 
was a haven. It was co-educational, but they cared a lot about girls being educated to the same level as boys.
     'It was fee-paying, but not terribly expensive. A lot of the parents were struggling actors or musicians. I wouldn't be at all 
surprised if Mrs Bromley had allowed some of them to postpone payment if they got into difficulties.
     They took on children they liked; and they liked real characters. Rima was always a character. We did a lot of theatre; 1 
remember a production of Dick Whittington at the Mercury Theatre in Notting Hill Gate.
     'Children were allowed to speak for themselves, and Rima always did that. We were brought up to be clever. The school really 
stood us in good stead. We were encouraged to be independent Rima and I and a small pack would roam the streets at lunch-time we 
had one fight with a posh primary school in Holland Park when the kids were making fun of our red blazers. We punched them in the 
playground; I remember it was snowing in the park.
     'I was delighted to hear about Alan years later; they make a good couple. He's got to be the ultimate grown-up crumpet. 1 
don't mind that his teeth aren't perfect, there's something so magnetic about him. He's just a fascinating man, he seems so warm 
and clever. You feel he's going to be fun. He's divine with children, they adore him.'
     In  1953, at the age of seven, the future grown-up crumpet automatically transferred from West Acton to Denventwater Junior 
School. There he won a scholarship in 1957 to the boys' independent day school Latymer Upper, the Alma Mater of fellow actors Hugh 
Grant, Mel Smith, Christopher and Dominic Guard and breakfast TV' doctor. Hillary Jones, exposed as a two-timer by the tabloids. 
Old Latymerians are never dull.
     Alan was born with the distinctive 'Syrup of Figs' drawl, as one friend calls it, but the emollient private-school accent was 
created
     
31
     at Latymer Upper in Hammersmith's King Street. The process of detachment from his past had begun.
     The first school established by the Latymer Foundation of 1624 was in Fulham churchyard. In 1648 it moved to Hammersmith, but 
a new school was built in 1863. On the present site, the warm red nineteenth-century brick and the gables give Latymer a 
cloistered, rarefied atmosphere that comes as a welcome relief from the traffic of the highly commercial King Street.
     Concerts take place in a long vaulted hall with stained-glass windows. Tranquil lawns lead via the adjacent prep school to the 
River Thames: in 1957, a child from a council estate must have felt as if he were entering the rarefied realms of the Hanging 
Gardens of Babylon.
     The school has its own boathouse on the tideway, giving direct river access. In the summer months, outdoor life revolves 
around cricket, athletics, rowing and tennis.
     The public floggings that one pre-war pupil, John Prebble., remembers had long been abolished. Each boy was assigned a 
personal tutor, responsible for his development and general welfare. With someone watching over him, Latymer Upper was to be an 
academic and dramatic Arcadia for the young Alan Rickman.
     Here was a chance to put into practice - and how - the latent exhibitionism that was a vital component in the makeup of ever}' 
passive-aggressive personality. The word latent' is the key to Alan's equivocal attitude towards the Press.
     A perfectionist such as Rickman still resents the way in which, because of the ephemeral nature of live theatre, stage 
performances are immortalised only in reviews. The actor may be refining his technique night after night, but the notices have 
already set the show in aspic. He has always been touchy about critics because of their markedly mixed reactions to his voice; his 
hostility to the Press can be traced back to the paranoia of those early years when he was reinventing himself in the image of the 
silky-sounding matinee idol of his childhood. He was always anxious not to seem common; instead he became famously uncommon.
     Laurence Olivier once said that all actors are masochistic exhibitionists. More masochistic than exhibitionist, Kenneth 
Branagh once mumbled humorously to me; but the oxymoron applies to Alan Rickman in particular.
     Although he grew tall in his teens, he was to prove particularly good at female roles in Latymer productions because of his 
vocal
     
32
     musicality, a certain gracefulness and a chameleonic quality. Such transformations gave him the chance to escape completely 
into another world where he was no longer a poor kid who had to apply for a grant to buy his school uniform. The dressing-up box 
was his new kingdom. He could be whoever he wanted to be.
     He was highly intelligent and academic enough to have earned his place at the school; but it was his supreme acting ability 
that was to give him the edge at Latymer Upper.
     
     
2. THE SURROGATE FATHER	33
     
     On the last Saturday in January, 1990, a 55-year-old schoolmaster called Colin Turner was killed in a freak accident on a 
visit to friends. Colin had been hoping to retire to Stratford-upon-Avon five years later in 1995, looking forward to indulging his 
passion for Shakespearean research. He was walking down a flight of stairs in a block of flats in Stamford Court, Hammersmith, when 
he suddenly tripped and fell headlong, breaking his neck on the railings at the bottom of the stairs. Colin was rushed to the 
nearby Charing Cross Hospital; but he had died almost instantaneously.
     'Oddly enough,' says Colin's close friend Edward Ted1 Stead, sadly recalling a bizarre detail, 'the bottle of wine he was 
carrying was quite undamaged.'
     Wilf Sharp, then the Head of English at Latymer Upper School, was informed of his colleague's fate the next morning on Sunday, 
28 January. At first he couldn't quite believe it; he had only just received a letter from Colin the previous day.
     The correspondence was about Colin's attendance at the funeral of their mutual friend, the painter Ruskin Spear, who had lived 
a few doors away from Colin in Hammersmith's British Grove.
     There was to be a similar tragedy five years later on New Year's Eve, 1995, for a former Latymer Upper master who had lived in 
the same apartment block as Colin. Retired English teacher Jim McCabe died of a brain haemorrhage after falling and hitting his 
head on a stationary car in the car park. Alan Rickman attended his requiem mass at the end of January 1996 and later went back to 
the school to talk over old times.
     When he had heard the news about Colin Turner's fatal accident, it was particularly devastating for Alan. Colin had been his 
mentor at Latymer Upper, joining the school at the same time as the then fatherless, 11-year-old Alan. Turner was 23. An English 
teacher at Latymer for the next 33 years, he would become Head of Middle School.
     As a bachelor, Colin had treated his career as a vocation in the Chips tradition. An Old Latymerian himself, he was a
     
34
     flamboyant and idiosyncratic actor and director in the school's Gild Drama Club. He had hoped to make a career in the 
professional theatre, but eventually trained as a teacher after National Service in the RAF and returned to his beloved Latymer.
     The school was staffed with frustrated actors,' remembers the writer, critic and broadcaster Robert Cushman, a pupil at the 
school in Alan's day.
     It was overwhelmingly non-tee-paying in my time,' adds Cushman, who left two years before Alan in 1962 but acted alongside him 
in Gild productions. The school was not class-ridden at all. It was a good time, the beginning of the 60s. It was almost like doing 
weekly rep, with a major show every term. The Gild met every week except in the summer exam term, and there was a great sense of 
comedy in the school. It was a fun place to be. A whole bunch of bachelor teachers bought us drinks when we were under age; in the 
Gild, we all felt like their equals.
     'Colin Turner was a matinee-idol type, very good-looking with a light tenor voice. He was very tall - I remember him playing 
Sir Andrew Aguecheek in Twelfth Night when someone else dropped out.'
     Opera fan Colin was just as likely to step into a skirt and send himself up as to play in straight drama. Among his most 
memorable roles at Latymer Upper were the sad schoolmaster and cuckold Crocker Harris in Rattigan's The Browning Version, the 
foul-mouthed fishwife Martha in Albee's Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf ? and an outrageous succession of pantomine Dame parts, such 
as Sarah the Cook and Dame Trot.
     A big and imposing man with an irrepressible sense of humour, he modelled his female roles on his favourite aunt, surrogate 
mother and holiday companion, Mrs Elsie Laws. Shades of Travels With My Aunt, indeed.
     In The Latymerian magazine of Spring/Summer 1990, Ted Stead's tribute to Colin remembered '. . . the little touches which many 
people haven't time for ... his gifts, a kind word, a joke, a glass of sherry, an arm round the shoulder, a present - often a 
flower, or even when needed, a sharp word of reality to cure self-pity and indulgence. There was always a welcome in his home and 
his hospitality through his parties brought together his wide circle of friends on Twelfth Night and on his birthday, when he 
sometimes ruefully counted the years but did not grow old.' Colin had the
     
35
     born schoolteacher's ability to seem as youthful in his enthusiasms as his pupils, hence his empathy with his boys.
     It was Colin Turner who discovered the gawky young Alan Rickman, for whom he clearly felt a paternal concern. In later years 
he would also develop the talent of Melvyn 'Mel' Smith, Hugh Grant, Christopher Guard plus his brother Dominic and even a future 
Miss Moneypenny: actress Samantha Bond from Latymer's sister school Godolphin. Samantha's journalist brother Matthew, also one of 
his pupils, was later to write a tribute to Colin in The Times Diary on what would have been the occasion of his 60th birthday.
     There was a good creative buzz around the place, and Colin was at the centre of it. He was one of the great characters of the 
school. Colin was a great mentor to lots of people: he had a real eye for talent,' says Mail On Sunday film critic Matthew, an 
exact contemporary of Hugh Grant at Latymer Upper in the 70s. 'When you think of it, Colin had an amazing strike record for a drama 
teacher. It's sad that some of his former pupils only became great successes after his death; but Colin was interested in the 
progress of the journeymen actors as well.
     'At 6 ft 6 in, it would have been difficult for him to be a professional actor. He was a very imposing pantomine dame; he took 
it very seriously and was good at it. He didn't mind being ridiculed in drag at the panto, but he had tremendous authority back in 
the classroom.
     'I rather rebelled against acting because of my family,' explains Matthew, son of the actor Philip Bond. 'I did science 
A-Levels and Colin teased me about it. So I tended not to act much: 1 was the one who got away. It was the Arties versus the 
Hearties at Latymer, and I was somewhere in between.
     'My career as a schoolboy actor reached its peak in The Italian Straw Hat when I played an elderly Italian gentleman; but I 
wore yellow dresses in the school Jantaculum with the best of them, Hugh Grant included.' The future pop star Sophie Ellis-Bextor 
and the actress Kate Beckinsale were among the Godolphin girls appearing in co-productions with Latymer. As Matthew recalls: They 
did allow girls in later to play female roles ... but then they decided to ban the girls after some very unGarrick Club behaviour.' 
Despite that behavioural blip, girls have since been admitted to Latymer Upper's sixth form, with the eventual plan that the school 
will go fully co-educational.
     
36
     From 1957-1964, when Alan attended the school, Colin inevitably became something of a father figure to him even with only 
twelve years' difference between them. Alan's bravura style and even the development of his unique voice can be attributed to him.
     'It struck me that Colin's basic manner was not dissimilar to Alan's; both possessed this wonderful voice and presence. When 
you see Alan, there are echoes of Colin, because he is a mannered actor,' adds Matthew. 'But it might have worked both ways; it 
might have been Colin who adopted Alan's style, because he would have had great admiration for someone with such a natural actor's 
voice. The actor Simon Kunz has a great voice too, and he became another protege of Colin's at Latymer; Colin must have thought 
that Simon would be another Alan Rickman.'
     'Alan was very close to Colin, who really guided him,' remembers Ted Stead. 'Colin was one of my closest friends, and we were 
both invited to Alan's 21st birthday party as his friends. It's very unusual to invite your old teachers to your 21st, but he did.' 
Their former pupil even continued to act alongside Colin and Ted for several years after Alan had left Latymer Upper for Chelsea 
College of Art.
     Alan and his new girlfriend Rima met up with Colin and Ted again in the Court Drama Group at a London County Council Evening 
Institute off the Huston Road, where Wilf Sharp and his wife Miriam ('Mim') were instructors in their spare time.
     Wilf and Mim's daughter, Jane, played Juliet to Alan's Romeo in this amateur dramatics group, with Colin Turner as Mercutio 
and Mim directing. It was Latymer Revisited with females.
     Alan himself recalls Latymer Upper in the 1960s as an exhilarating mini National Theatre, with teachers fighting pupils for 
the best roles. It was a glamorous sanctuary from the drab reality of poverty.
     A former classmate of Alan's recalls that 80 per cent of the boys in Rickman's day were from a working-class background. 'They 
took the cream of the 11-plus from all over London. I came from a middle-class background, and I almost felt like the odd boy out. 
Most of the intake was from the C-D social groups: academically it was highly selective, but the social mix was like a 
comprehensive. It's a great pity that the direct-grant system has finished there.
     The school's motto is Pavilatim Ergo Certe (Slowly But Surely), which could sum up Rickman's slow-burn career. Founded in
     
37
     1624 by the terms of lawyer Edward Latymer's will, it aimed to give a first-class education to able boys from all backgrounds.
     Latymer worked in the livery courts. The income from the childless Latymer's rents in the hamlet of Hammersmith was bequeathed 
to the founding of a charity under which eight poor local boys were to be put 'to some petty school' to be taught English and 'some 
part of God's true religion' so that they could be kept 'from idle and vagrant courses'. The 1572 Vagabonds Act had deemed all 
unlicensed 'Common Players' to be 'rogues, vagabonds and sturdy beggars', no better than vagrants. One wonders just what the devout 
Latymer would have made of the famous thespians that emerged from his school.
     Despite a certain working-class diffidence, Rickman's dramatic abilities were very obvious from the beginning. He was a 
regular performer in school plays as a member of the Gild Drama Club, held every Friday night.
     The Gild was set up in the 1920s as a senior dramatic society, based upon the medieval trade guilds (spelt gilds). It was open 
to fifth and sixth-formers plus masters, with girls from Godolphin eventually playing female roles, though not in Alan's day.
     The idea, very radical for its time, was to create 'Jantaculum' musical revues in which pupils and masters could compete as 
equals. Rickman's self-possession, interpreted by some as arrogance, stemmed from that terrific egalitarian start in life when boys 
were taught to take on the world. It almost goes without saying that, with that voice and that presence, he made an imposing 
prefect at the age of eighteen. Nearly four decades later, another Old Latymerian called John Byer, a teacher now for more than 
three decades, swears that the secret of Rickman's 'wonderful portrayal of the wicked Sheriff of Nottingham was the practice he had 
as my class prefect when I was in the fourth form!' As a poor boy from the wrong side of the tracks, Alan was self-conscious enough 
as a prefect to assume that aloofness conferred authority, as so many sixth-formers 'dressed in a little brief authority' tend to 
do. Tobacco helped the nerves, and Rickman puffed away at the ciggies as much as anyone. Byer recalls how 'Alan's fingers were 
nicotine-stained; smoking was de rigueur at Latymer then and it was allowed in the prefects' room. Although he treated me like dm,' 
he adds good-humouredly, ò think we were probably pretty awful - and it was what we expected!'
     
38
     Latymer was a direct-grant school in 1957, with competitive entry by exam. "You won a place here on merit,' says Nigel Orton, 
the school's former deputy head who went on to run the Old Latymerian Office that keeps in touch with former pupils. 'Most of the 
boys were on scholarship, because Latymer has always been renowned for taking boys from humble or lower middle-class backgrounds. 
The school is still selective, but the direct grant finished in 1976 and we became fee-paying - though the bursary-scheme takes 
care of boys from poor backgrounds.
     'When the Government started an assisted-places scheme in the early 80s, we bought into this in a big way. It's a totally 
academic, selective school.'
     Alan made a memorably precocious Latymer acting debut at the age of eleven as Volumnia, the overbearing and bellicose mamma of 
Shakespeare's Coriolanus. Later, he became a Gild committee-member, or Curianus, in the quaint Latymer parlance.
     He was also Chamberlayne, the title given to the boy in charge of Wardrobe. The intricacies of costume design fascinated 
Rick-man, whose talents as an artist were already obvious. The library still holds Curianus Rickman's own flamboyant signed cartoon 
of himself, heavily padded as Sir Epicure Mammon with a conical hat perched on his sharp Mod haircut for a production of Ben 
Jonson's The Alchemist, in the spring of 1964, Alan's final year in the Sixth Form.
     Not that Rickman was remotely the kind of teenaged weekend Mod who scootered down to the seaside for a ritual fight with 
greasy Rockers. The fastidious young scholarship boy was cosseted by academic privilege, and hated growing up on a 
rough-and-ready-council estate. According to one friend, he still remains sensitive about the experience because acting is 
overwhelmingly a middle-class profession, even more so now that many drama grants from cash-strapped local authorities have dried 
up.
     At Latymer. Alan could escape into a charmed life. Brian Worthington, a master from Dulwich College's English department, was 
a guest reviewer of The Alchemist for the school magazine. The Latymerian. He wrote: 'Sir Epicure Mammon's costume, though well 
designed, was made of a thin, meagre-looking material, quite wrong for the character. This grandiose and greedy sensualist should 
surely look as splendid as his verse sounds.
     
39
     'Nevertheless Alan Rickman's performance compensated for this and his curious "mod" hairstyle. A lazy and smug drawl, affected 
movements and lucid, well-pointed verse-speaking succeeded well for this avaricious yet perversely sensitive booby. He knew how to 
throw away a line and deliver the famous speech — "I'll have all my beds blown up, not stuff’d, down is too hard" — without any 
indulgence in the voice, beautifully.'
     The previous year, Alan played the female role of Grusha in Brecht's The Caucasian Chalk Circle, which was his first 
introduction to left-wing agit prop or agitational propaganda. 'He read with assurance, sympathy and complete absence of 
embarrassment,' noted Ted Stead, the director of the production, in The Latymerian. Unfortunately, Alan fell ill and had to be 
replaced in the second half. He received his first dodgy notice when the late Leonard Sachs - who made his name as the deliriously 
alliterative Master of Ceremonies in the television variety series The Good Old Days and whose son, Robin, was a Latymer Upper 
pupil - seemed to find Alan just a little too precocious.
     In a Latymerian review of a 1963 production of The Knight Of The Burning Pestle, Sachs had a somewhat equivocal response to 
Rickman's 'just too arch Humphrey'. Judging by the adjacent photograph, the foppish, confident-looking Rickman must have been 
hilarious.
     'I used to bump into Alan on the Tube because we lived quite close to each other,' recalls Robert Cushman. Then I suddenly 
became aware of him as an actor in the Gild in 1962 when I played Sergeant Musgrave in a rehearsed reading of John Arden's Serjeant 
Musgrave's Dance and Alan played Annie the barmaid. He played her as a bedraggled slut, and there was amazing depth, tragedy and 
irony in his performance. I have this image of him cradling a dead body.
     'He was a charismatic character at school: there was that voice and that authority. I don't know that I would necessarily have 
prophesied stardom for him. His individuality was always going to stand him in good stead, though.'
     At the Speech and Musical Festival of 1964,  Rickman was commended for having '. . . with studied nonchalance extracted every 
ounce of biting satire from Peacock's Portrait of Scythrop' He's been studying nonchalance ever since. And as Grikos in Cloud Over 
The Morning, he won the award at Hammersmith Drama
     
40
     Festival that same year for the best individual performance. The rap over the knuckles from Sachs had done him no harm.
     'I first met Alan when I joined the school in 1962 and he was in the Lower Sixth.' says Stead, a Cambridge contemporary of 
David Frost. Corin Redgrave, Margaret Drabble and Derek Jacobi. Ted. who went on to teach at Gravesend Grammar School for Boys, 
gave Trevor Nunn his first acting job in Dylan Thomas's Return Journey when they were both up at Downing College.
     Above all, Stead remembers Rickman's confidence, with an ability to camp things up as a schoolboy drag queen that nearly gave 
the Head of the time a fit of puritanical apoplexy.
     'Alan was in the political panto Alt Baba And The Seven Dwarfs. He played the sixth wife of All Baba and one of his lines was 
censored by the headmaster, who was a northern Methodist and insisted it be cut from a family show.
     'It was a line about Alan being the Saturday wife, since Ali Baba had one for every day of the week. Alan had to say "fat or 
thin, nearly bare, he doesn't care" of Ali Baba's taste in women. And he wore a diaphanous costume in a very flamboyant way, quite 
confidently.'
     Robert Cushman reviewed that production for the spring issue of The Latymcrian in 1963. "Spy stories were very much in vogue 
then, and this was a riotously involved spy-spoof sketch. Alan infiltrated the sultan's harem as a spy, disguised as one of his 
wives,' he remembers.
     A review in The Latymerian school magazine for Winter 1962 records that Alan took the role of 'a sultry spy from Roedean - a 
sort of do-it-yourself (Eartha) Kin - played with a vocal edge that enabled him to bring the house down with a monosyllable.' That 
sounds like the Alan Rickman we all know.
     'He was always laconic, wonderful at ensemble playing and tremendously popular with boys and staff. One could see he had 
tremendous talent,' adds Ted Stead.
     'When he did The Alchemist in the Upper Sixth, it ran for over three hours. A schoolboy Alchemist is a recipe for disaster, 
but Alan had this panache in the role of Sir Epicure Mammon. He was very imposing indeed, but he didn't upset the ensemble. He was 
a very good verse-speaker even in 1964. Jonson is almost intractable, but he managed it.
     'He always had a wonderful barbed wit, but it was never unkind. There was always a twinkle in his eyes; he never meant to hurt 
people. Really, he was a very reliable model pupil.
     
41
     'Latymer was a very competitive school, and Alan wasn't a leader. He was just somebody who was popular, made people laugh. But 
he was university material, no question of it. In fact. Alan would have made a good teacher.
     'But at that stage, an was his chosen career. He was so clear that he was going to Chelsea College of An, so we didn't think 
of him in the theatre at that stage. The voice was there when I first met him: it made him unique.'
     Chris Hammond, a chemistry teacher and the current Head of Middle School, came to Latymer Upper in 1966 two years after Alan 
had left with a mighty reputation. In Latymer terms, he was a household name because of his performances in the Jantaculum. He 
brought the house down; the audiences cried with laughter.
     The Gild doesn't really exist now in the old way. There are drama productions, but not with the staff and pupils acting 
together. There are no more Jantaculum cabarets: they called them light entertainments in those days. There's a new view that we 
ought to be doing proper drama. The great cabaret tradition is no longer there.
     'When Alan came back to the school after Jim McCabe's requiem mass, he said that satire was very difficult these days. That's 
why the satire has gone from the Gild. Because it's all been done before, satire would border on the obscene these days. It has 
taken off in a strange direction.'
     The school still displays a photograph of Rickman in a 1962 production, alongside examples of the early thespian endeavours of 
rugby captain Mel Smith and cricketer Hugh Grant, all looking absurdly plump-cheeked and misleadingly cherubic. For as Robert 
Cushman recalls, There was so much jealousy and competitiveness over theatre. I remember one contemporary, Michael Newby, who went 
on to York University. He was a marvellous natural actor, but he became very disillusioned.'
     Newby figured in that Ali Baba And The Seven Dwarfs review from the Winter of 1962: This was a spy story, vaguely 
post-Fleming, and was handled with his customary skill and incisive-ness by Michael Newby as a deadpan James Bond. His crisp timing 
did a great deal to hold the story together and he was given two excellent foils: John Ray, possibly the most original comic 
personality the Gild possesses, was marvellously funny in an all-too-brief appearance as a cringing British agent; Alan Rickman . . 
.' You know the rest.
     
42
     Cushman. now based in Canada, has stayed friends with Rickman ever since their time at Latymer. 'My wife points out that Alan 
always helped with the washing-up . . . mind you. thai was before he went to Hollywood,' he jokes.
     Although Rickman still revisits Latymer Upper, he has a decidedly equivocal attitude towards the fee-paying school that gave 
poor scholarship boys like him a privileged upbringing.
     His misgivings were to lead to an ideological falling-out with Latymer towards the end of 1995 when the school asked 
permission to use his photograph in a display advertisement placed in theatre programmes for three productions from October to 
December at the Lyric Hammersmith. 1995 was Latymer's centenary year, and the ads were specifically designed to recruit new pupils 
with an interest in drama. Hence the mug-shots of Latymer's most famous dramatic successes: Alan Rickman, Mel Smith and Hugh Grant.
     The school wrote to ask Alan's permission to use his photo. 'We received a reply from his agent, one of those wonderful 
one-sentence letters that said Alan did not wish his photograph to be used in this way/ recalls Chris Hammond. 'Luckily we hadn't 
sent the display ads off to the printers, so we didn't have to reprint anything. We simply removed Alan's photograph.
     The strange thing was that Alan had already given permission for his picture to be used in a book about the history of the 
school, which was published in October 1995."
     Appearing in the school's history book was one thing; but joining in with its recruitment drive was a very different game of 
soldiers. Staunch Labour supporter Alan Rickman refused to cooperate with the ads because he didn't wish to be seen to be publicly 
endorsing a fee-paying school which no longer has the same quota of working-class scholarship boys that it did in his day. 
Paradoxically, that's because the Labour Party abolished the direct-grant system back in 1976 with the inevitable result that 
Latymer Upper took fewer poor pupils and became more elitist The 300 assisted places that still existed in 1995 were abolished by 
Labour after it came back into power in 1997.
     Ideally, of course. Labour would prefer private schools like Latymer not to exist at all. To add to the irony of Alan's 
dilemma. a member of his Labour councillor girlfriend's family was also educated at Latymer Upper. "I think it was her brother or 
her cousin, I can't remember which,' says Chris Hammond.
     
43
     In other words, though the system may not have pleased the purists, Latymer Upper proved to be the making of a lot of 
impoverished bright children . . . including Alan Rickman.
     'Alan is a romantic,' says Chris Hammond, not unsympatheti-cally. 'And every so often harsh political realities hit him, 
either through his partner or through logic. He has a romantic view of Latymer and of the Gild.
     'He's ideologically in dispute with the concept of an independent-school education, the idea that money buys all. But after 
Jim McCabe's requiem mass in January, Alan came back to the school and stayed for three hours from which I deduce he's not 
personally in dispute with us. He didn't have to come back; nobody forced
     him.
     'And when he was invited to the centenary service at St Paul's Cathedral in 1995, he sent his regrets that he couldn't come 
because of filming commitments.
     'Harriet Harman's name came up when we were talking, and yes, you could certainly say that he wasn't exactly in favour of her 
decision to send her son to a selective school,' adds Chris of the educational own goal by a Shadow Cabinet Minister that split the 
Labour front benches for a while in February 1996.
     'But I asked Alan how he would try to maintain Latymer in future if he were a school governor, and he reluctantly agreed that 
he would have done the same as us. He's ambivalent about it all, because he cares about Latymer.'
     According to Chris Hammond, another issue that Rickman felt strongly about was the sacking of Jim McCabe in 1993; he thought 
Jim was poorly treated at the time.
     'Jim was asked to leave,' admits Hammond. 'He was originally with us in the 60s, and he was fine then. Then he went off to 
teach at Crawley, Watford and eventually Singapore. He came back to Latymer for his final years. He was asked to jack it in at the 
end of one year; unfortunately he wasn't a good teacher any more. So he took early retirement; I would hope that Alan would see the 
necessity of that.' But Alan does like to play the white knight on occasion; it's a trait that does him no discredit.
     Rickman was to demonstrate his commitment to Latymer still further by returning again in November 1999 for the gala opening of 
the school's new arts centre, including the 300-seater Latymer Theatre. With him were Rima and Mel Smith, with whom he has
     
44
     long been friendly. 'He wasn't remotely distant and aloof; it was a very warm occasion and he stayed for three hours 
afterwards." says Orion. Far from being an elitist fixture for the use of the Latymerian boys and girls only. the theatre is used 
widely by local primary schoolchildren and drama students as a public resource open to all. Alan certainly approved ot that; and 
one suspects that Edward Latymer himself might have done so. too. And Latymer Upper's new scholarship appeal fund, which Chris 
Hammond says has the 'keen' support of both Alan and Mel. is intended to replace the late-lamented assisted-places scheme to some 
extent
     Leaving Latymer for the outside world in Ia64 was a great shock. Alan was later to recall the still, small voice that ignored 
his "wild bruiser of a will' and told him he should take up an instead of doing a Drama or an English degree. In that, he was 
emulating his graphic designer brother, David. Family influences were strong Alan was still living at home in Acton, much too poor 
to join in the emergent Swinging London scene of the King's Road in 1965
     Alan enrolled on a three-year art and design course at Chelsea College of Art. leaving in 1968. the year of Danny the Red and 
international student uprisings.
     Alan was later to recall the wall-to-wall sit-ins, the fellow student who painted on an acid trip and the girl from the 
graphics department who cycled up and down the King's Road while dressed as a nun. He told GQ magazine in July 1992 how he 
'wandered through those days wondering what on earth was going on ... there was a bit of me that always wanted the painting 
teachers to come into the graphic design department and discover me as a great painter. But I could never get it together. 1 think 
there was a bit of me that was waiting to act."
     In truth. Rickman was a bit lost until he found his soulmate Rima. If Colin Turner gave him sophistication, she gave him 
self-belief,
     'I always assumed that Rima and Alan emerged out of the diesel and smoke of west London, cosmically entwined.' says their 
playwright friend Stephen Dans, not entirely facetiously.
     It was at Chelsea College of Art that Alan met a general labourer's daughter from Paddington. Rima Elizabeth Honon. She was 
small, dark, sweet-faced and snub-nosed, with a calm, self-possessed air that made her seem remarkably precocious Alan was later to 
say. with a distaste for romantic gush that proved he was every' inch his mother's son. 'It was not love at first sight; I'd
     
45
     hate for us to be presented as something extraordinary. We're just as messy and complex as any other couple, and we go through 
just as many changes. But I really respect her. Rima and 1 can sit in a room just reading, and not saying anything to each other 
for an hour, then she'll read something to me and we'll both start giggling.' in other words, they manage to be friends as well as 
lovers; the best, and the rarest, combination.
     Like him, she was a clever, serious-minded working-class child who had suckled socialism at the breast. Alan and Rima 
instantly bonded like brother and sister; they thought alike and had the same dry sense of humour. They protected each other, and 
have done so ever since.
     The relationship has been remarkably solid over more than three decades, outlasting many of their friends' marriages. Although 
Rima is a year younger than Alan, from the very beginning she always seemed the older of the two. Yet it's a relationship based on 
neck-strain, because he towers over her.
     'When I first saw Alan with Rima, they didn't seem a very coupled couple. But 1 was wrong. I began to notice when I visited 
Alan in Stratford-upon-Avon that he seemed calmer when she was around. She centres him. She's very important to him,' says the 
playwright Dusty Hughes, who has known them both since 1981. 'She came up to do his garden at a cottage he rented in Stratford when 
he was with the RSC; she planted annuals everywhere.'
     'Alan did a reading at our wedding in 1990,' says Dusty's ex-wife, Theresa Hickey. 'He read the Shakespeare sonnet, "Let me 
not to the marriage of true minds admit impediment" from the pulpit.
     'He terrified everyone because he read it in a really sinister voice like Obadiah Slope's. I remember Rima had a bad cold, but 
she still came along to be with him. Alan is very much a one-woman man.' Unfortunately, Teresa and Dusty's marriage lasted only 
three years; but Alan and Rima's informal arrangement is still going strong. 'Neither of them are slaves to convention,' says the 
actor and director Richard Wilson, explaining why they have never seen the need for a formal contract while friends' marriages 
crumble one by one. Another friend thinks that Alan would have married if he had wanted children. But in 1998, Rickman admitted in 
an interview with the journalist Susie Mackenzie that he would have loved a family himself; that fatherhood was not something he 
deliberately chose to avoid. Then, to protect Rima, he added
     
46
     hurriedly: ' You should remember I am not the only one involved; there is another person here. Sometimes I think that in an 
ideal world three children, aged twelve, ten and eight, would be dropped on us and we would be great parents for that family.' 
Mackenzie asked him bluntly whether he had ever been tempted to leave the 51-year old Rima for a 20-year old starlet. 'No,' came 
the very firm answer, clanging down like a portcullis on that particular conversational avenue.
     Instead he set out to become the ideal uncle. In 2001, he told the movie magazine Unreel during a promotional interview for 
Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone that, far from being remote from children and children's interests as affluent Dinkies 
(Dual Income No Kids) so often are, he liked to spend time with his sister's young daughters Claire and Amy. Sheila had had the 
girls relatively late, and a middle-aged Alan found himself revelling in 'all those daft things - movies, McDonald's, Hamleys'. In 
a way, and with the distinct advantage of the wherewithal to pay for it this time, he was rediscovering his own 
face-pressed-against-the-glass childhood in the late 40s and early 50s when the magical Hamleys in Regent Street really did live up 
to its name as the greatest toyshop in the world.
     When he took Claire and Amy there, however, he was in for a shock when they made a beeline for the kind of girlie toy that 
would give the gender politicians a fit of the vapours. Despite the fact that his sister didn't dress the girls 'in pink or bows', 
he recalled how Claire and Amy 'marched straight to the Barbie counter - I couldn't believe it - hideous little dolls with pointed 
breasts'. Yet even grungey old Alan was enough of an indulgent uncle - and a bloody-minded rebel - to declare, If I had children, I 
like to think I'd let them wear whatever they wanted. None of my friends would believe me, but I'd let them walk down the road in 
pink Lurex and gold plastic.' So much for his reputation for solemnity.
     Rima was as passionate about theatre as Alan was, and they joined an amateur west London group called the Brook Green Players. 
She first appeared with him in a production of Emlyn Williams' Night Must Fall at the Methodist Hall in Askew Road, Shepherd's 
Bush.
     He was the star as the psychopathic Danny, the seductive boy murderer who kept a head in a hat-box; Rima took the part of the
     
47
     maid whom Danny impregnates in Sean O'Casey's least favourite play. A cast photograph published on page three of the West 
London Observer on 1 April 1965 shows Rima wearing a huge floral pinny and standing demurely in the back row. The smallest member 
of the cast, she also looks the most assured.
     That was deceptive, however, since she was never confident enough to take up acting full-time. The highly articulate Rima 
still finds political speech-making somewhat nerve-racking.
     But acting was where Alan, of course, found himself in the ascendant. He is in the front row of the Observer picture, 
displaying that familiar sultry pout and looking ready to sulk the place down with the cross-looking face he so often presents to 
the world. His is easily the most dramatic presence in the line-up.
     'What is one supposed to do when after watching a play, one finds oneself wanting to see more?' rhapsodised the gushing 
reviewer. 'For the registering of deep, heartfelt emotion . . . most of the burden fell to young Alan Rickman in the part of Danny, 
a rather mystifying young gentleman who is both the hero and the villain.
     'He it is who is called upon at one stage to break down and cry. This Mr Rickman does so well that it's almost possible to see 
the tears in his eyes.
     'It was Sir Laurence Olivier, I think,' hedges the reviewer, wallowing in the lachrymose theme, 'who once said this is the 
test of a real actor or actress. Of all the characters in this gripping drama, I think that Danny is the one upon whom most of the 
attention is focused.
     'Of course, he is one of the central characters. So much so that the stage seems empty without him. Even when his part calls 
for no word or action, he dominates the stage.'
     Nevertheless, Alan had persuaded himself that he ought to pursue an an career instead. In that, he was influenced by 
working-class caution: it seemed much easier to make a living from drawing than from the party-trick of performing. And if things 
didn't work out, he could always become a painter and decorator like his late father. However, Latymer had changed him utterly, 
much more than he knew.
     In their spare time, Alan and Rima then joined Edward Stead and Colin Turner in the Court Drama Group at the Stanhope Adult 
Education Institute opposite Great Portland tube station. It was to become a little Latymer in exile for Alan.
     
48
     Their seasons were amazingly eclectic Edward remembers more of Rickman's camped-up shock tactics in the musical revue The 
Borgua Orgy at the Stanhope
     There were some lines that went "Scoutmasters gay are we/ displaying a shapely knee/in our cute little shorts/we are known as 
good sports/from Queensgate to Battersea." Alan really threw himself into it,' he recalls.
     "We acted together in Behan's The Hostage and the Court did give Alan the part of Romeo, which he's never done professional!) 
Rima was Moth the page, Alan was Boyet and Colin was Don Armado in Love's Labours Lost; it was directed by Wilf Sharp, whose late 
wife Miriam requested in her will that Alan read from The Importance Of Being Earnest at her funeral.
     'Alan was devastated by Colin's sudden death, no question of it,' says Ted, pointing out that Rickman read two speeches at a 
Service of Thanksgiving for the life of Colin Turner at St Michael and All Angels Church in Bedford Park on 23 February 1900.
     'Alan came along and read the Queen Mab speech in honour of him, since Colin had played Mercutio in the Court's production of 
Romeo And Juliet. Alan even said, characteristically but wrongly, "Colin read it much better than me." It wasn't true but it was 
typical of his generosity. He also read "Our revels now are ended" from The Tempest
     'On Desert Island Discs, Hugh Grant mentioned the influence of Colin, though he didn't name him. Colin was immensely important 
for him, too. He's very different to Alan, though: Hugh is scatty and Alan is very in control.
     'Alan can be vulnerable, but he's very strong and clear about what he wants to do. He has handled his career very well, he's 
avoided meretricious stuff. One could never say of him that he did it for the money.
     'I lost touch for a couple of years when he finished at the Court, but then I heard he had got into RADA. We've kept up 
contact on and off since; he was there at the last anniversary of the Gild, there in person. Mel Smith sent a video
     'The voice was already there when I first met him. Initially it can sound affected, but è isn't. That's Alan. He's never 
patronising even to the people from the Court Drama Group when they met him years later.
     'A number of people say he seems aloof, which is absolutely wrong. When he was doing Achilles and Jaques at Stratford in the
     
49
     1980s, I took along two boys who were mad about the theatre. Afterwards we had a bottle of wine in his dressing-room and he 
insisted on paying for a meal afterwards. He had a little cottage opposite the theatre and we had tea there. We also saw him in Les 
Liaisons Dangercuses; he couldn't have been nicer or more helpful.
     'He made time to meet us, even though he had an hour's fencing every night before Les Liaisons to rehearse the final fight.
     •I also took boys from my present school to see Alan's Hamlet in 1992 - even the Oxbridge candidates could do nothing but look 
at him and ask for his autograph. They wrote to him afterwards and he wrote back by return of post.
     'People were kept out of the dressing-room so he could entertain boys from Gravesend Grammar whom he had never met. He had no 
reason to do it. He chided me and said, "You should have brought them all round" when I said, "Alan, there were 27 of them. I had 
to put names in a hat."
     'He tried hard to defuse the feeling of him being the star when I took those boys backstage. There was no actory behaviour.'
     After the three-year course at Chelsea, Alan studied graphic design for a year at the Royal College of Art to prepare himself 
for a career in art. Like so many others in 1968, he dreamed of changing the world with Letraset.
     To this end, in 1969 he set up the Netting Hill Herald freesheet with a group of friends. The Editor was David Adams, the 
Features Editor Jeremy Gibson and Alan was the Art Editor, which meant he designed the whole thing.
     It was surprisingly earnest stuff for those madcap times, with solemn think-pieces on the Kensington and Chelsea Arts Council 
and an undercover investigation by the Herald's Managing Editor, Paul Home, of the outrageous prices at Ronnie Scott's jazz club. 
There was also a leader-page article by the Sixth Baron Gifford, better known as Anthony Gifford QC, that called for the 
legalisation of cannabis. He has gone on to become one of the country's most prominent left-wing lawyers, setting up a radical set 
of barristers' chambers and running it as a co-operative that paid a flat-rate salary regardless of individual earnings. The 
experiment, unsurprisingly in the competitive world of the Bar, didn't last. But Tony did: since 1991, he has been dividing his 
work between Britain and ganja-friendly Jamaica, where he has a house.
     The Herald had none of the subversive naughtiness that characterised, say, such radical magazines as Oz. Perhaps it longed
     
5O
     to be taken seriously, like the alternative 'community' magazine I worked on in the 70s. Alan's design for the Herald's front 
page looked like a Russian Constructionist nightmare, full of clashing capital letters of various sizes.
     Published by the now-defunct West London Free Press, it grandly promised: Treat the Herald as an alternative to the other 
local papers ... we exist to express all shades of opinion.' It purported to be non-politically aligned, but inevitably it became a 
forum for left-wing debate.
     Its first issue carried advertisements about how to achieve sexual ecstasy and collect stamps, which certainly covered the 
waterfront in west London. Page two featured a holiday guide to Turkey and drugs, while the Liverpool poet, Brian Patten, provided 
a bit of local colour on page eight as a Netting Hillbilly.
     The same group of friends also started a graphic design company called Graphiti. They hired a studio in Berwick Street, Soho, 
for £10 a week in an atmosphere where everyone smoked pot while working on such groovy design commissions as rock-album sleeves. 
'We were successful workwise but absolute paupers because we foolishly went into it with no backing. Everyone paid us four months 
late,' Packman ruefully told The Stage and Television Today in 1986.
     Dave Granger, sales director of the present incarnation of Graphiti, remembers seeing Alan around while working in Berwick 
Street at the time. There were a hell of a lot of strange things going on at that time ... a lot of drinking and drugs. But there 
were a lot of good creative people around. Rickman was a very clever cartoonist.'
     'Our studio had white walls, sanded floors, trestle tables and no capital. . . and it was very heaven,' Alan somewhat 
self-consciously told the journalist Valerie Grove for a Harpers & Queen interview in April 1995.
     As with so many of the rock stars whose portentous concept albums he helped to package, four years of art school had been Alan 
Rickman's university. Packman's playwright friend Stephen Davis says rather wryly of his own more traditional days at Cambridge in 
the late 60s, 'British rock 'n' roll came out of art schools. I kept thinking, "If this place is so great, why isn't John Lennon 
here?" And Alan Rickman was probably the best undergraduate that university never had.'
     
51
     To prove it, Davis later wrote the TV play Busted for Alan and another actor friend Michael Feast in which they portrayed old 
university mates from Soc Soc (the insufferably twee diminutive for every student Socialist Society) who had gone their separate 
ways after graduation.
     But Rickman was restless in the middle of all the pot-parties: there was more to life than whimsical sleeve-notes, LSD lyrics 
and earnest debates on planning procedures in Hotting Hill Gate. (The latter was to be Rima's speciality, lucky girl, when she 
later became a councillor.)
     The acting instinct wouldn't go away, and Graphiti was not as lucrative as they'd all hoped. In the stoned atmosphere of the 
late 60s, it was difficult to make a tiny, under-capitalised cottage-industry work. They were small fry in a huge shark-pool where 
rock art was big business and the conglomerates were swallowing up the competition for the record companies' commissions.
     One day Alan Rickman found himself posting a letter to RADA, asking for an audition. At nearly 26, he felt rather foolish 
about being a student again. Mothers, particularly working-class mothers, tend to ask exactly when you're going to get a proper job 
at that age. But it was now or never. '1 was getting older,' he later confessed to GQ magazine in 1992, 'and I thought, "If you 
really want to do this, you've got to get on with it." '
     He had set in motion a chain of events that would change his life for ever, although it was to be a long slog. When he heard 
the news about his former star pupil, Colin Turner felt quietly triumphant. Alan was to phone 'home' regularly to Latymer Upper 
over the following eighteen years, letting Colin know everything about his progress from Leicester to Los Angeles.
     
     
blank
3. 'HE'S VERY KEEP DEATH OFF THE ROADS'	52
     
     He won a place at RADA by giving a speech from Richard III, a part that you could argue he has been playing on and off ever 
since. Certainly his cartoon Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves was, in his own words, an amalgam of a crazy 
rock star and what the Irish call 'Dick The Turd'.
     At 26, he was a mature student in comparison with nearly everyone else. By then, his art-school training had already used up 
his grant allocation from the local authority. So he lived at home, got by with the odd design commission and worked as a dresser 
to Sir Ralph Richardson and Nigel Hawthorne in the play West Of Suez, watching their work from the wings and spending more time at 
the ironing-board than John Osbome's Alison Porter. He not only fetched clean shirts for the men but also Jill Bennett's 
post-matinee fish and chips (no wonder John Osbome called the poor woman an overheated housemaid).
     Sir Ralph, one of the true originals of the British theatre, was a big hero. 'He was fearless and honest and didn't tell any 
lies. And he was totally centred,' Alan told GQ magazine in July 1992.
     It's only fair to point out that Nigel Hawthorne, later to act alongside Alan in the BBC's Barchester Chronicles plus a Peter 
Barnes play, told me that he couldn't recall his tall, lanky, morose-looking dresser. 'I do remember it being a particularly happy 
time, and that Ralph Richardson was always a source of great entertainment. I undertook the role of his secretary so I could be 
next to the great man and observe him at close quarters. It seems very much as though Alan Rickman was doing the same thing from 
the wings.'
     The RADA acting course is renewed for its intensity, and Rickman admitted to Drama Magazine's Barney Bardsley in 1984: 'You do 
get hauled over the emotional coals. But my body heaved a sigh of relief at being there. So much of your life is conducted from the 
neck up.' He loved the sheer physicality of the rigorous training, and he was old enough not to be overwhelmed The stillness 
acclaimed in great actors in fact comes from a body so
     
54
     connected to mind and heart that in a way it vibrates. That's really centred acting. Look at Fred Astaire. You don't look at 
his feet or arms - you look here,' he said, pointing to a place between his ribs. He quoted the dancer Margaret Beals, who talked 
about 'catching the energy on its impulsive exits through the body'.
     Alan won the Bancroft Gold medal (as did his friend Juliet Stevenson in later years) and the Forbes Robertson Prize. He also 
shared the Emile Littler award with Nicholas Woodeson at the end of his two-year course. There was always something special going 
on with him,' says actor Stephen Crossley, a RADA contemporary. 'I looked up to him as a brother, because my brother had been an 
artist at drama school. Alan was very mature as a student: he commanded a great deal of authority. Most people trust him: he 
inspires tremendous loyalty. He's the most complete man of the theatre I know. He's a tremendous listener, and he's still the 
steadiest person: that's what will make him a wonderful director.
     'He won the Bancroft for generic performances: Pastor Manders in Ghosts and Angelo in Measure For Measure. Other people tried 
to imitate his style, but he's not easily imitated. He had a wonderful drawl at RADA - very laconic.
     I was Engstrand in Ghosts - the character has a club foot, and I had a very big, incredibly camp wooden boot. Alan said to me, 
"You'll get the reviews." There was a Camden Journal review and I was well mentioned or, rather, the boot was. He hasn't forgiven 
me for that,' cackles Stephen, not sounding too worried. He can bear testimony to Rickman's loyalty to old friends: twenty years 
later Stephen was cast in three roles for Alan's Hamlet tour in 1992.
     Film producer Catherine Bailey - who profiled him on The Late Show in November 1994 and with whom Alan and theatre producer 
Thelma Holt drew up proposals for running Hammersmith's Riverside Studios in West London - was also at RADA at the same time.
     1 was six years younger and I always wanted to go into stage management and production,' says Catherine, who looks rather like 
a younger version of Joan Littlewood (and said she had never been so insulted in her life when I mentioned this). 'But it was 
obvious that Alan was going to be a special actor; we've been friends ever since. People are fond of him: he's put a lot back into 
the business.'
     And yet he struck some at RADA as rather grand. Deluded with grandeur or not, the 28-year-old Rickman started his career in 
the

     
55
     grind of weekly repertory theatr