Alan Rickman

by Maureen Paton

  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 there as well. But it was a strange thing not to be 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 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 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 I 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 première: 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; she wasn’t quite comfortable with it.

  ‘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 I 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 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.

  ‘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.

  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; I 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. I 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 Derwentwater 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 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.