Alan Rickman

by Maureen Paton

  Here was a chance to put into practice – and how – the latent exhibitionism that was a vital component in the makeup of every 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 matinée 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 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

  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 ‘Ted’ 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 Mr Chips tradition. An Old Latymerian himself, he was a 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-fee-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 matinée-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 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: I 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 si
nce been admitted to Latymer Upper’s sixth form, with the eventual plan that the school will go fully co-educational.

  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 protégé 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 Euston 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 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 dirt,’ he adds good-humouredly, ‘I think we were probably pretty awful – and it was what we expected!’

  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 début 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 Rickman, 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.

  ‘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.r />
  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 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.