Part 2. THE FAUSTIAN GIFT
‘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 offbalance: 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 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 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 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 selfexpression – 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; 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 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 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.
