Alan Rickman (7 page)

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.

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.

‘Alan was in the political panto
Ali Baba And The Seven Dwarfs
. He played the sixth wife of Ali 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 Latymerian
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) Kitt – 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.

‘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, art was his chosen career. He was so clear that he was going to Chelsea College of Art, 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 incisiveness 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.