Alan Rickman (8 page)

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, that 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.

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 unsympathetically. ‘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
long been friendly. ‘He wasn't remotely distant and aloof; it was a very warm occasion and he stayed for three hours afterwards,' says Orton. 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 of 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 1964 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 art 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. I 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 Davis, not entirely facetiously.

It was at Chelsea College of Art that Alan met a general labourer's daughter from Paddington, Rima Elizabeth Horton. 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
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 I 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 I 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
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
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 art 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.