Alan Rickman (9 page)

In their spare time, Alan and Rima then joined Edward Stead and Colin Turner in the Court Drama Group at the Stanhope Adult Education Institute opposite Great Portland tube station. It was to become a little Latymer in exile for Alan.

Their seasons were amazingly eclectic. Edward remembers more of Rickman's camped-up shock tactics in the musical revue
The Borgia Orgy
at the Stanhope.

‘There were some lines that went “Scoutmasters gay are we/displaying a shapely knee/in our cute little shorts/we are known as good sports/from Queensgate to Battersea.” Alan really threw himself into it,' he recalls.

‘We acted together in Behan's
The Hostage;
and the Court did give Alan the part of Romeo, which he's never done professionally. Rima was Moth the page, Alan was Boyet and Colin was Don Armado in
Love's Labours Lost
; it was directed by Wilf Sharp, whose late wife Miriam requested in her will that Alan read from
The Importance Of Being Earnest
at her funeral.

‘Alan was devastated by Colin's sudden death, no question of it,' says Ted, pointing out that Rickman read two speeches at a Service of Thanksgiving for the life of Colin Turner at St Michael and All Angels Church in Bedford Park on 23 February 1990.

‘Alan came along and read the Queen Mab speech in honour of him, since Colin had played Mercutio in the Court's production of
Romeo And Juliet.
Alan even said, characteristically but wrongly, “Colin read it much better than me.” It wasn't true but it was typical of his generosity. He also read “Our revels now are ended” from
The Tempest
.

‘On
Desert Island Discs
, Hugh Grant mentioned the influence of Colin, though he didn't name him. Colin was immensely important for him, too. He's very different to Alan, though: Hugh is scatty and Alan is very in control.

‘Alan can be vulnerable, but he's very strong and clear about what he wants to do. He has handled his career very well, he's avoided meretricious stuff. One could never say of him that he did it for the money.

‘I lost touch for a couple of years when he finished at the Court, but then I heard he had got into RADA. We've kept up contact on and off since; he was there at the last anniversary of the Gild, there in person. Mel Smith sent a video.

‘The voice was already there when I first met him. Initially it can sound affected, but it isn't. That's Alan. He's never patronising . . . even to the people from the Court Drama Group when they met him years later.

‘A number of people say he seems aloof, which is absolutely wrong. When he was doing Achilles and Jaques at Stratford in the
1980s, I took along two boys who were mad about the theatre. Afterwards we had a bottle of wine in his dressing-room and he insisted on paying for a meal afterwards. He had a little cottage opposite the theatre and we had tea there. We also saw him in
Les Liaisons Dangereuses
; he couldn't have been nicer or more helpful.

‘He made time to meet us, even though he had an hour's fencing every night before
Les Liaisons
to rehearse the final fight.

‘I also took boys from my present school to see Alan's
Hamlet
in 1992 – even the Oxbridge candidates could do nothing but look at him and ask for his autograph. They wrote to him afterwards and he wrote back by return of post.

‘People were kept out of the dressing-room so he could entertain boys from Gravesend Grammar whom he had never met. He had no reason to do it. He chided me and said, “You should have brought them all round” when I said, “Alan, there were 27 of them. I had to put names in a hat.”

‘He tried hard to defuse the feeling of him being the star when I took those boys backstage. There was no actory behaviour.'

After the three-year course at Chelsea, Alan studied graphic design for a year at the Royal College of Art to prepare himself for a career in art. Like so many others in 1968, he dreamed of changing the world with Letraset.

To this end, in 1969 he set up the
Notting Hill Herald
freesheet with a group of friends. The Editor was David Adams, the Features Editor Jeremy Gibson and Alan was the Art Editor, which meant he designed the whole thing.

It was surprisingly earnest stuff for those madcap times, with solemn think-pieces on the Kensington and Chelsea Arts Council and an undercover investigation by the
Herald
's Managing Editor, Paul Horne, of the outrageous prices at Ronnie Scott's jazz club. There was also a leader-page article by the Sixth Baron Gifford, better known as Anthony Gifford QC, that called for the legalisation of cannabis. He has gone on to become one of the country's most prominent left-wing lawyers, setting up a radical set of barristers' chambers and running it as a co-operative that paid a flat-rate salary regardless of individual earnings. The experiment, unsurprisingly in the competitive world of the Bar, didn't last. But Tony did: since 1991, he has been dividing his work between Britain and ganja-friendly Jamaica, where he has a house.

The
Herald
had none of the subversive naughtiness that characterised, say, such radical magazines as
Oz
. Perhaps it longed
to be taken seriously, like the alternative ‘community' magazine I worked on in the 70s. Alan's design for the
Herald
's front page looked like a Russian Constructionist nightmare, full of clashing capital letters of various sizes.

Published by the now-defunct West London Free Press, it grandly promised: ‘Treat the
Herald
as an alternative to the other local papers . . . we exist to express all shades of opinion.' It purported to be non-politically aligned, but inevitably it became a forum for left-wing debate.

Its first issue carried advertisements about how to achieve sexual ecstasy and collect stamps, which certainly covered the waterfront in west London. Page two featured a holiday guide to Turkey and drugs, while the Liverpool poet, Brian Patten, provided a bit of local colour on page eight as a Notting Hillbilly.

The same group of friends also started a graphic design company called Graphiti. They hired a studio in Berwick Street, Soho, for £10 a week in an atmosphere where everyone smoked pot while working on such groovy design commissions as rock-album sleeves. ‘We were successful workwise but absolute paupers because we foolishly went into it with no backing. Everyone paid us four months late,' Rickman ruefully told
The Stage and Television Today
in 1986.

Dave Granger, sales director of the present incarnation of Graphiti, remembers seeing Alan around while working in Berwick Street at the time. ‘There were a hell of a lot of strange things going on at that time . . . a lot of drinking and drugs. But there were a lot of good creative people around. Rickman was a very clever cartoonist.'

‘Our studio had white walls, sanded floors, trestle tables and no capital . . . and it was very heaven,' Alan somewhat self-consciously told the journalist Valerie Grove for a
Harpers & Queen
interview in April 1995.

As with so many of the rock stars whose portentous concept albums he helped to package, four years of art school had been Alan Rickman's university. Rickman's playwright friend Stephen Davis says rather wryly of his own more traditional days at Cambridge in the late 60s, ‘British rock ‘n' roll came out of art schools. I kept thinking, “If this place is so great, why isn't John Lennon here?” And Alan Rickman was probably the best undergraduate that university never had.'

To prove it, Davis later wrote the TV play
Busted
for Alan and another actor friend Michael Feast in which they portrayed old university mates from Soc Soc (the insufferably twee diminutive for every student Socialist Society) who had gone their separate ways after graduation.

But Rickman was restless in the middle of all the pot-parties: there was more to life than whimsical sleeve-notes, LSD lyrics and earnest debates on planning procedures in Notting Hill Gate. (The latter was to be Rima's speciality, lucky girl, when she later became a councillor.)

The acting instinct wouldn't go away, and Graphiti was not as lucrative as they'd all hoped. In the stoned atmosphere of the late 60s, it was difficult to make a tiny, under-capitalised cottage-industry work. They were small fry in a huge shark-pool where rock art was big business and the conglomerates were swallowing up the competition for the record companies' commissions.

One day Alan Rickman found himself posting a letter to RADA, asking for an audition. At nearly 26, he felt rather foolish about being a student again. Mothers, particularly working-class mothers, tend to ask exactly when you're going to get a proper job at that age. But it was now or never. ‘I was getting older,' he later confessed to
GQ
magazine in 1992, ‘and I thought, “If you really want to do this, you've got to get on with it.”'

He had set in motion a chain of events that would change his life for ever, although it was to be a long slog. When he heard the news about his former star pupil, Colin Turner felt quietly triumphant. Alan was to phone ‘home' regularly to Latymer Upper over the following eighteen years, letting Colin know everything about his progress from Leicester to Los Angeles.

HE WON A
place at RADA by giving a speech from
Richard III
, a part that you could argue he has been playing on and off ever since. Certainly his cartoon Sheriff of Nottingham in
Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves
was, in his own words, an amalgam of a crazy rock star and what the Irish call ‘Dick The Turd'.

At 26, he was a mature student in comparison with nearly everyone else. By then, his art-school training had already used up his grant allocation from the local authority. So he lived at home, got by with the odd design commission and worked as a dresser to Sir Ralph Richardson and Nigel Hawthorne in the play
West Of Suez
, watching their work from the wings and spending more time at the ironing-board than John Osborne's Alison Porter. He not only fetched clean shirts for the men but also Jill Bennett's post-matinée fish and chips (no wonder John Osborne called the poor woman an overheated housemaid).

Sir Ralph, one of the true originals of the British theatre, was a big hero. ‘He was fearless and honest and didn't tell any lies. And he was totally centred,' Alan told
GQ
magazine in July 1992.

It's only fair to point out that Nigel Hawthorne, later to act alongside Alan in the BBC's
Barchester Chronicles
plus a Peter Barnes play, told me that he couldn't recall his tall, lanky, morose-looking dresser. ‘I do remember it being a particularly happy time, and that Ralph Richardson was always a source of great entertainment. I undertook the role of his secretary so I could be next to the great man and observe him at close quarters. It seems very much as though Alan Rickman was doing the same thing from the wings.'

The RADA acting course is renowed for its intensity, and Rickman admitted to
Drama Magazine
's Barney Bardsley in 1984: ‘You do get hauled over the emotional coals. But my body heaved a sigh of relief at being there. So much of your life is conducted from the neck up.' He loved the sheer physicality of the rigorous training, and he was old enough not to be overwhelmed. ‘The stillness acclaimed in great actors in fact comes from a body so
connected to mind and heart that in a way it vibrates. That's really centred acting. Look at Fred Astaire. You don't look at his feet or arms – you look here,' he said, pointing to a place between his ribs. He quoted the dancer Margaret Beals, who talked about ‘catching the energy on its impulsive exits through the body'.

Alan won the Bancroft Gold medal (as did his friend Juliet Stevenson in later years) and the Forbes Robertson Prize. He also shared the Emile Littler award with Nicholas Woodeson at the end of his two-year course. ‘There was always something special going on with him,' says actor Stephen Crossley, a RADA contemporary. ‘I looked up to him as a brother, because my brother had been an artist at drama school. Alan was very mature as a student: he commanded a great deal of authority. Most people trust him: he inspires tremendous loyalty. He's the most complete man of the theatre I know. He's a tremendous listener, and he's still the steadiest person: that's what will make him a wonderful director.

‘He won the Bancroft for generic performances: Pastor Manders in
Ghosts
and Angelo in
Measure For Measure.
Other people tried to imitate his style, but he's not easily imitated. He had a wonderful drawl at RADA – very laconic.

‘I was Engstrand in
Ghosts
– the character has a club foot, and I had a very big, incredibly camp wooden boot. Alan said to me, “You'll get the reviews.” There was a
Camden Journal
review and I was well mentioned or, rather, the boot was. He hasn't forgiven me for that,' cackles Stephen, not sounding too worried. He can bear testimony to Rickman's loyalty to old friends: twenty years later Stephen was cast in three roles for Alan's
Hamlet
tour in 1992.

Film producer Catherine Bailey – who profiled him on
The Late Show
in November 1994 and with whom Alan and theatre producer Thelma Holt drew up proposals for running Hammersmith's Riverside Studios in West London – was also at RADA at the same time.

‘I was six years younger and I always wanted to go into stage management and production,' says Catherine, who looks rather like a younger version of Joan Littlewood (and said she had never been so insulted in her life when I mentioned this). ‘But it was obvious that Alan was going to be a special actor; we've been friends ever since. People are fond of him: he's put a lot back into the business.'

And yet he struck some at RADA as rather grand. Deluded with grandeur or not, the 28-year-old Rickman started his career in the
grind of weekly repertory theatre like every other aspiring actor. Very few people went straight from drama school to TV or film, as they do now, often to the detriment of their craft.