Alan Rickman (6 page)

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; I 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. I 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 Derwentwater 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 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.

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 since been admitted to Latymer Upper's sixth form, with the eventual plan that the school will go fully co-educational.