Read Online Alan Rickman by Maureen Paton - Free Book Online

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.
    â€˜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