Alan Rickman by Maureen Paton Read Free Book Online

artistic. In fact, I had even passed the local government exams for the Civil Service, just to please my mother.
    â€˜She was widowed too, and I was so taken with the comparison with Alan’s mother. I met Mrs Rickman at the
Die Hard
première: when I said how marvellous Alan was in the role, she just said, “Yes, yes, he’s very good”. It was as if something was niggling her; she wasn’t quite comfortable with it.
    â€˜They are terrified of boasting about their children’s achievements, as if people might accuse them of showing off and aiming above their station in life. So they go to the other extreme. Alan sent his mother on a winter cruise: her comments mirrored my mother’s when I sent her to Gibraltar. Never grateful – grudging comments, finding fault with the food. But still proud of her son in a reserved sort of way. She wouldn’t like to make a show of things.’
    It reminds me, too, of my own mother’s reaction when I told her that I wanted to go to university. ‘You’re aiming above your station,’ she said, automatically reaching for the hand-me-down phrase. And she was very uneasy with the cruise I sent her on, too! The working classes take years to shake off the serf mentality, the hopeless feeling that some things are just not for the likes of them. Alan Rickman’s mother knew he was remarkable in many ways: he was her Alan, but he was also his own person to an almost aloof degree. He had to cultivate that sense of separateness and be quite ruthless about going his own way, or he would never have succeeded.
    He certainly schooled her from the beginning of his acting career in how to talk to the Press; Alan, nervous about coming from the ‘wrong’ background to such a middle-class environment, was very concerned about saying the correct thing. An early cutting from the
Acton Gazette
of 26 May 1977 features a studio portrait of a fresh-faced Rickman and a careful quote from his mother. ‘He was always keen on acting and even at school achieved recognition,’ she told the
Gazette
almost primly. Clearly not one to gush about her boy, who was on tour at the time.
    â€˜Mr Rickman has not been lured into television yet, preferring to tread the boards in repertory where he gets an immediate audience response to his performances,’ concluded the anonymous reporter, having been fobbed off with a standard response by both Alan and his mother. It was the kind of routine guff they teach you in your final term at drama school.
    â€˜My mother would come out with all sorts of bigotry against unions and strikes and foreigners on the TV, and then go out and vote Labour. She wouldn’t think twice about it. She wouldn’t see any contradiction in that,’ says Peter Barnes.
    â€˜I do think that Alan still has a working-class view of life in a way,’ he adds. ‘He was round to dinner one night, and my wife wasnagging me at the dinner-table about my eating and my weight. Alan said, “I would never let Rima speak to me like that.” He said it in front of my wife, which I thought was a bit reactionary. It’s very working-class.
    â€˜He said that his mother was like mine, would sit in front of the TV set and say that British workers never do any work, it’s the unions . . . and then she would go out and vote Labour after all this bigoted, reactionary, right-wing nonsense. Working-class prejudices linger on.
    â€˜I would just say to mine, “Shut up, mother . . .”’ adds Peter fondly, finding it all rather amusing and touching.
    It took Alan years before he sheepishly admitted to
The Times
magazine on 12 March 1994: ‘I’ve had feminism knocked into me, and a jolly good thing too . . .’ Margaret was a very strong role-model for the female sex; and he became very close to her. As a result, he has always been relaxed around women.
    Alan also had another