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Rickman. He melodramatically told his old friend Peter Barnes that the latter’s first hit play, later filmed in 1972 with Peter O’Toole as a mad aristocrat, had ‘changed his life’.
    The Ruling Class
was premièred in Nottingham in 1968 and quickly transferred to the West End, opening at London’s Piccadilly Theatre. It was one of those rotten-state-of-the-nation plays that proved uncannily prophetic, with a peer of the realm accidentally killing himself by auto-erotic strangulation in the first scene. With its great leaps of logic, this flamboyant attack upon the British class system was also hugely, and ambitiously, entertaining. Peter aimed to create ‘a comic theatre . . . of opposites, where everything is simultaneously tragic and ridiculous’. Since he and Tom Stoppard both began writing plays around the same time, it is debatable who influenced whom. Both are great showmen, vaudevillians with serious things to say.
    Nearly three decades later, the Tory MP Stephen Milligan was found dead in similar circumstances; only then was the pleasurable purpose of this bizarre and dangerous practice duly explained to a bemused general public by the sexperts of the popular Press. But Barnes’ anti-Establishment audacity, at a time when few dared acknowledge the fact that hanged men get hard-ons, had deeply impressed the young Rickman in 1968. After all, it was only three years since capital punishment for murder had been abolished; although death by hanging has remained on the statute-books for piracy and, as critics of the late Princess Diana’s former lover, James Hewitt, love to keep pointing out, for treason.
    Bernard and Margaret Rickman were to have two more children. Alan’s younger brother, Michael Keith, arrived 21 months after Alan on 21 November 1947. The only daughter. Sheila, was born on 15 February 1950.
    Alan was later to describe himself as a ‘dreamy’ child, wrapped up in his own little world as he scribbled and doodled. David andMichael, too, had artistic leanings, with the same beautiful handwriting. ‘Alan is a very talented water-colourist. He has this elegant, flowing, effortless calligraphy,’ says Stephen Davis.
    He was the clever, petted one of the family, the future scholarship child, although Alan the egalitarian took pains to emphasise in a
Guardian
interview with Susie Mackenzie in 1998 that his parents had no favourites and treated them all equally. His slow way of speaking meant that he received more attention: his parents had to listen carefully to his every word. Alan was particularly fond of his father Bernard. Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuits, famously said: ‘Give me the boy at the age of seven and I will give you the man.’ Alan’s confident masculinity and self-contained air of assurance were shaped by that early closeness with the saintly-sounding Bernard.
    When Alan was only eight and the youngest, Sheila, was just four, their father died of cancer. Alan subsequently talked of ‘the devastating sense of grief’ in the household; they were rehoused by the council and moved to an Acton estate to the west of Wormwood Scrubs Prison, where his mother struggled to bring up four children on her own by working for the Post Office.
    She married again briefly, but it lasted only three years. Clearly Bernard had been the love of her life, although Alan recalled the relationship between his Methodist Welsh mother and his Irish Catholic father had often been volatile: the clash of cultures would sometimes end in sounds of banging doors and weeping behind them. But, despite their lack of money and their cramped surroundings, the little family of six were happy.
    Everything changed with his father’s death. ‘His death was a huge thing to happen to four kids under ten,’ he said, remembering how his headmaster had come into his class and spoken in an undertone to the teacher as they both turned to