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later role as an adviser to a wide circle of friends is based upon holding the balance of power, just as he saw his mother do. In effect, he became both parent and teacher following the example of his mother and his influential Latymer Upper teacher and mentor, Colin Turner.
    Until her death in 1997, Margaret Rickman lived in the same modest house that she had made her own with replacement windows and a smart new fence around the front garden. Under the Tories’ ‘Right To Buy’ policy, she and her youngest son, Michael, jointly purchased the council property after years of renting. The novelist, Peter Ackroyd, was brought up not far away in a street with the Anglo-Saxon name of Wulfstan and proudly claims that Wormwood Scrubs cast a longer shadow over his beloved childhood home. But then Ackroyd always did revel in the macabre. In one of those cheek-by-jowl arrangements between very different neighbourhoods in which London specialises, Alan was based only a few miles away from his mother.
    Alan visited his mother regularly until the very end, particularly when her health first began to decline in 1995; he once turned up at an RSC Christmas party at the then Artistic Director Adrian Noble’s house in north London, with some of Margaret’s mince pies in Tupperware boxes. She had pressed them upon him at the end of his visit, not letting him go until he had taken something home with him ‘to keep him going’. It’s a very working-class thing: providing hospitality even for passing guests who stay five minutes, let alone your own grown-up children, is a huge matter of pride with working-class matriarchs.
    Rickman himself told Mackenzie that his mother was as fiercely protective of her children as a tigress; similarly, his brothers andsister have had nothing but ‘the fiercest pride’ for the famous member of the family – ‘and I for them’. His mother, he said, ‘was incredibly talented herself; she would have had a career as a singer in another world.’ Which is why he took her to see the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical
Phantom of the Opera
for her 80th birthday, with a party afterwards that Margaret entered ‘like the star she was. I’ve never seen anyone enter a room like that,’ he added.
    â€˜He doesn’t hide his family,’ Stephen Davis told me a few years before Margaret Rickman’s death. ‘His mother is a real matriarch, and he takes a lot of care with her. Strength of character is genetic; Alan tells funny stories about her sometimes.’ Yet another friend says that Rima feels Alan has never quite come to terms with his working-class background. Way over to the east of the ‘Scrubs’, Rima’s outside interests – her work as a grass-roots local politician enables her to keep close to the people in the way that an actor can do only through his fans – have included the governorship of Barlby School and North Kensington Community Centre.
    Alan’s younger brother, Michael, is also a west Londoner; and his older brother David lives in nearby Hertfordshire. The vast majority of actors come from comfortable, impeccably bourgeois backgrounds, and Alan is all too aware that he came from tougher roots. When he goes back to them, he takes care not to flaunt his lifestyle.
    Peter Barnes says he saw a lot of his own mother (who died in 1981) in Margaret Rickman. ‘Alan and I came from the same background; both of us weren’t in a position to buy property until quite late. Writing is as precarious as acting, and I had been struggling for twenty years until I made my name in Hollywood.
    â€˜I was born at Bow, so I’m an authentic Cockney. I recognised my mother in Alan’s mother. My mother remarked at the first night of
The Ruling Class
, my first big success, that I could have gone into the Civil Service instead . . .
    â€˜It was a struggle for Alan and me to go off at a tangent and be