“You started in art school, you then changed to drama school. Why?”
Alan Rickman: “I never see it as a change. And I think it’s a great tragedy that, certainly in England when I was growing up, you had to decide what the rest of your life was going to be about at around 16, in terms of what A-Levels you were going to do if you were going into further education.
And I was fortunate in various ways. One was that I had a school that believed that you could do Art and Physics at A-Level if you wanted to, and it also had a very strong drama tradition.
I had a family whose catch-phrase was always “Well, whatever makes you happy.”
(“The Scotsman”, 1997)