Alan Bates - Career

Career

Bates' stage debut was in 1955, in You and Your Wife, in Coventry. In 1956, Bates debuted in London in the West End as Cliff in Look Back in Anger, a role he had originated at the Royal Court and which made him a star. He also played the role on television (for the ITV Playhouse) and on Broadway. In the late 1950s, he appeared in several plays for television in Britain. In 1960, he appeared in The Entertainer opposite Laurence Olivier, his first film role. Bates worked for the Padded Wagon Moving Company in the early 1960s while acting at the Circle in the Square Theatre in New York City. Throughout the 1960s he starred in several major films including Whistle Down the Wind (1961), A Kind of Loving (1962), Zorba the Greek (1964), Philippe de Broca's King of Hearts (1966), Georgy Girl (1966), Far From the Madding Crowd (1967), and in the Bernard Malamud film The Fixer (1968), which gave him an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor. In 1969, he starred in Women in Love.

Bates was handpicked by director John Schlesinger (with whom he had previously worked on A Kind of Loving and Far From The Madding Crowd) to star in the film Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971) in the role of Dr. Daniel Hirsh. Bates was held up filming The Go-Between (1970) for director Joseph Losey, and had also become a father around that time, and so he had to pass on the project. (The part then went first to Ian Bannen, who balked at kissing and simulating sex with another man, and then to Peter Finch, who earned an Academy Award nomination for the role.)

Around this time he appeared as Col. Vershinin in the National Theatre's film of Three Sisters, directed by and co-starring Laurence Olivier.

Bates continued to work in film and television throughout the 1970s and 1980s, and starred in such international films as An Unmarried Woman (1978), Nijinsky (1980), and also played Bette Midler's ruthless business manager in the 1979 film The Rose. On television, his parts ranged from classic roles such as 1978's The Mayor of Casterbridge (his favourite role he said), in the Laurence Olivier Presents episode of Harold Pinter's The Collection (1976), A Voyage Round My Father (1982) working again with Laurence Olivier, An Englishman Abroad (1983) (playing Guy Burgess), and Pack of Lies (1987) (in which he played a British Secret Service agent tracking several Soviet spies). He continued working in film and television in the 1990s, including the role of Claudius in Mel Gibson's version of Hamlet (1990), though most of his roles in this era were more low-key.

In 2001, Bates joined an all-star cast in Robert Altman's critically acclaimed period drama Gosford Park, in which he played the butler Jennings. He later played Antonius Agrippa in the 2004 TV film Spartacus, but died before it debuted. The film was dedicated to his memory and that of writer Howard Fast, who wrote the original novel that inspired the film Spartacus by Stanley Kubrick.

On stage, Bates had a particular association with the plays of Simon Gray, appearing in Butley, Otherwise Engaged, Stage Struck, Melon, Life Support and Simply Disconnected, as well as the film of Butley and Gray's TV series Unnatural Pursuits. In Otherwise Engaged, Bates' co-star was Ian Charleson, who became a good friend, and Bates later contributed a chapter to the 1990 book, For Ian Charleson: A Tribute.

Bates was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1996, and was knighted in 2003. He was an Associate Member of RADA and was a patron of The Actors Centre, Covent Garden, London from 1994 until his death in 2003.