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As leading man in a 1967 French film called Le roi de coeurs – King of Hearts |
Red hot object of desire
Illtyd Harrington reviews a new biography of Alan Bates, an actor who deserves to be remembered for more than his nude scene with Oliver Reed in Women in Love
Otherwise Engaged: The Life of Alan Bates. By Donald Spoto.
Hutchinson Books £18.99 order this book
’s Women in Love (1969) – a cinematic exercise, viewed by some as homo-eroticism, which still sexually disturbs.
For he also appeared in 80 plays, 45 films and 32 major television dramas. Glenda Jackson, Hampstead and Highgate’s MP, then an outstanding actor not given to easy praise, wrote: “It was not only a pleasure to act with him – it was a pleasure to see him act.”
Born into a middle-class family in the enchanting beauty of Derbyshire, he was driven on like so many stars by a determined mother. With his good looks and what Ken Russell characterised as his “sexual ambivalence”, he moved steadily to fame, becoming an object of desire for both men and women,
Often indecisive, he was capable of terminating love affairs as easily as slamming a door in your face. But when he heard that one of his former lovers, John Curry, the ice skating champion, had been struck down by Aids he went straight to his bedside and brought him home to nurse.
He married the crazed Victoria Ward in 1970, produced twin boys, Ben and Tristan, both blessed with good looks. They existed in the chaotic home background of their Vale of Health house.
Tristan died tragically in squalid circumstances while modelling in Tokyo in 1989, aged 19, probably of an overdose. Victoria, described by a friend as “obsessive, anorexic and pathetic”, went over the edge. Bates’s patience and tolerance towards her was saintly but was shattered by his son’s death.
Spoto is an exhaustive biographer. Nothing daunts him – from The Life of Jesus to Princess Diana – and, to be fair, his catalogue of Bates’s life and work is thorough if sometimes facile.
No stone is left unturned or wart unrouged. It is all here, from the explosive consequence of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger in 1956 at the avant garde Royal Court theatre, when Bates played Cliff, the faithful Welsh friend of the Angry Young Man, to his performance in Zorba the Greek.
His television work included An Englishman Abroad (1983), the story of the Foreign Office traitor who was exiled to grimmest Russia, and an appalling version of Spartacus, shot in Bulgaria, which was released in 2004 after his death.
Osborne’s “kitchen sink” bombshell was the starting point of an exciting eruption of new playwrights including Harold Pinter, Simon Grey who loved Bates and wrote for him, as did David Storey, a welcome, powerful writer. People of the calibre of Granada’s Sydney Newman scooped up Bates for his drama series Armchair Theatre. Bates was, by any definition, a red hot property.
It would be wrong to write him off as a complex man. It was not that easy. He was capable of the most generous acts of practical help and he obviously had a yearning for a monogamous, permanent relationship.
He could have been visualised by Thomas Hardy when he wrote the character of Gabriel Oak in Far from the Madding Crowd or been DH Lawrence’s first choice for his Women in Love.
He died in 2003 in the London Clinic as Sir Alan Bates. In the late 1940s Howard Hughes coined a phrase for his mistress Jane Russell in the film The Outlaw which was banned by the Catholic Church. Russell, he said, was “mean, moody and magnificent”.
Bates was dark, brooding, beautiful, bold but benign.
Sadly, he remained essentially alone. |
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