Bates, Alan Arthur

Bates, Alan Arthur (1934–2003), English actor, who made his first appearance in London at the Royal Court in 1956, where later the same year he attracted favourable notice as Cliff Lewis in Osborne's Look Back in Anger (NY, 1957). He then played Edmund Tyrone in O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night (1958). It was, however, as Mick in Pinter's The Caretaker (1960; NY, 1961) that he made his first outstanding success. He also appeared as Richard III at the Stratford (Ontario) Festival in 1967. In 1969 he returned to the Royal Court in David Storey's In Celebration and in 1970 (London, 1971) he was seen as Hamlet at the Nottingham Playhouse. By now one of the country's leading actors, he embarked on an interesting series of classical and modern roles: from the title-role in Simon Gray's Butley (1971; NY, 1972) to an ‘effervescently likeable’ Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre to new plays by Storey (Life Class, 1974) and Gray (Otherwise Engaged, 1975). In 1976 he played Trigorin in Chekhov's The Seagull, and he was seen in two more of Gray's plays, Stage Struck (1979) and Melon (1987). He also excelled as Colonel Redl, the Jewish homosexual tricked into treachery, in Osborne's A Patriot for Me (Chichester and London, 1983); as Edgar in Strindberg's The Dance of Death (1985); and in the title-role of the voyeuristic narrator in Shaffer's Yonadab (National Theatre, 1986). In 1989 he played Chekhov's Ivanov and Benedick in Much Ado about Nothing in repertory.