Otherwise Engaged: The Life of Alan Bates
by Donald Spoto
Hutchinson £18.99, pp273
The title of this officially sanctioned study of one of the most intriguing theatrical lives comes from the 1975 play, Otherwise Engaged, by Simon Gray, in which Bates starred. But the story that unfolds here suggests it is an unnecessarily detached label to pin on an actor who, while perhaps a mysterious and even ambiguous figure, never appeared distant or uninvolved. Spoto's book makes it clear that the point about Bates, both as a man and actor, is how completely he embodied the vital cultural revolution of the 1960s, with its emphasis on truth, complexity and the 'real' world. He was a sophisticated matinee idol, sure, but of a gritty, emotional kind.
Peter Wyngarde, who, for a decade, was Bates's secret boyfriend, noted early on that the actor had a face 'which falls in love with the camera', and Spoto points out that while this might be an odd inversion of the usual phrase, it is quite telling. Bates's famous green eyes do devour the cinema screen and he often dominates a scene in which he has little to say.
With such powerful personal voltage, first noted by his schoolfriends in Belper, Derbyshire, some might wonder today why Bates did not become a superstar. Spoto, a veteran chronicler of lives of Hollywood giants such as Hitchcock and Bergman, remind us that, in fact, Bates was about as big a star as anyone can be. On stage, he rode the theatrical rollercoaster of the 1960s and 1970s by appearing in John Osborne's groundbreaking Look Back in Anger at the Royal Court and Harold Pinter's The Caretaker, going on to become a dramatic muse both for Pinter and for Simon Gray.
On film he became an icon of the age several times over with his intense performances as a 'Jesus' figure in Whistle Down the Wind, opposite Julie Christie in Far From the Madding Crowd, as Ted Burgess in The Go-Between, as Zorba's willing foil in Zorba the Greek and, perhaps most enduringly, wrestling naked in front of the fire in Women in Love. It was only Bates's intelligent humility and dislike of publicity that checked his ascent to the status of a commodity to be traded on the international entertainment market.
He had one encounter with commercial film-making and did not like it. Working for money and increased exposure on The Running Man was a disenchanting waste of time, despite his famous costars, Lee Remick and Laurence Harvey, and he never wanted to do it again.
Championed by a series of older, wiser men, Bates got into Rada at an early age and was one of the brightest in a stellar year, training alongside Albert Finney, Peter O'Toole, Richard Briers and Peter Bowles. It was a competitive era and Bates regularly doubted his abilities, always vowing to work harder. It was also a sexually adventurous time, although Spoto invites the reader to speculate that the young Bates's attachments to both men and women were tentative at this stage.
He made his name when cast as Cliff, the sympathetic role in Look Back in Anger, and excelled in Pinter's The Caretaker in 1960. Bates felt he could relate to Pinter's characters. 'I understand them,' he once said. 'I know who they are.' For Spoto, this was a veiled reference to his troubled private life with Wyngarde, who he felt was dominating him malevolently. He later referred to this as the 'dark period in my life', yet Bates's relationships were rarely full of light. He had an early chaste encounter with a co-star, Joanna Pettet, and then a more physically realised affair with Israeli Yardena Harari, but he frequently saw men too. He met his wife, Victoria Ward, the mercurial and waif-like mother of his children, when she naughtily posed as a Time magazine journalist and asked him to a party in New York. They eventually found a modus vivendi as loving parents of twin sons, Benedick and Tristan.
Bates's screen role as the confused and sensitive young man in Zorba the Greek apparently gave him a great deal of trouble. He felt he was miscast, Spoto reveals, but the film stands testament to the best of his skill. 'You had to suggest a great deal of complication. Not actually play it,' he once explained. Bates died from cancer in 2003. The actor who emerges in this biography is a compassionate man who was drawn to troubled souls, who disliked the passivity he detected in himself, but was capable of communicating and understanding psychological subtleties.