Alan's illness had been kept private, and so his death, just after Christmas 2003, came as a shock. Hundreds of newspapers, magazines and web sites picked up the Reuters and AP reports, and many published well-written appreciations of his life and work. Some common errors crept in and proliferated, and I have corrected them below where appropriate. (Alan's wife's name was Victoria Ward, not Ford; she died of an anorexia-like wasting disease, not a heart attack; the cause of Alan's death was pancreatic cancer, not liver cancer or a stroke.)
The selections represent the obituaries that best describe his career and capture his special qualities. There are also several wonderful tributes, and excerpts from longer articles.

Sir Alan Bates, CBE, actor, was born on February 17, 1934. He died of cancer on December 27, 2003, aged 69. Actor who came to prominence in kitchen sink dramas and went on to bring brooding intensity to the works of Chekhov and Hardy.

Sir Alan Bates was one of the foremost actors of his generation, and among the most prolific. He first came to prominence in the realist, "kitchen sink" theatre and cinema of the 1950s and early 1960s, but his versatility and willingness to take risks ensured that he was never confined to one type of character. For all that, there were discernible Bates specialities. He was particularly at home playing brooding, troubled men wrestling with inner demons, whether in the plays of Simon Gray, or as Thomas Hardy's doomed Henchard in the BBC television version of The Mayor of Casterbridge.
Bates had a long and fruitful collaboration with Gray, which stretched over 11 productions in more than 20 years. He also worked regularly with Harold Pinter, both acting in his plays and being directed by him, appeared in three David Storey plays directed by Lindsay Anderson and worked with director John Schlesinger in the cinema and television.
A stocky, handsome man with a shock of dark hair which hardly seemed to grey, though his face became ruddier and more rumpled with age, Bates had no special technique or method; his approach to acting was intuitive.
This made him particularly suited to psychological roles, enabling him to penetrate a character with a greater depth than would have been possible for a more self-conscious and deliberate actor. Directors who worked with Bates noted that he had an almost childlike absence of ego. It was as though he kept a space in himself vacant into which his current character could be poured.
An intensely private man, Bates had no interest in the trappings of stardom. He neither sought nor found the big-money roles that his reputation could have afforded him. At the outset of his career he turned down a seven-year Hollywood contract that was offered to him on the back of his performance as the original Cliff in John Osborne's Look Back in Anger. He preferred not to plan too far ahead, pursuing his career in the same intuitive manner in which he acted. The driving forces in his life were acting and his family. When he suffered the devastating double loss of his wife and a son in the early 1990s, he flung himself into his work with more vigour than ever.

Alan Arthur Bates was born in Derbyshire in 1934, the eldest of three sons. His father was an insurance salesman and a cellist, while his mother was an accomplished pianist. This creative home environment (both his brothers became artists) ensured that Bates's announcement at the age of 11 that he wanted to be an actor was met with a rare level of parental support. His parents sent him to voice-coaching classes, and encouraged him to join the local Shakespeare society after early successes in school plays at Herbert Strutt Grammar in Belper.
At 18, Bates won a place at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, where his course was punctuated by a period of national service in the Royal Air Force. His contemporaries in a particularly fruitful period for the academy included Peter O'Toole and Albert Finney. In 1955 he made his professional debut with the Midland Theatre Company in Coventry, and the following year moved to London to become a founder member of George Devine's English Stage Company at the Royal Court. He was fortunate so early in his career (he was only 22) to have a prominent part of one of the landmarks of modern British theatre, Look Back in Anger (1956). The play moved to New York to great acclaim.
In 1960 Bates made his cinema debut in the film of another Osborne play, The Entertainer. In the same year he received plaudits for his Mick, the antic extrovert of two brothers in the original stage production of Pinter's The Caretaker at the Arts Theatre, a performance he repeated in a suitably claustrophobic film version. Meanwhile, he had made his mark in the cinema with leading roles in Whistle Down the Wind, as the fugitive killer mistaken by children for Jesus Christ, and in A Kind of Loving, from Stan Barstow's novel about a young northerner who makes his girlfriend pregnant and has to live with the bitter consequences. The films marked the directorial debuts of Bryan Forbes and Schlesinger.
Several notable films followed. He played the social climbing clerk in Nothing But the Best (1964), an under-rated satire from a script by Frederic Raphael, the young English writer in Zorba the Greek, a supporting role in the swinging London story, Georgy Girl, and the farmer, Gabriel Oak, in Far From the Madding Crowd, an ambitious rendering of the Thomas Hardy novel, scripted by Raphael and directed by Schlesinger.
In 1968 Bates went to Hollywood for The Fixer, a ponderous adaptation of Bernard Malamud's novel about the travails of a Jew in Tsarist Russia, which nevertheless brought him an Oscar nomination.
His contribution to Ken Russell's flamboyant treatment of the D.H. Lawrence novel, Women In Love, was overshadowed by a nude wrestling scene with Oliver Reed, an unprecedented display of male nakedness in the British cinema. He brought a quiet intelligence to The Go-Between, directed by Joseph Losey from a Pinter script, and played the father of a spastic daughter in the film of Peter Nichols's darkly funny autobiographical play, A Day in the Death of Joe Egg.

Despite having said he would never marry, Bates did so in 1970, his wife Victoria giving birth to twin sons in the same year. His career continued to flourish. In the theatre he began his association with Storey and Anderson on In Celebration, gave an intelligent reading of Hamlet and in 1971 he played one of his most celebrated roles, the sardonic academic in Simon Gray's Butley. He won the Evening Standard's best actor award and later played the part in New York. Butley was filmed, as was In Celebration.
He worked with Storey and Anderson again on Life Class (1974), while other Gray plays included Otherwise Engaged, for which he won a Variety Club award, its sequel, Simply Disconnected, and Melon. |There was another Variety Club award for his part in a revival of Osborne's A Patriot For Me (1983), which he played at Chichester, in the West End and in Los Angeles. His other London stage work during the 1980s included Strindberg's The Dance of Death and alternating Chekhov's Ivanov and Much Ado About Nothing.
He kept busy in the cinema, though few of his later films matched the distinction of the earlier ones. He admitted that he took work to pay the school fees. But there were impressive performances, notably as the impresario Diaghilev in Nijinsky.

Television had generally come third to the stage and cinema and it was not until 1978, with Dennis Potter's adaptation of The Mayor of Casterbridge, that Bates had an impact. He played opposite Laurence Olivier in John Mortimer's autobiographical A Voyage Round My Father.
His best television role was as the drunken, louche spy Guy Burgess in An Englishman Abroad (1983), based by Alan Bennett on the unlikely meeting in Moscow between Burgess and the actress Coral Browne (who played herself).
Schlesinger directed and Bates's performance brought him a Bafta award. Bates played Marcel Proust in a later Bennett play, 102 Boulevard Haussmann, a study of the writer's creative roots.

In 1990, Bates's son Tristan died suddenly in Tokyo. The Japanese inquest ruled that he had died from viral pneumonia but the British coroner recorded an open verdict. Two years later, his wife Victoria went to Italy in an attempt to recover from the recent additional losses of her mother and sister, and died there, alone, of a grief-induced wasting disease. Devastated, Bates sought refuge in his work, refusing to interrupt filming of Gray's television drama Unnatural Pursuits, in which he played an outrageously drunken writer.
Although his marriage was never easy, it was exceptionally close, and Bates's friends, always protective of him, rallied around. In 1994 Bates helped his mourning process by financing the Tristan Bates Theatre in the Covent Garden Actors' Centre to honour his son's memory. He remained particularly close to his surviving son, Benedick, who followed him into the acting profession.
At the National Theatre, meanwhile, Bates was reunited with Storey and Anderson on Stages, and in 1995 he returned to the West End, after a long gap, to play the title role in Ibsen's The Master Builder at the Haymarket, directed by Peter Hall.
Two years later came his 11th collaboration with Gray on Life Support, in which he played a man with a dying wife. In 1999 he joined the Royal Shakespeare Company to play a wistful and elegiac Antony opposite Frances de la Tour in Antony and Cleopatra, while his penniless aristocrat in Turgenev's Fortune's Fool on Broadway (2002), directed by Arthur Penn, won him a Tony award.
Later television work included Oliver's Travels, from a novel by Alan Plater featuring a lecturer who lived his life according to anagrams. It was not a success and Plater let it be known that he would have preferred Tom Courtenay.
Bates was happier as the eccentric Uncle Matthew in Love in a Cold Climate, from two Nancy Mitford novels, and he played George V in Bertie and Elizabeth (2002), charting the love affair between George VI and Queen Elizabeth. In the cinema he was the alcoholic quack doctor in Sam Shepard's Silent Tongue and Jennings the butler in Robert Altman's country house whodunit, Gosford Park.

In private, Bates was said to be hilariously witty, and was much in demand as a speechmaker at friends' functions. He did not enjoy talking about himself and always resisted attempts to analyse his acting. Whenever he had the chance, he would retreat to his native Derbyshire, where he enjoyed hill walking.
He was appointed CBE in 1995 and knighted in 2003. He is survived by his son.

The airwaves have been heavy with unstinted praise for Alan Bates since his untimely death at the London Clinic at the weekend. All the tributes were more than justified for one of the great actors ever to grace the screen and stage. I'll admit that the "Angry Young Man of the Sixties" tag puzzled me somewhat. Perhaps some people are confusing the roles he played with the man himself. For if Alan was a giant, as undoubtedly he was, then in my experience he was a gentle giant.
Although I was only fortunate to work with him once - not for want of asking - on Women In Love, I followed his career closely. I saw most of his films and a number of his plays, and never ceased to be impressed by the total conviction with which he invested his roles - comedy, drama and everything in between.
Who can forget his rare beauty in Whistle Down the Wind, The Caretaker, Georgy Girl, An Unmarried Woman or King of Hearts? His ability to make you care about the disillusioned Butley in Simon Gray's play? The dignity of his scene in Gosford Park in front of the mirror? Anyone who was lucky enough to catch him in Yasmina Reza's An Unexpected Man, in New York two years ago, will remember the sexual tension he was able to arouse simply by putting his hand on the back of Eileen Atkins's seat on the train, inspiring an audible intake of breath from the audience.
I recall him playing Kuzoukin in Turgenev's Fortune's Fool on Broadway last year. His ability to hold the stage was typified in a long monologue which was a symphony of dance, gesture and intonation, revealing every nuance of the complex Kuzoukin - it deservedly won him every prize that the New York theatre gives out for an outstanding actor. Yet for all the kudos from the audiences, what Alan most wanted to know was if I'd noticed what an excellent actor his son, Ben, was, sharing the stage with his illustrious dad.
Women in Love: Alan and Glenda and Olly and Jennie. Sparking the role of Birkin with his mercurial gifts, Alan - always alert to discovering the truth of a character - grew a beard to enhance his resemblance to the author DH Lawrence, whose mouthpiece he would be in the story. It may not have disguised his own handsomeness, but he nonetheless gave us a hero for modern times which, ironically, emerged from a character who lived in the early 1920s. Real people. Alan made it so. His sprightly step. That speech to the fig at table. Running naked through a wheat field at dawn ... Who can forget the indelible impressions of vigour and intellect combined that became his signature?
And although it's close to 40 years since that nude wrestling match with Oliver Reed, I remember vividly the untiring effort Alan put into it. Oliver, a fine physical specimen, thought the less muscular Alan would be a pushover. Filled with confidence, Olly spent most of his evenings prior to the scene in more or less party mood, while Alan, after a hard day's filming, would suffer several hours of hands-on professional wrestling instruction. The result was that when the time came to shoot it, Alan was more than a match for Oliver. For that he gained Oliver's total respect - which was never easily won.

I last saw Alan in America, just over a year ago, at the Philadelphia Film Festival, where he was accepting an award on someone else's behalf. The someone else was the director John Schlesinger, who had recently suffered a stroke and was too ill to accept the Lifetime Achievement Award that he so richly deserved.
Alan and I had a long chat covering half a lifetime of missed opportunities and possible plans for the future. I remember thinking that I had seen him looking better - but one hardly looks relaxed on these occasions. If he was unwell then, he had overcome his personal discomfort to do justice to an artist he had worked with and respected, ignoring selfish considerations to deliver his appreciation. It was one of the finest and most sensitive tributes I have ever heard.
I only learned of Alan's illness a few days ago, and immediately rang the London Clinic in the hope of having a few words. Alas, he was sleeping at the time, but his son, Ben, who took the call, promised to convey my best wishes. I hope he was able to do so at what must have been a difficult time. I have to trust that Alan knows that of the many actors I have worked with, he is one of the three I truly came to love and respect. Like Ursula in Women In Love, I come to the void he has left with empty hands, except to say quietly: "Look what a flower I've brought you."
Meanwhile, they are showing yet another repeat of the nude wrestling scene. Who knows whether Alan and Oliver are once again stripping off for a celestial remake of that memorable encounter in that big film studio in the sky.

©2003 Associated New Media

ALAN BATES'S special gift was to remain perennially modern. As a young actor in the 1960s and early 1970s, he struck critics as one of the key voices of a cocky era. Nobody could be brash, cheeky and rebellious quite like Bates.
But as he aged, and particularly when he appeared in the plays of his friend Simon Gray, cockiness often became a tough-minded cynicism that seemed to reflect the troubled Zeitgeist of the closing decades of the last century. Nobody could blend disillusion and defiance, mockery and self-mockery quite like Bates. His father was an insurance salesman, well-to-do and a fine amateur cellist, yet Bates was always identified with a generation of actors from working-class origins, among them Peter O'Toole, Albert Finney, Tom Courtenay and Bates's other contemporaries at RADA, who brought fresh energy and an exhilarating abrasiveness to a bland and often dull British theatre.
It is not surprising that he first made an impact in John Osborne's Look Back in Anger in 1956, yet it is surprising that the part he took was Cliff, the stolid best friend of the play's raging anti-hero. Stolid Bates wasn't, as subsequent roles were to emphasise. The rule for casting directors became this: Want a maverick? Want a sharp, smart, rather dangerous young man? Send for Alan Bates. Certainly, he was born to play the role of the taunting, menacing young builder in The Caretaker, the play that put Harold Pinter firmly on the theatrical map in 1960.
He was also instrumental in launching Simon Gray's career as a dramatist. First as a sadistic university lecturer in Butley in 1971, then as a publisher trying to escape his friends' and family's emotional demands in Otherwise Engaged in 1975.
He held the stage with wit, style and withering sophistication. It was much the same with the work of the young David Storey. Who created the role of the embittered son who tried to transform a family reunion into a civil war in In Celebration in 1969 and the art teacher who coolly provoked the near-rape of a model in the classroom in Life Class in 1974? By now the answer was almost inevitable. Alan Bates.
He could have followed O'Toole to Hollywood -there were plenty of invitations after the success of Look Back -but for him movies were secondary to the stage. However, he gave notable performances as a northern lad forced into marriage by his girl's pregnancy in A Kind of Loving, Julie Christie's working-class lover in The GoBetween, Anthony Quinn's cool young employer in Zorba, and a fly, go getting estate agent in the underrated Nothing But the Best.
As that list suggests, Bates did not lack range. He could play classical as well as modern: the archetypal young pup, Hamlet, in 1971; a hilariously sassy Petruchio for the RSC in 1973; and an over-the-hill Antony for the same company opposite Frances de la Tour's Cleopatra in 1999. And even though his most familiar mode was sceptical and sardonic, he brought both weight and a deep melancholy to that RSC Antony, to the title character of Ibsen's Master Builder and, on television, to Michael Henchard in Hardy's Mayor of Casterbridge. I will also recall him in another of Gray's plays, Life Support, in 1997. He played a Bates the urbane ironist was on display.
Yet there were many moments when his fists clenched or his face bunched or his red-rimmed eyes seemed to squint in baffled desperation, and you knew that you were in the presence of a pain almost too intimate to watch. Only a major actor could have achieved that.

© Times Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved.

DIED. ALAN BATES, 69, bluff, beguiling English actor; of pancreatic cancer; in London. A modest giant bestriding nearly a half-century of excellence, the Derbyshire lad co-starred at 22 in the original London stage production of Look Back in Anger. But the Angry Young Man tag never quite fit Bates' protean gifts. As a charming killer in Nothing But the Best or a Jewish prisoner in The Fixer, wrestling nude in Women in Love or incarnating the lonely spy Guy Burgess in An Englishman Abroad, he brought strength, delicacy, wit and humanity to each role.
In films he often chaperoned showier stars (Anthony Quinn in Zorba the Greek, Lynn Redgrave in Georgy Girl, Bette Midler in The Rose) to Oscar nominations; he was the solid ground they danced on. The stage allowed him to dominate. He radiated silky malevolence in Harold Pinter's The Caretaker, a tonic cynicism in Simon Gray's Butley, a charming naivete in Turgenev's Fortune's Fool.
Bates' brilliance was too often taken for granted. His absence leaves a profound hole in our theater and film life.

OFTEN sexy, always surly, Sir Alan Bates made his name as the angry young man of the so-called kitchen-sink dramas of the 1960s. In reality, he was a quiet character whose private life eventually dissolved in unjustified heartbreak.
He died last weekend, aged 69, after a stroke, following liver [correction: pancreatic] cancer. Brave to the end despite the chemotherapy that robbed him of his dark good looks, he made one of his last public appearances at a memorial service for fellow actor Richard Harris. Together, they had burst on to the London scene in a wave of working-class films that marked the egalitarianism of the '60s.
With his Derbyshire background and rugged, brooding presence, Bates was perfect for these dramas, with their realistic northern settings. He made his stage debut in the original Royal Court production of John Osborne's Look Back In Anger in 1956 and made his first film appearance in The Entertainer, with Laurence Olivier, in 1960. He acquired a firm female fan base as a working-class dreamer in the 1962 film A Kind Of Loving. In 1970, Bates bared all in a famous scene with Oliver Reed in the film of D. H. Lawrence's Women In Love.

Bates never liked to talk about himself, until the death of one of his twin sons, followed by the death of wife Victoria, caused him to try to explain his pain, which he said had both devastated him and spurred him to greater efforts in his work.
Bates met Victoria at a party in New York in 1962, when she was an assistant on an American magazine. He was immediately taken by her beauty and a reticence to match his own and they were married six years later.
The often volatile marriage lasted 24 years. When tragedy struck, Bates was helpless to stop his wife fading away, following the deaths of her father, mother and sister and then the couple's son, Tristan, who succumbed to an allergic attack in 1990, aged 19. While planning an Asian holiday, Tristan had a cholera vaccination and, within hours, had collapsed and died.
A grieving Victoria developed an anorexia-like disease, wasted away and effectively died of a broken heart. Bates buried her next to their son in Derbyshire and threw himself into his work, establishing a small theatre he called the Tristan Bates.

LAST year, Bates won a Broadway award for his role as a Russian aristocrat in Turgenev's Fortune's Fool,  in which he appeared with his surviving son, Benedick.
During the '60s, he seemed to be in every important film, including Georgy Girl, Far From The Madding Crowd and Zorba The Greekand the play The Caretaker. In a memorable 1983 performance, he played the spy Guy Burgess in the moving TV play, An Englishman Abroad. Who will ever forget his portrayal of the lonely, disgraced Burgess in his Moscow exile playing his favourite Jack Buchanan record on a cherished wind-up gramophone to Coral Browne. 'Did you know him?' he asked Browne wistfully as he desperately sought a bond with home. She told him they had been lovers.

Two years ago he starred in the award-winning Gosford Park. Such performances led to a knighthood last year. In latter years, Bates pumped money into the theatre he had dedicated to his son Tristan and pursued his own career with renewed vigour.
"I thought: `I've had 50 years of experience and Tristan had only 20'," he said.
"In a sense, you start to do it for them. I haven't died yet. I have my own span of life to live. They wouldn't want me to lie down until I am supposed to."
But, as the tragedies finally took their toll on his own health, it was a time he could put off no longer.