BRITAIN: British star of stage and screen Sir Alan Bates (69) has died after losing a long fight with cancer, his agent said yesterday. He died in a London hospital on Saturday with his son and brother at his side.
Bates came to fame as one of a new breed of gritty actors as Britain threw off its post-war shackles - the "Angry Young Man" era - and was knighted earlier this year after a career spanning six decades.
His big break came with John Osborne's play Look Back in Anger in 1956. But Bates went on to play classical leads on the stage in Hamlet, Richard III and Anthony and Cleopatra.
On the big screen, he starred in films such as Zorba the Greek, Far From The Madding Crowd and Women in Love, in which he famously grappled naked with Oliver Reed.
More recently, in 2001, he featured in director Robert Altman's period drama Gosford Park.
Born in Allestree, Derby in 1934, Bates won a scholarship to study at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London and began his stage career in the Midlands. He moved to the English Stage Company at the Royal Court Theatre after a period of National Service in the RAF.
During his career, Bates continued to appear in stage works by playwrights as diverse as Shakespeare and Alan Bennett.
Oscar-winning actress Glenda Jackson, who starred with Bates in Women in Love, said he had been unafraid to take risks.
"The longer he lived, the better an actor he became," Ms Jackson, now a politician, told Sky television. "But as he matured as an individual, his acting became broader and deeper, and he always brought the unexpected to everything he did."
Bates continued acting during his illness and threw himself into his work to help cope with two personal tragedies that struck in the early 1990s. His son Tristan died in 1990 from an asthma attack aged just 19, and his wife, the actress Victoria Ford, died two years later from a suspected heart attack.
He was known for being a workaholic, more interested in challenging roles than the international super-stardom that could have been his. - (Reuters, PA)