Acting has helped Alan Bates come to terms
with the deaths of his son and wife.
Now, at 65, he is playing Mark Antony at the Barbican,
has a new film coming out and is learning to be happy again

Nicci Gerrard
The Observer, Sunday January 23, 2000

"I AM sixty-five. I do not always recognise my life," says Alan Bates. "All the things that have happened ..." He rubs a hand across his bearded chin and doesn't smile.On the screen and on the stage, we have watched Alan Bates grow older - from the first burst of fame when he played Cliff in the original Royal Court "Look Back in Anger," when he was just 24, through "Women in Love" (famously wrestling naked with Oliver Reed), "The Go-Between," "Far From the Madding Crowd," "A Kind of Loving," "Zorba the Greek," "The Entertainer," "Whistle Down the Wind," "An Englishman Abroad," "Georgy Girl," as the loquacious alter ego of David Storey, of Simon Gray. He's been Hamlet, Ivanov, the master builder...
Subtle, loud, eager, angry, sober, dark, innocent, sexy, boyish, sardonic, hopeful, weary. Lines imperceptibly etching themselves on his handsome face, age creeping up on him, until here he is now, rugged, creased, lived in and well-marked by time, which so many actors spend their lives fleeing. He's handsome still, more solid in his rumpled clothes and ample beard, like a grizzled, powerful bear. You feel, looking at him, that he has earned the right to be the scorched Mark Antony in "Antony and Cleopatra" at last (a part offered to him many times over the past decades, which he is finally playing at the Barbican, opposite Frances de la Tour, and back with the RSC after a 20-year absence).

o "The Cherry Orchard" o

He is also appearing with Frances de la Tour, as well as Charlotte Rampling, in Michael Cacoyannis's film adaptation of Chekhov's "The Cherry Orchard ," which opens on 11 February. Cacoyannis directed Bates in "Zorba the Greek," three decades ago. "We had better not wait another 30 years for the next one," says Bates. He calls the film 'wonderful'; he says Cacoyannis - who had dreamt of doing "The Cherry Orchard" for years, raised the money for it himself, and expended on the film 'so much passion and love' - allowed the individual characters to blossom and let the play speak for itself. He calls his role of Uncle Gaev a "real sleeper: he's a hidden part; one of those dreams. I read the script and at first I thought: but everyone else is in charge and I'm just hanging round, on the edge. But actually he's so present; he becomes a major character. I loved working with Charlotte, who plays this divine woman whom everyone loves and no one can get hold of - and that's Charlotte too, that's what Charlotte is like herself. It often happens in Chekhov - he writes so wonderfully of families, and you become a family yourselves. You can't avoid what's written there."
Bates is touching and strange in the film - sad and optimistic, expansive and childish and innocent. He says of acting that "each time, it is as if it is the first time, as if each job is for your first break. I don't know if that attitude is healthy or retarded. Of course, there's an accumulation of approaches, techniques, attitudes, understanding, that help you, maybe help you, not to fail. Yet also you begin at zero. At the start I almost can't walk across the stage, I am so scared. And of course, maturity makes things more deal-able with. You don't care so much about things like reviews, what people think of you. And so do big experiences. Experiences like having children." He pauses, looks at me with his brown and scrupulous eyes. "And like losing children." Ah, there it is. Ten years ago, Alan Bates's life was torn in half: "Literally in half," he says to me now. "Four became two. Like a sniper in your garden." First his son, 19-year-old Tristan [right, in photo], died after an asthmatic attack. Then, some months later, Victoria, his wife of 22 years, also died. "Suddenly it was just me and Benedick [Tristan's twin brother] left."

o The mysteries of going o

These things, he says, change you deeply. "They have to. You have to learn something as you go through, you have to allow them to change you. They are as present as ever to me - but they're not there physically. It's tempting to go all wacko and say, 'He spoke to me yesterday.' Wacko or not, I believe in his presence. I was saying to my friend, Angharad Rees, who suffered the same experience, that all four of us dominate me, dictate who I am. The mysteries of going," he says, "are the same as the mysteries of coming."
He tells me that when his son died, he almost went mad. "You have to go mad with the grief - well, I wasn't mad, of course, I was consumed. Just consumed utterly. You have to go to the extremes or you won't come out the other side. You stand a chance if you let yourself be wrecked. Suppress it and you're in big trouble. And you have in the end to find a way to come to terms with it. Or you take your bottle of aspirins. You go on and you tell yourself they wouldn't have wanted it any other way. That's what my wife kept telling me in those first months, 'He would have wanted you to go on.'" So he poured himself into work. In the first scene he rehearsed after Tristan's death, as Claudius in Zeffirelli's "Hamlet," he found himself standing at the graveside of Ophelia: "Another 19-year-old." He laughs ruefully. "At least I knew how to behave. Actually, I suddenly saw death everywhere. Everything was connected to death. Everything was sharpened, heightened."
The loss, says Bates, was 'terrifying'. He always thinks he doesn't want to talk about it and it's private, but then he finds he does talk still, because: "There it is. There he is." He swings round in his chair and points.

"That's Tristan," signalling a large pen-and-ink drawing of a young man staring down at us. "And that's Benedick. And my wife. And me.'"Three handsome men and a beautiful woman. "There we all are together." He smiles very proudly at the haunted wall. "The family."
His wife died 'mysteriously', he says. The doctors called it a wasting disease. "She had to... she just let life... well, what do I mean? It's too mysterious. She just vanished, She just disappeared. She was always a mysterious creature, with a lot going on in her mind. It was as if one day she said, 'Well, that's it, I'll go now'." He waves his hand gently, as if giving her permission to depart. The loss of half the family induced in him and his surviving son a sort of metaphysical panic: a great whoosh of fear that blew over them for some time.
Acting helped, says Bates. "You have to use your self and yet believe that you are someone else." He has no idea how he became an actor. He grew up in Derbyshire, on the edge of the Peak District (he has a house there and it is still the place that he calls home) and went through school resisting drama ('It was sissy'). Yet he went to the theatre every week, and suddenly, just before his teens, he understood that he was intensely drawn to the theatre and knew, too, that it was where he wanted to be himself.

o I have been a lucky man o

He started to act, and to win competitions, and realised: "Maybe it was something I could do well. I hadn't been very good at school, never really liked it. I was a rather private boy, hidden - maybe acting is where I could show off. Ha! Some critics say I show off rather too much. I love acting. It is a permanent challenge; there is always further to go. Whether it is in film or on the stage, it is about understanding a character, and reaching out. Of course, in the cinema, you're not your own man, whereas in the theatre, when the curtain goes up, it's yours. I often think what a strange job I have - dressing up and pretending to be someone else. But I give who I am to these parts, and if it reveals an aspect of life, then maybe," he shrugs, "maybe I'm doing something a bit useful."
He wants to play "Timon of Athens" (which he was going to do along with Antony, until he came down with a chest infection). He has his eye on Prospero. He thinks that now is a good time to reflect on his life. "How am I going to face the next 30 years of my life? I have particular circumstances, of course: people have died, when I should have died before them. It's given me a different dimension. I don't care so very much what happens to me any more. All that's gone. I guess in work I just hope for more experiences like the ones I've had recently, acting with two women [Frances de la Tour and Charlotte Rampling] who are at the peak of their capacities. When it works, you think, 'I am still functioning. I can still do this.' I have been a lucky man."
And in life? "Ah well, yes, in life, I just think I will let life happen. Not that you lose control or don't care. Just that you don't panic. When I first lost Tristan and Victoria, life made me panic, I was filled with a sense of utter insecurity. Life comes right into your face. Bleak. Now, after all this time, I can deal with my life alone. I'd like to have a companion, but I can be alone. And I find that I can be sort of happy. Sort of." |||

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