Byline: Alan Bates

from For Ian Charleson: A Tribute
Constable & Co, Ltd, London: 1990
ISBN 0 09 470250 0

"I MET IAN when we were both in Simon Gray's "Otherwise Engaged." It was a particularly happy company. Ian played a surly lodger who took everything for granted and was very bolshy to the landlord. He was marvellous in the part and was immediately accepted by everyone. Though he was the youngest in the cast-still in his early twenties-and it was his first time in the West End, he wasn't overawed. Nor did he play at being the gauche young man. It was simply that, without being arrogant, he was quite fearless and had a natural ease with everybody. ..."

Eulogy for Coral Browne: "I can hear Coral now saying, "So you got stuck with the address, did you, darling, good luck; and don't think I won't be listening." To sum up the life and spirit of Coral Browne in a short address is pretty impossible..."

Alan wrote this memory of fellow actor Harry Andrews for a book called "Memories," published to benefit the Alzheimer's Disease Society. "We meet only a few people like this in our lives, and we do not always realise until too late just how significant they have been."

Tribute for Rosemary Martin: "I worked with her on two plays by David Storey [above: Bates and Martin in Storey's "Stages," 1992] and three by Simon Gray. Every moment on stage with her was not only a pleasure, but a realisation of everything one had ever imagined acting with a colleague to be..."

From Harold Pinter: A Celebration (ISBN 0-571-20661-1): "MY AGENT told me that I'd been offered a play at the Arts Theatre which he couldn't make head nor tail of and the pay was £6 per week. He said I'd had a better offer from BBC Television: 'So there's nothing to discuss, is there?' I said I didn't understand the play either but that I'd had an instinctive reaction to its poetry and humanity and I would definitely be doing it. My agent attended the first night and was first round at my dressing room door. To his great credit he said, 'Never listen to me again.' The play was, of course, The Caretaker.
"Harold's work as a writer has been acclaimed over and over again, quite rightly, but it is about his work as a director that I feel I can say something. ..."

In OLIVIER AT WORK, compiled by the Royal National Theatre with the help of Richard Olivier and Joan Plowright, Alan Bates offers this reminiscence:

"During the filming of 'Three Sisters' (which he was directing) we'd shot a scene I was in, and Olivier said it was marvellous - go and see the rushes with Joan [Plowright]. I did, and didn't like it, and Joan told him I wasn't happy with the scene. He was rather displeased, and said, 'Well there isn't time to reshoot it.' It was quite a chilling moment, and I was very sorry I'd mentioned it - qustioned his judgement. Anyway, I forgot about it, and days later - five minutes before the studio closed - he said very loudly and sharply, 'Oh, we have five minutes, and we're going to do Alan's re-take.' So I pulled myself together and did it. Next day he said, 'What did you think?' and I said I thought it was much better. 'Oh fine,' he said.
"I love the story because he had to stay in charge of the situation - he'd had his judgement qestioned, and he'd had the generosity to give me the time to do it again, on his own terms." |||