The Colors of Bates

From childhood Alan Bates has had an urge to play a romantic hero--a Rhett Butler, perhaps, carrying Scarlett O'Hara up the stairway of Tara. Instead, for most of his career he has been the antihero, borne along, as he puts it, "on the new wave of English writers --kitchen sinks and psychology." He was the funny but menacing brother in Harold Pinter's play and movie The Caretaker, the father who half mocks his helpless, brain-damaged child in the filmed version of A Day in the Life of Joe Egg, and the attractive cad in Nothing But the Best and Georgy Girl.

This fall Bates brings to Broadway his most extraordinary anti-hero to date and his first full-fledged comic role. In Simon Gray's Butley, a long-run hit in London, he plays a bisexual college English professor who presides, with glee and gusto, over the breakdown of his life. "This is a full picture of someone falling apart and really rather enjoying it," Bates says. "Butley has a terrific sense of life and the hypocrisies of it. He can't commit himself. When his wife asks him if he wants her back, he replies: 'Frequently, but not permanently.' According to Butley, life repeats itself in ever diminishing climaxes. Isn't that often the way we all feel?"

The part--which requires him to be devastatingly witty and mean, yet somehow sympathetic--is perhaps the most demanding that Bates has ever played. "He's got amazing colors as an actor," says John Frankenheimer, who directed him, together with Co-Star Dominique Sanda, in the recently completed movie Impossible Object. "When I found the script for the picture, I realized that I needed an actor with every nuance--comedy, pathos, the chaos of everyday life--and no self-pity whatever. I saw all these things in Bates' Butley, and I realized that only he could play it." Michael Cacoyannis, who directed Bates as the repressed intellectual in Zorba the Greek, adds: "For most actors it is enough that they manage one mood with competence. Bates reflects three or four moods at the same time."

If Bates has any critics, either personal or professional, it is hard to find them. He is the son of musical parents; his mother was a piano teacher and his father was a professional cellist who gave up art to turn insurance salesman. Bates was only eleven when he decided that he would go on the stage. In school in the Midlands and ever since, he has worked at his profession energetically but not flamboyantly. After six months in repertory in Coventry, he took a job at the Royal Court Theater in London, then landed in John Osborne's Look Back in Anger, the brash, lewd play that brought new life and a new generation to the anemic English stage of the '50s. "It took everybody by the ears," Bates says, "and marked a whole new way of thinking in the British theater."

Despite numerous starring roles since, both in plays and movies, Bates has never achieved the celebrity of a star. He is a private person, and his own personality tends to be hidden, chameleonlike, behind his roles. He even takes on some of the characteristics of his character. When he played in The Caretaker, for instance, he began to fantasize, like Mick, about faraway places. Though he has not fallen apart, like Butley in the present role, he has at least taken on the appearance of the character, and looks disheveled, rumpled and unmanaged, even offstage. However, the most visible eccentricities Bates himself indulges in are vegetarianism and homeopathic medicine.

Folk Mystique. Married only three years ago, Bates, 38, has taken to domesticity with enthusiasm. He and his wife Victoria have a house in London's expensive Hampstead area but spend much of their time with their two-year-old twin sons in a converted barn next to his parents' home in Derbyshire. There the Midlands meet the North Country and green hedges give way to gray stone walls. "Alan is a Derbyshire boy," says Actor Jeremy Brett, a close friend. "That's one better than being a Welshman. The Derby hills have a magic like the Welsh mountains, and they all get this folk mystique." Bates reveled in his role in Women in Love partly because it was filmed on location there and partly because he feels close to Fellow Midlander D.H. Lawrence. His part, in fact, has been interpreted as Lawrence's alter ego.

At some time, Bates would like to do a musical, and he has been taking singing lessons in London. Beyond that, like many other actors, he wants to be a film director--his own kind of film director. "A director should be a psychoanalyst to the actor," he says. "His function should be to shade points. He has an incredibly subtle job of choosing."

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