Alan Bates, the flamboyant British stage and screen star who earned international fame in Zorba the Greek, died Saturday in London of pancreatic cancer. He was 69.
A glorious-looking leading man who turned into a richly florid character actor, able to play wise or foolish, gay or straight, sad or funny with equal ease, he was always more interested in the work than the fame.
His most recent film roles included the butler Jennings in Robert Altman's 2001 murder mystery Gosford Park and featured parts in 2002's pulpish thrillers The Sum of All Fears with Ben Affleck and The Mothman Prophecies with Richard Gere.
The two-time Tony winner and former Oscar nominee was knighted last January by Queen Elizabeth II.
Bates was diagnosed with cancer shortly thereafter, but he continued to work during breaks in chemotherapy treatment. He will be seen with a shaved head as Lentulas in the USA Channel miniseries Spartacus, which will air in April. He also has a small role as a duplicitous bureaucrat in the current thriller The Statement.
Bates was born in Allestree, Derbyshire, the son of an insurance broker and housewife, who encouraged his interest in the arts. He earned a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts and, after a two-year stint in the Royal Air Force, his professional career took off at age 22, when he joined the newly formed English Shakespeare Company.
He quickly became recognized as a forceful member of the new breed of English actor, slapped with the "angry young man" tag after appearing in John Osborne's anti-Establishment play Look Back in Anger, even though he played one of the play's gentler characters and was notoriously good-natured in real life. All his life Bates was closely identified with the works of major playwrights, including Osborne, Harold Pinter, Simon Gray, Alan Bennett and Tom Stoppard, as well as William Shakespeare and Anton Chekov.
He played brother to Albert Finney and son to Laurence Olivier in the film adaptation of Osborne's The Entertainer and was the menacing Mick in the film version of Pinter's The Caretaker. But in 1961 he really grabbed attention as the fugitive murderer whom young Hayley Mills thinks in Jesus Christ in Whistle Down the Wind.
International recognition came in 1964 with Zorba the Greek, in which Bates played the repressed young writer Basil who discovers the joy of living after inheriting a Greek island and meeting the lusty Zorba (played by Anthony Quinn).
Film audiences soon saw more and more of Bates--literally when it came to Ken Russell's adaptation of D.H. Lawrence's Women in Love, in which Bates and Oliver Reed wrestled in the nude.
Bates' celluloid résumé also includes the swinging London comedy Georgy Girl opposite Lynn Redgrave; the John Schlesinger-helmed films A Kind of Loving and Far from the Madding Crowd (the latter opposite Julie Christie); An Unmarried Woman (as Jill Clayburg's studly catch); The Rose (with Bette Midler); and A Day in the Death of Joe Egg.
Bates earned an Oscar nomination as a Jewish handyman unjustly jailed in czarist Russia in the 1968 film The Fixer. He won Tony Awards for his roles in Gray's Butley (a role Bates reprised on screen) and another last year for a revival of Ivan Turgenev's Fortune's Fool.
His television credits include An Englishman Abroad and Love in a Cold Climate.
"As he grew older he became an even better actor with much greater depth and breadth," Glenda Jackson, the Oscar-winning British actress turned politician, who starred with Bates in Women in Love, told BBC Radio. "I just thought that, apart from being a really first-rate actor, he was the most delightful person."
Bates' wife, Victoria, died in 1992. One of their twin sons, Tristan, died from an asthma attack in 1990. Bates is survived by his other son, Benedick, and two brothers.