Onstage, as brilliant, pig‐headed Ben Butley, he's something else. That's modest Alan, the human being, offstage.
#ALAN BATES FULL#
“The audience was terrific,” he said, “because it was full of people who very much wanted to see it and hadn't been able to get a ticket before.” Nobody rushed up the aisles to get to Sardi's, or snare a cab, or escape the muggers, or whatever it is those people rush up the aisles for, yet Bates takes only partial credit for how well the evening worked. The management threw in one extra Friday night preview, and the audience stayed in its seats at the final curtain and cheered. On Tuesday night, Bates returns to the Broadway stage in “Butley” (the play in which he scored a tremendous success in London) and curiosity here has been at such a pitch that New Yorkers bought up all the available preview tickets weeks ago. If you get to know him well, he may tell you how his mother took him, as a child, to the movies, and covered his head when something horrible came on the screen, but he isn't going to reveal anything more personal than that.” Jean Kerr, the playwright for whom he starred in “Poor Richard” in 1964, says, “Alan feels fatuous talking about himself, he feels like a fool. I also served time with the RAF.”Ī bachelor until his middle 30's, he now has a wife maiden name Victoria Ward-and the two aforementioned babies, twin sons named Tristan and Benedick, who are almost 2 years old, and who look “pretty much alike, but they're quite different personalities.” The family is with him in New York (“It's fun, I've always enjoyed New York”) and that's all you're going to hear about it from him. I went to high school, and got a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. I wanted to get out of the established rut. In what may be the longest autobiographical utterance ever to fall from his lips, he once told a journalist, “I come from the middle middle class. It is work-”), he's an anachronism in a world where other actors leap to tell reporters about their psychoanalyses, their grass smoking, their illegitimate babies.īates himself has two legitimate babies, but he won't describe them to the press because he doesn't want them recognized, or bothered. Uncomfortable in interviews (“An interview is as dependent on time and mood as acting is, it's a slightly false situation, you're with someone you don't know, and wouldn't perhaps ever have met, and you have to, sort of, work.
He'll talk about his luck at having started his career with London's innovative Royal Court Theater.
He'll talk about the way the unconscious helps an actor interpret Pinter. “It's done in little bits, and there are people around doing other jobs, and it's out of context.” He shakes his head. He says if the script is right, he makes no fuss, though he always finds the actual shooting of a bare scene more traumatic than he's expected it to be from just sitting home and reading it. “It was shot from too low down, and it was too bright, but that's something else.” I mean, it's one of the great things about the end of ‘King of Hearts.’ Though I didn't think I was particularly well shot.” Suddenly he roars with laughter. He'll talk about “Women in Love,” where he wrestled, naked, with Oliver Reed (“If you've read the book, you know you can't do the film without it”), or the French picture, “King of Hearts,” where he took off everything except his crown. THERE'S no facet of his work Alan Bates won't discuss.
0 kommentar(er)
