English actor Alan Bates was BOTD in 1934. Born in Derby, he showed an early interest in acting, and won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, where his classmates included Peter O’Toole and Albert Finney. He made a storming debut in the 1956 premiere of John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger, launching him to stardom. He made his screen debut in the 1960 film The Entertainer, he became a leading figure in British cinema, starring in Carol Reed’s The Running Man, John Schlesinger’s A Kind of Loving and Far From the Madding Crowd, and Joseph Losey‘s film of L. P. Hartley’s novel The Go-Between. In Women in Love, Ken Russell’s glorious insane adaptation of D. H. Lawrence‘s novel, Bates and co-star Oliver Reed famously wrestled in the nude (with Bates later being acknowledged as the more well-endowed performer). Rakishly handsome with a mellifluous voice, his work was characterised by a sense of mischief and danger, a quality possibly fuelled by his lifelong bisexuality. Married with two sons, he had relationships with men throughout his life, though avoided speaking publicly about his sexuality. On stage and screen, he was much bolder, playing a gay alcoholic in Simon Gray’s play Butley, the ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev in Nijinsky, the gay Cambridge spy Guy Burgess in An Englishman Abroad and a closeted dog fancier in an adaptation of J. R. Ackerley‘s novel We Think the World of You. He rarely appeared in Hollywood films, but played a convincingly sleazy manager in The Rose, a fictionalised biopic of Janis Joplin starring Bette Midler. Largely retired by the 1990s, he had vivid supporting roles in Hamlet, Gosford Park and the 2000 TV adaptation of Nancy Mitford’s novel Love in a Cold Climate. His lovers included the actor Nickolas Grace and Olympic skater John Curry, whom whom he had a two-year relationship until Curry’s death from AIDS in 1994. He established the Tristan Bates Theatre in London in memory of his son Tristan who died at 19. Bates died in 2003 aged 69.