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Dimanche 28 janvier 7 28 /01 /Jan 07:20

Alan Bates n'est qu'un exemple, comme James Dean, son homosexualité, l'attrait pour un jeune acteur plus âgé, a favorisé son début de carrière.

coucher, coucher, coucher, ils me font ch... toutes celles et ceux qui prétendent y avoir été forcé(e)s ouais ! mon oeil !!!

et 10, 20, même 30 ans après osent dire qu'ils ont été violés...et "innocemment" demandent "réparation"...thème récurrent ces temps-ci dans les media...parlons-en

De nos jours son premier amant serait encore condamnable pour pédophilie puisqu'il n'avait,-dans les annés(19)50- que 15 ans.

Devant l'exemple des gars qui se sont cachés, les gens qui ont ce genre de notoriété ont fort à réfléchir sur leur éventuelle "sortie du placard"!

-"La longue carrière de l'acteur britannique Alan Bates a commencé dans la ville de Derby, dans les Midlands , où il a été présenté au théâtre par son ambitieuse mère Mary.
énormément
C'était une forte femme, exceptionnellement forte qui allait exercer une puissante influence , peut-être disproportionnée, sur son fils préféré pour le reste de sa vie.

Fasciné par la scène dès son plus jeune âge, Alan n'avait que 15 ans quand il écrivit pour la première fois à la Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, à Londres, pour postuler pour une place d'acteur.

En cela, il a été fortement encouragé par un jeune acteur nommé John Dexter, qui travaillait dans et autour de Derby à cette époque.

À 24 ans, Dexter était considérablement plus âgé que le beau jeune Alan, et pas du tout gêné d'être homosexuel.

"Alan s'est lié d'amitié avec John Dexter dont mon père n'était pas content", se souvient Martin, le frère cadet de Bates.

Sans se décourager, Alan a persisté dans cette amitié et, après avoir été accepté par RADA,(The Royal Academy of Dramatic Art), en 1954, a déménagé dans la même pension de famille que Dexter dans le nord de Londres.

Inévitablement, il y avait des rumeurs d'une affaire homo, mais si elles étaient vraies, aucun des deux hommes n'en parlait jamais.

Les logements suivants d'Alan, après un bref passage au service militaire, étaient encore plus bohèmes - un appartement partagé à Londres (Battersea) avec les étudiants en art dramatique Roy Kinnear, Ian White et Keith Baxter.

"C'était une sorte de refuge pour marginaux", se souvient Baxter.

«Nous avons ménagé de la place pour les incertains : certains étaient hétéro, d'autres étaient gais, d'autres ne savaient pas ce qu'ils étaient, et d'autres ont "navigué, slalomé entre les deux aux "heures de pointe" en fonction de la circulation.-lol-

Les jeunes acteurs et actrices étaient très soucieux d'être discrets, gardant strictement les détails de leurs liaisons romantiques pour eux-mêmes - eux pas plus qu'Alan, qui avait une horreur marquée de heurter les sensibilités pudiques voire pudibondes victoriennes de sa mère qui en eût été offensée !

Néanmoins, les potins de théâtre étaient, à l'époque, centrés sur ses amitiés avec ses contemporains masculins. Il a été noté qu'aucune femme ne semblait lui inspirer autre chose qu'une amitié sociable.

Alan (à G et Peter )

Sa première relation sérieuse à long terme ce fut avec Peter Wyngarde qui commença en 1956, alors Alan faisait ses débuts professionnels dans la pièce révolutionnaire de John Osborne "Look Back In Anger" au Royal Court Theatre de Londres.

Cet automne-là, Wyngarde arriva dans les coulisses pour féliciter Alan et, quelques semaines plus tard, ils se mirent ensemble.

Peter Wingarde avait de l'assurance et un grand équilibre social, Peter, avec ces atouts a remporté une belle partie. Bien que, juste six mois plus vieux que Alan, il avait déjà beaucoup voyagé et était beaucoup plus urbain et expérimenté dans les chemins emmêlés et confus de la vie d'acteur.

Alan, d'un autre côté, était vulnérable, même souple. Il a été captivé par la personnalité décisive et dynamique de Peter. Dès lors commença une période au cours de laquelle le partenariat avec Alan s'avra un avantage professionnel pour Peter

Ce n'était pas une relation entièrement exclusive. Lorsque la pièce "Look Back in Anger" fut transférée à Broadway, à l'été 1957, Alan tomba dans un groupe privilégié mais plutôt luxueux de riches New-Yorkais.

"Il était sexuellement très précoce", selon Paul Taylor, un compagnon venu plus tard. "Il avait été très passionné pendant son séjour à la RAF - et il était à New York." "

C'est au cours de cette période que les éclaireurs de talents des grandes compagnies cinématographiques ont commencé à tapoter sur la porte du vestiaire d'Alan, désireux de discuter de contrats à long terme.

Google Traduction pour les entreprises : Google Kit du traducteur Gadget Traduction

"He was sexually very precocious," according to Paul Taylor, a later companion. "He had been very passionate during his time in the RAF - and he was in New York."

It was during this period that talent scouts from the big movie companies first began tapping on Alan's dressing-room door, eager to discuss longterm deals.

It was not an entirely exclusive relationship. When Look Back in Anger transferred to Broadway, in the summer of 1957, Alan fell in with a privileged but rather louche set of wealthy New Yorkers.

"He was sexually very precocious," according to Paul Taylor, a later companion. "He had been very passionate during his time in the RAF - and he was in New York."

It was during this period that talent scouts from the big movie companies first began tapping on Alan's dressing-room door, eager to discuss longterm deals.

But when he learned that they had no specific projects or roles on offer - merely a weekly salary - he politely bade them good night.

"Even though it offered security, I felt it meant being owned by somebody," he said, preferring to take his chances amid the uncertain, shifting fortunes of a self-directed career.

"I didn't want to be someone else's property and be told what to do."

Years later, that was precisely how he described the difficulties that were beginning to occur in his relationship with Peter Wyngarde.

Wyngarde had become something of a Svengali to him, toughening Alan up on the business side of acting, advising him on what to read, and introducing him to influential producers and writers.

Alan looked to him for advice on just about everything, but he told friends that he feared being overwhelmed - and resented his own passivity and willing subordination.

Colleagues referred to Peter - perhaps rather harshly, perhaps not - as "The Major".

Later, Alan described these years as "the dark period of my life".

But to be fair to Wyngarde, at least some of the shadows were cast by Alan's own carefully created public image, which was necessarily at odds with his private-life, leaving him full of inner tension-and doubts about his future.

It was not until Bates was nearly 30-years-old that he began to consider how he might end his relationship with Peter and start looking for his own place to live in.

But, now, his life took another unexpected turn with the entry of three powerful and highly influential women.

One of them was Joanna Pettet, who played his love interest in a Broadway production of the play Poor Richard in 1964.

As other women had before her, Joanna fell madly in love with her handsome co-star.

"I was just besotted," she says. "He was my first and greatest love."

With huge excitement she accepted Alan's invitation to join him for a holiday on the Caribbean island of St Thomas - but it did not go quite as she had expected.

Joanna tells how Alan had booked one room for them at a simple but romantic hotel, where, on the first night of their holiday, they dined quietly before retiring.

"We slept in the same bed," she recalls, "but nothing happened."

She was too nervous to ask if something was suddenly wrong, "and I was not old enough or sophisticated enough to be aggressive with him - it just didn't seem right. Then we heard the couple next door making violent love, and Alan got out of bed and turned on the air-conditioner, to counter the noise."

The holiday ended as chastely as it had begun, without any discussion on the subject. Joanna was understandably confused, but Alan was so genial and amusing that her love for him was undimmed.

"From our first week of rehearsals for Poor Richard, I thought he was the most beautiful man I'd ever seen in my life," she said.

"Then I learned that he was fine and good and beautiful inside, too. I didn't ever want to lose his friendship."

But she was not the only attractive blonde competing for his attention. Just before Christmas that year, a group of young women who worked for American magazines appeared outside the theatre to ask for Alan's autograph.

As they were leaving, one of the girls turned and invited him to a party at her apartment, and asked if she could interview him for Time magazine.

Typically, as it was easier to accept than to find a reason to decline, Alan agreed.

Over the next few days, he found himself unable to put from his memory this pale, slender blonde. With her warm and adoring gaze, and British accent, she seemed to him lonely and needy of comfort, despite her liveliness. To Alan, such vulnerability was always irresistible.

The girl's name was Victoria Ward. She had a taste for shocking-pink mini-skirts - the shorter the better - and was, in the words of one contemporary, "a very sexy girl who attracted men easily".

At the party in her apartment - to mark her 25th birthday - Alan quickly found himself the object of her undivided attention.

Just like Joanna Pettet, however, Victoria found him frustratingly elusive. Alan seemed uneasy, apparently on the alert for a telephone call or the arrival of a friend.

"At last the latecomer had arrived," she wrote in her diary, "accepting on the stairs the offer of coffee rather than mulled wine. He told Alan he was leaving, and the latecomer and I had a staring match which I couldn't maintain.' Alan then departed with the young man.

A few days later, Alan rang Victoria to thank her for the evening and said nothing about his hasty departure.

He took her out for a meal soon afterwards to a famous Manhattan restaurant.

"Absolutely fabulous," she wrote in her diary.

"Dim corner table - mushroom and spinach salad and wine. Strolled back through freezing streets, my hand in Alan's pocket."

It could have been a scene straight from one of his movies.

But with Alan Bates, things were never simple when it came to romance, and there was another twist in the story to come.

Staying in Rome in the spring of 1965, to record a TV drama, he met a strikingly attractive Israeli dance student named Yardena Harari.

They went to dinner, then to a nightclub. That June, he took her to a Beatles concert, then flew her off to the South of France, where they checked into the fashionable and romantic Colombe d'Or Hotel.

As before, however, sharing a room was not a prelude to anything sexual. Yardena was left as confused as Joanna and Victoria.

Everything changed after Alan persuaded Yardena to accompany him back to England and they arrived at the flat in Kensington where, officially, he was still living with Peter Wyngarde.

So swiftly did the relationship move that within a very short time he had

bought his first house - 122 Hamilton Terrace, St John's Wood - and moved Yardena into it.

"We never really furnished the place at all," she recalled, "and for a while there was no water in the house - just a table and our bed."

Alan had embarked on what may well have been his most enduring and passionate sexual relationship with a woman.

Soon - to Yardena's great astonishment - he asked her to marry him.

"I was, of course, hesitant because I knew about Peter Wyngarde," she says.

"I told Alan that I had to know if he was a man with a basically homosexual or heterosexual image of himself. He didn't answer, and to this day I don't know.

"He wasn't at peace with himself, and sometimes I think he took it out on women, who were such a challenge to this confused sense that he had of himself."

Yardena returned to Israel, and when she came back to England later in the year she found Alan's romantic feelings for her - such as they had been - much changed. All his energies were once again concentrated on acting.

"His work was an escape hatch for him," she said later, "a way of avoiding the challenge of intimacy in any category".

Astonishingly, through all of this, Alan had never confronted Peter Wyngarde about their relationship, and never formally acknowledged or discussed with him what he had told a few friends - that he wanted to terminate all contact between them.

This was typical.

A natural peacemaker, he tried to avoided confrontations whenever he could, especially in personal relationships, expecting things to sort themselves out of their own accord.

The result, according to friends, was that he often unintentionally made situations more difficult, and ultimately more distressing, both for himself and others.

Finally, on a visit to their Kensington flat to collect the last of his clothes, he blurted out to Wyngarde: "I think I should get married."

At that point, having cooled towards Yardena, he had no intention of marrying anyone. His rejection of Peter, however, was clear.

"I thought we had a really important and mutually beneficial relationship," Wyngarde said sadly many years later.

"We seemed to share the same romantic ideas - that we would be like the Oliviers. I would direct plays for him to act in, and we would have a wonderful joint career together."

The notion of marriage, Wyngarde thought, was suggested by those who considered it essential for Alan's image and career.

"And that", he concluded, "was the end of our dream."

Or perhaps only of his own.

Felicity Kendal recalls that Alan "talked about his time with Peter Wyngarde as a very unhappy period. He didn't find it easy to make light of.

"Normally he could extricate himself when it got too intense and people were too demanding. But he couldn't get out of this one for a long time."

Another friend, Conrad Monk, was frank in summing up the conviction of many: "Peter had a catastrophic influence on Alan - he just bullied and dominated him. We knew the relationship was very bad, and we were glad when it was over."

With Yardena back in Israel and Peter no longer part of his life, Alan took the opportunity to invite both Victoria Ward and Joanna Pettet to a gathering at his new house in Hamilton Terrace.

With puckish perversity, he gave each of the two women the clear impression that he was ardently in love with the other - a tactic perhaps designed to short-circuit the tender inclinations of both. Joanna coped rather better with this than did Victoria.

Meanwhile, for those of his friends who thought that his long homosexual relationship with Wyngarde had been a phase which he was about to forget, Alan had a surprise.

On a trip to Canada in the autumn of 1967, he had been enchanted by a drama student who came backstage to meet him after a performance of Richard III.

Almost at once, he had invited the young man to share his quarters.

Born in Lancashire in 1947, Paul Taylor was just 20 when he met the 33-year-old Bates. Slim and blond, he had a warm smile, ready wit and expressive eyes.

He had bought his ticket to Richard III on a brief holiday in Toronto.

"There was an immediate rapport," he said later of his meeting with Bates. "Almost at once, it seemed, Alan invited me to live with him. I accepted."

Paul was no gushing, subordinate fan. He and Alan shared many interests, from cooking to the fine points of tending an English garden.

"Alan taught me a great deal, and we had a very intense and loving sexual relationship," said Paul, who moved in to the house in London when they returned to England.

Alan was now keeping increasingly glamorous company.

During another transatlantic visit a year later, following the filming of D. H. Lawrence's Women In Love, he attended a private, men-only party high in the Hollywood Hills, where he was reunited with the actor Rock Hudson, whom he had briefly met at a New York gathering a decade previously.

Like Alan, Hudson ferociously guarded his unconventional private life.

There was, Alan said later, a strong mutual attraction between them - but what happened subsequently was not a high point in his romantic career.

The wine and champagne flowed, and as the evening progressed, Alan - who was also taking alcohol-laced cough syrup for a bout of flu - became more and more inebriated.

Hudson, who lived nearby, offered to escort him back to his room at the Beverly Hills Hotel. But no sooner had the two men reached his room than Alan became suddenly and violently ill.

Rock did the necessary tidying up, set out a bottle of water, ensured that Alan was feeling better, then quietly withdrew without so much as a farewell kiss. Some encounters do not turn out as the principals and the gossips expect.

On his return to London early in 1969, Alan found several cards and letters from Victoria awaiting his attention.

Over the next few months they met often, and rumours of romance began to swirl in certain theatrical circles.

"Oh, he's back with women again, is he?" said the director Peter Wood. "Really, he is so tedious!"

There was no doubt that Alan was keenly attracted to Victoria's fey spirit, her intellectual curiosity and her infectious energy.

He also loved her vulnerability and, always preferring to be the care-giver in any relationship, he was eager to be a kind of older brother or father figure, no matter what gender the partner.

With Paul Taylor still living with him, his private life was becoming more complex by the minute.

He was glad of the distraction of a role in David Storey's play In Celebration at the Royal Court theatre - but this, in turn, brought more complications.

One evening during the run, the play was attended by Princess Margaret, with a retinue of minders and friends.

It was initially expected that her party would leave the theatre after the first act, but they remained to the end, when Her Royal Highness went backstage to greet the players.

The royal visitor's eye was immediately taken by one of the young stars, Brian Cox, then 23. As usual when she fancied someone, the 39-year-old Margaret quite directly proposed a rendezvous: would he dine with her privately at Kensington Palace? Cox, however, did not accept.

Very soon afterwards the Princess turned her attention to Alan and a similar invitation was forthcoming - but he, too, declined.

Although Her Royal Highness continued to pursue Alan over several years and with dogged determination, she never succeeded.

In addition to any other reasons, Alan saw that any sort of relationship with the capricious Margaret would be only an unwelcome entrapment, as disastrous for his reputation as it had been for that of other young men - especially when it came to his inevitable exclusion.

In the decades to come, his closest friends, as well as many theatre colleagues, felt that his long-expected, much anticipated, consistently proposed and mysteriously delayed knighthood was the result of the Princess's deliberate interference.

Margaret was unaccustomed to having her invitations rejected and never forgot what she considered an intolerable snub. His knighthood was eventually bestowed just months after her death in 2002.

While Alan was busy turning down the chance of a royal romance, matters were coming to a head in his relationship with Victoria, who was now seeing him almost every day.

"I had the impression", said Elizabeth Grant, a neighbour of the couple, "that Victoria had made an enormous play for Alan - and succeeded where others hadn't."

In April 1970, Victoria announced that she was pregnant. Whether or not this development was intentional is unclear, but it presented Alan with a great dilemma.

His friend Conrad Monk says: "I could sense that this was a hard time for him. His star was very much in the ascendancy, he was in constant demand on stage and screen, and of course he had an image to maintain.

"It would have been a terrible story for the Press to get hold of in those days - that she was pregnant, first of all, or worse, that she was pregnant and he refused to marry her."

Many who knew the couple felt the gipsyish Victoria was just as wary of commitment as Alan, but his old friend Ian White saw it differently.

"She was actually very ambitious in her own quiet way." he recalled.

"Marrying Alan was her step to stardom. She was determined to get him as her husband and she went about it in just the right way. This was no time to be 'out' in the theatre. In a sense, Alan was an easy victim for her."

Certainly, Victoria was an eccentric-self-absorbed creature, sometimes subject to wide mood swings.

The playwright David Storey spoke for many when he said: "It was a big mystery to me why Alan chose her - it was an inappropriate union right from the start."

Nevertheless, friends and family are unanimous that Alan never urged Victoria to have an abortion.

"No quick decision was made," says the couple's son Benedick.

"Then, one day, Mum apparently said to Dad, 'Maybe we should get married,' and he replied, 'OK' - just like that."

As Alan's friend Nickolas Grace recalled: "He followed through, he did the honourable thing."

Once again, the accommodating Alan had let the circumstances and events of life lead him, or force him, to act.

There was now just one awkward task that Alan had to dispatch and there was no easy way to do it.

"One evening, Alan came home," Paul Taylor recalled, "and he said very quickly and simply, 'I'm going to have to ask you to leave, as I'm going to be married'. I was taken completely by surprise."

And so, without recrimination or harsh words of any kind, Paul walked out of the house, and for the next few years or so, out of Alan's life as well.

If close friends sensed dark clouds on the horizon, they kept the thought to themselves. But their fears for the future were more than justified.

A new and, ultimately tragic, era of the complex personal life of Alan Bates was about to begin.

• Abridged extract from Otherwise Engaged: The Life Of Alan Bates by Donald Spot