On Broadway - Goodnight, sweet friends...

---- Eternally Yours

 In the Cinema - Goodnight, sweet friends...

---- Eternally Yours

Robert Walker
October 13th, 1918 - August 28th, 1951
Roy Rogers
November 5th, 1911 - July 6th, 1998
Fred Zinnemann
April 29th, 1907 - March 14th, 1997

Sir Alan Bates
a gentle, witty man

When  they speak of their friend Alan Bates, who died Saturday, December 26th, 2003, after a year-long battle with pancreatic cancer, Eileen Atkins and Frank Langella recall an actor of tremendous subtlety, technical skill and emotional openness - and a gentle man of great warmth, some vanity and much wit.
"More than anything, Alan loved to laugh, which we did all the time," says Langella, who starred opposite Bates on Broadway in "Fortune's Fool" in 2002. "Alan had a huge camp side, but he was never malicious,"  says Atkins, who appeared with Bates in Yasmina Reza's off-Broadway hit, "The Unexpected Man," in 2002. "That is a rare and wonderful quality to find in people, and it is one of the things I loved about him most."
Alan, who was born in Derbyshire in 1934, gained fame as a member of England's pack of "angry young men" - writers, actors and directors who attacked suffocating middle-class values.
But unlike his peers Tom Courtney, Albert Finney and Peter O'Tool, Bates brought sensitivity and tenderness to his roles in "Zorba the Greek," "Georgy Girl," "Women in Love" and "An Unmarried Woman."
"He wasn't ashamed of showing his soft side, his female side," says Atkins, who knew Bates for more than 40 years. "He was not crassly ultra-male, which made him very sexy." So sexy, in fact, that when years later, at age 66, he appeared in "The Unexpected Man," older women, fans from his hunky youth, used to wait for him outside the stage door. "Loads of them," says Atkins. "And he loved it."
Langella, who didn't meet Bates until they appeared in "Fortune's Fool," but who became one of his closest friends and spoke to him almost every day while he fought cancer, praises the actor's "emotional abandon" on stage.
"Alan was the most fluid actor I've ever worked with," he says. "We never had a set notion about how to do a scene. It was a fresh approach every night, and Alan was willing to go in any direction I wanted to go in."
Bates, as an impoverished nobleman, and Langella, as the fobbish snob who humiliates him, both won Tony Awards for their performances in the play. During the run, the two palled around so much after the show each night that Langella, accepting a Drama Desk Award, cracked, "I must put to bed rumors that Alan and I are having an affair." "We were the same age, and had the same attitudes about life," says Langella. "I treasure our friendship even more than our work."
Off stage, Bates was known to be a shrewd judge of plays and roles for which he was well-suited. He didn't like long runs, and he often would not commit to a production until the last possible minute. He was generous to friends, and frequently used his clout to get other actors work.
"If someone's wife or partner left them, Alan would find them a job to help them get over it," says Atkins. "He was terribly good to people, sometimes too good. There were times when I thought he spoiled his own acting by surrounding himself with people who were not very good because he wanted to do them a good turn."
Alan was knighted in 2002, which came as a relief to his friends. "He wanted a knighthood so badly, and for years he was in despair that he didn't get one," says Atkins. "Every time the list came out, I'd say, 'Please, God, let Alan be on it.'"
Mr. Bates got his knighthood the same year he won the Tony and became a grandfather. "He called me up to tell me what a wonderful year it was," recalled Atkins. "Three weeks later,  he called me again and told me he had cancer."
Both Atkins and Langella say Alan remained optimistic about his chances of beating his illness right up until the end. "He loved the fact that he still had masses of hair, and when he lost it because of the chemotherapy, I was sure he would not appear in public again," says Atkins. "But he turned up last year wearing a baseball cap at a party thrown by Tom Stoppard. He was very cheerful, and