QUAD Derby

Sir Alan Bates Celebration

Introduced by: Martin Bates & Nigel Powlson

Venue: QUAD Cinema

Date: Sunday 22nd February 2009

A celebration of local actor Sir Alan Bates CBE at QUAD

QUAD commemorated the Derby born actor Sir Alan Bates CBE with an evening of conversation and film celebrating his life and work.

The ‘Sir Alan Bates Celebration event’ was scheduled to mark what would have been his 75th birthday. His brother, Martin Bates, was joined by Derby Evening Telegraph’s Entertainments Editor Nigel Powlson on stage to discuss Sir Alan’s international film, theatre and television career spanning nearly 50 years.  There was also a display of rarely seen photos from Martin’s personal collection.

The event included a screening of A Kind Of Loving (15)from 1962, in which long time collaborator John Schlesinger brings a young Bates to the screen as Vic Brown, trying to better himself while trapped in a loveless marriage following an unwanted pregnancy.  With a witty and uncompromising screenplay by Keith Waterhouse this is one of the key films at the dawn of the great British Social Realism movement, with Bates playing one of our first ‘angry young men’.