Oliver Reed
- Thread starter mikey41
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B_frednethel
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ConanTheBarber
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New to me, but it seems to be true. Here's an extract from Donald Spoto's biography, Otherwise Engaged: The Life Of Alan Bates.
It mentions that Bates lived a tormented double life and had affairs with many men, including, yes, Peter Wyngarde.
He married a woman who seems to have been a bit mentally ill. Bates had already had his affair with Wyngarde, and when the marriage became very difficult, he resumed his liaisons with men.
His new partner was Nickolas Grace, a fellow actor in a production of Shakespeare's The Taming Of The Shrew with the Royal Shakespeare Company.
Alan and Nickolas, who was 25, became in the latter's words "very close and very loving, in an intense affair that was one of the most important relationships of my life".
So close were they that Nickolas even became a good friend to Victoria and the children.
But for Alan, the relationship brought to the surface all his fears that the secret side of his life would be discovered and made public - an anxiety that had tormented him during the ten years he had lived with the actor Peter Wyngarde in the Sixties.
As he had with previous male lovers, he denied to Nickolas that he was truly homosexual.
Later, he had an affair with figure skater John Curry:
As a welcome relief from his domestic turmoil, Alan was now in the midst of an intense, two-year romance with the British figure skater John Curry.
< snip >
"It was one of Alan's most serious relationships," recalled the actor's friend Conrad Monk, "but there was a moment when John publicly revealed that he had really fallen for Alan.
"With that, it was over: proclaiming yourself was the one thing you could not do with him. Alan couldn't sustain emotional bonds with lovers: he always saw them as unwelcome entanglements."
And then there was another affair with a young artist named Gerard Hasting:
And there was another complication that overlapped the Curry affair - a new love that Alan could neither ignore nor blithely terminate, and one that eventually endured longer than any other.
In 1982 he had been introduced at a party to a young artist 26 years his junior named Gerard Hastings, at that time just 22. The attraction was immediate.
At first Alan and Gerard met only intermittently. "He came to my flat and always brought a bottle of champagne and some cheesecake, which he loved," says Gerard. "I made lunch, and we spent the afternoon together."
They continued to meet in a rented room near Alan's home until finally Gerard moved in. But it was a constant source of regret to Gerard that Alan never felt able to tell his sons the truth about the relationship, even though they had guessed it.
< snip >
Gerard learned that although Alan had dear women friends, they were not objects of his sexual desire. "He appreciated women for companionship and men for sexual fulfilment," says Gerard. "His erotic fantasies mainly involved men - he called attractive young men 'haunches of venison', for example.
"Yet sometimes, oddly, he seemed to feel very uncomfortable about his sexuality, and felt it necessary to reaffirm his masculinity, or his idea of masculinity. He actually turned to me one day and said, 'Of course, you know I'm not gay.'"
A sad story, I would say.
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