Sir Alan Bates, the actor who died on Saturday aged 69, was a leading interpreter on stage and screen of the new wave of dramatic writing which heralded the renaissance of modern drama in the post-war British theatre and continued into the 1960s and 1970s.One of the earliest and most intelligent of the so-called “red-brick” actors, Bates belonged to an acting generation whose social backgrounds and unpolished tones added authenticity to the anti-heroes and angry young men of “kitchen-sink” drama.Bates himself was rarely wrathful, and it was as Cliff, the quiet, sympathetic friend of Jimmy Porter, the quintessentially angry young...