Actor Alan Bates, who came to fame as one of British cinema's "angry young men" of the 60s and whose heralded stage and screen career was marked by a love of acting as opposed to fame, died Saturday night in London after a long battle with cancer; he was 69. Educated at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, Bates indeed helped launch the genre of angry young men plays by starring in John Osbourne's Look Back in Anger in 1956, which started him on a stage career that was marked by innumerable roles created by classic playwrights. His first major film role in 1960 was opposite none other than Laurence Olivier in Osbourne's The Entertainer, in which Bates and a young Albert Finney played the sons of Olivier's shabby vaudevillian. Roles in Whistle Down the Wind, A Kind of Loving and The Running Man followed, but it was Bates' two successive performances in Zorba the Greek and Georgy Girl that helped make him a film star; the former film, in which he played a repressed Englishman opposite Anthony Quinn's life-affirming Zorba, received a Best Picture nomination. Bates himself received a Best Actor nomination for John Frankenheimer's The Fixer (1968), and a year later earned more fame and a bit of notoriety for Ken Russell's erotic adaptation of D.H. Lawrence's Women in Love, in which he wrestled naked with Oliver Reed. Notable film roles also included Far From the Madding Crowd, An Unmarried Woman, The Rose and his turn as Claudius in Mel Gibson's Hamlet. Bates also won a Tony award in 2002 for Turgenev's Fortune's Fool and was made a Commander of the British Empire in 1995 and knighted last year. Most recently, Bates was seen onscreen in the thriller The Sum of All Fears, Robert Altman's Oscar-winning Gosford Park and this year's drama The Statement. Bates, whose son Tristan died in 1990 and wife Victoria Ford died in 1992, is survived by two brothers, son Benedick, and a granddaughter. --Prepared by IMDb staff...