"I love the camera and it loves me. Well, not very much sometimes. But we're good friends"
~ Dirk Bogarde

It’s not often that an actor’s career moves from matinee idol to art film stalwart but that’s what happened to the very capable English actor Dirk Bogarde in the course of a five-decade career. Born Derek Bogaerde in London in 1921 he entered repertory theatre as a teen, but the war intervened, and he served as an intelligence officer and rose to the rank of Captain. After the war, Rank contracted him and his film career began in earnest and after a few support roles, he got an unexpected shot at a lead role when Stewart Granger dropped out of Ester Waters in 1948. He starred in his first big box office hit in Basil Dearden’s The Blue Lamp a couple of years later. Unlike many of his peers from that era, he didn’t return to the stage constantly and left his legacy as an actor entirely on the coiled rolls of film beamed onto a silver screen for the next half century. He represented a softer masculinity, a quiet intelligence with a soulful presence in British cinema - one that enriched and enhanced many of the studio confections he starred in before he became a fixture in more challenging films.  

Betty Box was a producer at Rank and knew the good looking and capable Bogarde had a wider appeal than the series of young criminals or bad boys he’d been playing and cast him in a series of light comedies that were risqué and slightly bawdy, certainly by the values of 1950s Britain, the ‘Doctor’ series, the first of which was Doctor in The House for Ralph Thomas. The decade saw Bogarde as a fixture in British cinema, playing in a succession of war films and drams or thrillers as the stiff upper lip type or put upon troubled young men with fine and capable directors like Anthony Asquith, Charles Crichton, Lewis Gilbert, Powell and Pressburger and Joseph Losey et.al. The most prolific association he had was with Ralph Thomas with whom he’d made nine films across a decade after the first Doctor film. 

The best of his 1950s output showcased Bogarde’s sultry charms and easy charisma, and he soon became a reliable box office draw outside even the hit Doctor films, ranking in the top 5 most popular male stars in Britain for most of the decade. He was at his best in dramas like Basil Dearden’s The Gentle Gunman or Lewis Gilbert’s excellent Cast a Dark Shadow but did the odd comedy like Val Guest’s For Better, For Worse and some fine war films like Lewis Milestone’s They Who Dare or The Sea Shall Not Have Them for Lewis Gilbert. The Powell and Pressburger effort, Ill Met by Moonlight sadly proved one of the lesser Archers features, but Joseph Losey’s The Sleeping Tiger made an impression, not least with Losey who would come knocking on Bogarde’s door several years later. Bogarde probably achieved his peak movie star moment with the Ralph Thomas sturdy adaptation of A Tale of Two Cities, as he perfectly inhabited the role of Sydney Carton, amidst a great cast, but sadly the film was a box office disappointment. 

The British New Wave of cinema arrived at the end of the 1950s with filmmakers like Tony Richardson, Karel Reisz, Lindsay Anderson and Jack Clayton suddenly attracting international attention and with them a new breed of actors like Laurence Harvey, Alan Bates, Tom Courtenay and Albert Finney. Dirk Bogarde was in many ways yesterday’s man with his beautiful received pronunciation and cut-glass accent but the early 1960s saw him take creative chances by chasing and accepting challenging roles in important films and changing the perception of what he was capable of. It was one of the ‘old guard’ directors in Basil Dearden who made the controversial Victim, a sympathetic portrayal of gay men in a time when homosexuality was illegal in Britain. 

Dirk Bogarde was a closeted gay man in a long-term relationship with his business manager Tony Forwood, an actor and former husband of actress Glynis Johns and this was undoubtedly motivation for him to be supportive of Dearden’s film. Around this period Bogarde had dabbled with starring opposite Hollywood legends Ava Gardner in The Angel Wore Red, and Judy Garland in I Could Go on Singing – directed by Nunnally Johnson and Ronald Neame respectively – but neither set the box-office or critics aflame and Hollywood did not come knocking. He fared better for George Cukor in the lush Franz Liszt biopic Song Without End, but it was a commercial flop for Columbia and that was that. After a couple of undistinguished war films and a final ‘Doctor’ role that seemed more like throwbacks to his past efforts he teamed up again with American exile Joseph Losey and completely made the switch to serious actor in a Harold Pinter penned masterpiece, The Servant. The offbeat and tawdry subject and the stretch it represented for Bogarde’s artistry effectively reinvented his career and won him a BAFTA for his work. 

Losey continued to provide quality in the seminal WWI film, For King and Country, where Bogarde shone opposite the brilliant Tom Courtenay in one of the finest anti-war films ever made. Bogarde continued to commit to challenging films and reaped more rewards when he won another BAFTA for his superb performance in John Schlesinger’s Darling, opposite the luminous Julie Christie. The role was a showcase of Bogarde’s ability to invest seemingly ordinary characters with depth and authenticity and his genius for bringing out the best from his fellow actors. Losey provided a quasi-comic detour with the James Bond spoof Modesty Blaise, starring the miscast Monica Vitti – the film was a modest hit but Bogarde had no kind words for the Italian star and Losey quickly made it up to Bogarde with one of his finest films, Accident. Dirk co-starred an against-type Stanley Baker with great support from Michael York and Delphine Seyrig in another coruscating Harold Pinter adaptation. 

1967 was a memorable year for the actor as not only his performance in Accident was nominated for a BAFTA but also his brilliant turn in Jack Clayton’s remarkable Our Mother’s House – a film in which he played very much against type. Bogarde was now at the point where he could pursue purely artistic challenges and, with very few exceptions, that is what he did for the next two decades. Sebastian was a 1968 Michael Powell produced Cold War thriller that fell flat, but he fared no better in John Frankenheimer’s The Fixer, an odd period film set in Tsarist Russia with a Dalton Trumbo script based on a Pulitzer Prize winning novel – but sometimes stellar ingredients don’t always ensure the final stew is tasty. A brilliant ensemble cast couldn’t save the George Cukor misfire, Justine and Bogarde lined up with seemingly every male British actor from the last 30 years for Richard Attenborough’s satirical if uneven WWII musical, Oh, What a Lovely War! 

Bogarde fared much better with two superb collaborations with the Italian master Luchino Visconti – firstly with The Damned in 1969 and with Death in Venice in 1971. The success of these films placed Bogarde at the centre of European cinema and at the peak of his critical acclaim, having carved out an identity as the classy, intelligent older actor of choice. After Night Flight to Moscow, a run of the mill spy thriller - albeit with heavyweight Hollywood stars Henry Fonda and Yul Brynner - Bogarde made a brave choice to star in Liliana Cavani’s controversial The Night Porter. Rarely have A-list actors like Bogarde and his co-star Charlotte Rampling taken such reputational risks in lending their talents to such a confronting and challenging film, but the film stands with very few as a searing examination of the post-traumatic shock of the Nazi holocaust with a side of sadomasochistic sex. Deeply misunderstood since its initial release; it remains a potent look at the damage caused by fascism and the dark ripples that resonate through the years. 

Dirk Bogarde spent the last years of his film career as an art film darling, working with European masters like Alain Resnais, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Bertrand Tavernier in films that added to his legacy as one of the finest actors of his generation. He interrupted that flow to add to his friend Richard Attenborough’s worthy but lumpy WWII epic, A Bridge Too Far, again sharing the screen with every British actor of his generation! He spent his last decades writing his memoirs, of which nine volumes were published, which showed him to be a fine, erudite and talented writer. He expanded upon his literary skills by writing a screenplay from a Graham Greene story (which he also starred in) and wrote six fiction novels to boot. Dirk Bogarde had an exceptional if singular film career, but his name became a byword for dependability – if Bogarde was in the film then it would be worth investigating if only to hear that effortless delivery of his dulcet, velvet voice or see the searing intelligence behind his thoughtful eyes. Bogarde could deliver a world of emotion with a startling economy of movement and take you deep into the heart of a character with a delicacy that evaded most of his more masculine peers. A master actor from a time when giants roamed the stage and screen.