Dirk Bogarde

His poetry has been published in war anthologies, and a grey ink brush drawing, "Tents in Orchard. He twice won the BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role, for The Servant (1963) and Darling (1965). His other notable film roles included Victim (1961), Accident (1967), The Damned (1969), Death in Venice (1971), The Night Porter (1974),[16] A Bridge Too Far (1977) and Despair (1978). He was appointed a Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters in 1990 and a Knight Bachelor in 1992.

Dirk Bogarde studied at Chelsea College of Art and Design, Allan Glen's School and St Catherine's School. Training under Henry Moore and Graham Sutherland is recorded. The recorded working language is English. Positions recorded include President of the Jury at the Cannes Festival. Distinctions recorded are Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres, Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres and Knight Bachelor.

• Honorific Prefix — Sir • Name — Dirk Bogarde • Birth Name — Derek Jules Gaspard Ulric Niven van den Bogaerde • Born — 28 March 1921 • Birthplace — West Hampstead, London, England • Died — 8 May 1999 • Place of death — Chelsea, London, England • Years Active — 1939–1990 • Partner — Anthony Forwood (1949–1988) (Forwood's death)[1] • Occupation — * Actor • novelist • screenwriter • Website — dirkbogarde.co.uk (Dirk Bogarde Estate)

Bogarde was the eldest of three children born to Ulric van den Bogaerde (1892–1972) and Margaret Niven (1898–1980). Ulric was born in Perry Barr, Birmingham, of Flemish ancestry, and was art editor of The Times. Margaret Niven, a former actress, was Scottish, from Glasgow. Dirk Bogarde was born in a nursing home at 12 Hemstal Road,[5] West Hampstead, London, and was baptised on 30 October 1921, at St. Mary's Church, Kilburn. He had a younger sister, Elizabeth (born 1924), and a brother, Gareth Ulric Van Den Bogaerde, an advertising film producer, born in July 1933 in Hendon.[6] Conditions in the family home in north London became cramped, so Bogarde was moved to Glasgow to stay with relatives of his mother. He stayed there for more than three years, returning at the end of 1937. He attended University College School and the former Allan Glen's High School of Science in Glasgow, a time he described in his autobiography as an unhappy one. Having secured a scholarship at Chelsea College of Art, Bogarde completed his two year course, and landed "a back-stage job as tea-boy at seven shillings and sixpence per week".[7] A chance to act as a stand-in convinced Bogarde that "he needed some additional basic training, and he joined a provincial repertory group". His first on-screen appearance was as an uncredited extra in the George Formby comedy, Come On George! (1939).[8]

During the war, Derek "Pip" Bogaerde served in the British Army, initially with the Royal Corps of Signals. He was then commissioned at the age of 22 into the Queen's Royal Regiment (West Surrey) on 2 April 1943 with the rank of second lieutenant.[9] He served in both the European and Pacific theatres, principally as an intelligence officer.

Bogarde served as an intelligence officer with the 21st Army Group (Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery) as it liberated Europe. Taylor Downing's book, Spies in the Sky, tells of Bogarde's work in photo-reconnaissance in the aftermath of D-Day, moving through Normandy with Royal Canadian Air Force units. By July 1944, they were at the "B.8" airfield at Sommervieu, near Bayeux. As an air photographic interpreter with the rank of captain, Bogarde was later attached to the Second Army, where he selected ground targets in France, Holland and Germany for the Second Tactical Air Force and RAF Bomber Command.[10] Villages on key routes were heavily bombed to prevent the Wehrmacht's armour from reaching the invasion lodgement areas.[11] In a 1986 Yorkshire Television interview with Russell Harty, Bogarde recalled going on painting trips, sometimes to see the villages which he had selected as targets, I found what I had thought in the rubble were a whole row of footballs, and they weren't footballs... they were children's heads... A whole school of kids, a convent, had been pulled out of school, and lined up in this little narrow alleyway between the buildings to save them from the bombing, and the whole thing had come in on top of them.

Bogarde said he was one of the first Allied officers to reach the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany on 20 April 1945, an experience that had the most profound effect on him and about which he had difficulty speaking for many years afterwards.[12] • Illustration — Women survivors in Bergen-Belsen collecting their bread ration after their liberation, April 1945 • Illustration — A British Army bulldozer pushes bodies into a mass grave at Belsen, 19 April 1945 There was some later dispute as to whether he really visited Belsen, although, more than a decade after publishing his biography, and following additional research, John Coldstream concluded that "it is now possible to state with some authority that he did at least set foot inside the camp".[13]

Bogarde disclosed in a 1966 interview with Woman's Mirror that he was at fault in a multiple fatality car-crash on VJ Day in India, "I don't drive-I killed some people once, in a car crash, and I'll never drive again, not even on a film set. It was a long time ago, on VJ day, actually, in India, and they were all soldiers."[14]

The horror and revulsion at the cruelty and inhumanity that he said he witnessed left him with a deep-seated hostility towards Germany; in the late 1980s, he wrote that he would disembark from a lift rather than ride with a German of his generation.[15] Nevertheless, three of his more memorable film roles were as Germans, one of them as a former SS officer in The Night Porter (1974). Bogarde was most vocal towards the end of his life on voluntary euthanasia, of which he became a staunch proponent after witnessing the protracted death of his lifelong partner and manager Anthony Forwood (the former husband of actress Glynis Johns) in 1988. He gave an interview to John Hofsess, London executive director of the Voluntary Euthanasia Society,

Bogarde's London West End theatre-acting debut was in 1939, with the stage name "Derek Bogaerde", in J. B. Priestley's play Cornelius. In 1947 he appeared at the Fortune Theatre in Michael Clayton Hutton's Power Without Glory.[17] After the war, he started pursuing film roles using the name "Dirk Bogarde". One of Bogarde's earliest starring roles in cinema was in the 1949 film Once a Jolly Swagman, where he played a daring speedway ace, riding for the Cobras. This was filmed at New Cross Speedway, in South East London, during one of the postwar years in which speedway was the biggest spectator sport in the UK.

After leaving the Rank Organisation in the early 1960s, Bogarde abandoned his heart-throb image and "chose roles that challenged received morality and that pushed the scope of cinema". He starred in the film Victim (1961), playing a London barrister who fights the blackmailers of a young man with whom he has had a deeply emotional relationship. The young man commits suicide after being arrested for embezzlement, rather than ruin his beloved's career. In exposing the ring of extortionists, Bogarde's character risks his reputation and marriage to see that justice is done. Victim was the first British film to portray the humiliation to which gay people were exposed via discriminatory law and as a victimised minority; it is said to have had some effect upon the later Sexual Offences Act 1967 ending, to some extent, the illegal status of male homosexual activity. • Illustration — Bogarde with Jane Birkin, co-star in Daddy Nostalgie at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival He again teamed up with Joseph Losey to play Hugo Barrett, a decadent valet, in The Servant (1963), with a script by Harold Pinter, and which garnered Bogarde a BAFTA Award.[23] That year also saw the release of The Mind Benders, in which he played a professor conducting sensory deprivation experiments at Oxford University (and which anticipates Altered States [1980]). The following year saw another collaboration with Losey in the anti-war film King and Country, in which Bogarde played an army officer at a court-martial, reluctantly defending deserter Tom Courtenay. He won a second BAFTA for his role as a television broadcaster-writer Robert Gold in Darling (1965), directed by John Schlesinger. Bogarde, Losey and Pinter reunited for Accident (1967), which recounted the travails of Stephen, a bored Oxford University professor. Our Mother's House (1967) is an off-beat film noir and the British entry at the Venice Film Festival, directed by Jack Clayton, in which Bogarde plays a ne'er-do-well father who descends upon "his" seven children on the death of their mother. In his first collaboration with Luchino Visconti in La Caduta degli dei (The Damned, 1969), Bogarde played German industrialist Frederick Bruckmann alongside Ingrid Thulin. Two years later Visconti was back at the helm when Bogarde portrayed Gustav von Aschenbach in Morte a Venezia (Death in Venice).[24] In 1974, the controversial Il Portiere di notte (The Night Porter) saw Bogarde cast as an ex-Nazi, Max Aldorfer, co-starring Charlotte Rampling, and directed by Liliana Cavani. He played Claude, the lawyer son of a dying, drunken writer (John Gielgud) in the well-received, multidimensional French film Providence (1977), directed by Alain Resnais, and industrialist Hermann Hermann, who descends into madness in Despair (1978) directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. "It was the best performance I've ever done in my life," he later recounted. "Fassbinder... really screwed the film up. He tore it to pieces with a scissors."[25] This led to Bogarde going on an extended hiatus. "And I thought, 'OK. Give it up'. So I gave it up and I didn't do another film for fourteen years." He returned one last time, as Daddy in Bertrand Tavernier's Daddy Nostalgie, (or These Foolish Things) (1991), co-starring Jane Birkin as his daughter.

In the 1960s and 1970s Bogarde played opposite many renowned stars. The Angel Wore Red (1960) saw Bogarde playing an unfrocked priest who falls in love with cabaret entertainer Ava Gardner during the Spanish Civil War. The same year, in Song Without End he portrayed Hungarian composer and virtuoso pianist Franz Liszt, a film initially directed by Charles Vidor (who died during shooting) and completed by Bogarde's friend George Cukor, which was the actor's only foray into Hollywood.[26] The campy The Singer Not the Song (1961) starred Bogarde as a Mexican bandit alongside John Mills as a priest. In H.M.S. Defiant (or Damn the Defiant!) (1962), he played the sadistic Lieutenant Scott-Padget, co-starring Sir Alec Guinness; I Could Go On Singing (1963), co-starring Judy Garland in her final screen role; Hot Enough for June (or Agent 8¾) (1964), a James Bond-type spy spoof co-starring Robert Morley; Modesty Blaise (1966), a campy spy send-up playing arch villain Gabriel opposite Monica Vitti and Terence Stamp and directed by Joseph Losey; The Fixer (1968), based on Bernard Malamud's novel, co-starring Alan Bates; Sebastian (1968), as Sebastian, a mathematician working on code decryption, who falls in love with Susannah York, a decrypter in the all-female decoding office he heads for British Intelligence, also co-starring Sir John Gielgud and Lilli Palmer, co-produced by Michael Powell; Oh! What a Lovely War (1969), co-starring Sir John Gielgud and Sir Laurence Olivier and directed by Richard Attenborough; Justine (1969), directed by George Cukor; Le Serpent (1973), co-starring Henry Fonda and Yul Brynner. A Bridge Too Far (1977), also starring Sean Connery, and again directed by Richard Attenborough, saw Bogarde give a controversial performance as Lieutenant General Frederick 'Boy' Browning. Bogarde claimed he had known General Browning from his time on Field Marshal Montgomery's staff during the war, and took issue with the largely negative portrayal of the general whom he played in A Bridge Too Far. Browning's widow, author Dame Daphne du Maurier, ferociously attacked his characterisation and "the resultant establishment fallout, much of it homophobic, wrongly convinced [Bogarde] that the newly ennobled Sir Richard [Attenborough] had deliberately contrived to scupper his chance of a knighthood."[27] While several of his fellow actors were veterans, Bogarde was the only cast member to have served at the battles being depicted in the film, having entered Brussels the day after its liberation, and worked on the planning of Operation Market Garden.

In 1977, Bogarde embarked on his second career as an author. Starting with a first volume A Postillion Struck by Lightning (an allusion to the phrase My postillion has been struck by lightning), he wrote a series of 15 books—nine volumes of memoirs and six novels, as well as essays, reviews, poetry and collected journalism. As a writer, Bogarde displayed a witty, elegant, highly literate and thoughtful style.

While under contract with the Rank Organisation, Bogarde was set to play the role of T. E. Lawrence in a proposed film Lawrence written by Terence Rattigan and to be directed by Anthony Asquith.[28] On the eve of production, after a year of preparation by Bogarde, Rattigan and Asquith, the film was scrapped without full explanation—ostensibly for budgetary reasons—to the dismay of all three men.[29] The abrupt scrapping of Lawrence, a role long researched and keenly anticipated by Bogarde, was among his greatest screen disappointments. (Rattigan reworked the script as a play, Ross, which opened to great success in 1960, initially with Alec Guinness playing Lawrence.) Bogarde was also reportedly considered for the title role in MGM's Doctor Zhivago (1965).[30] Earlier, he had declined Louis Jourdan's role as Gaston in MGM's Gigi (1958).[31] His contract with Rank had precluded him from accepting the lead in the film adaptation of John Osborne's ground-breaking stage play, Look Back in Anger in 1959. In 1961, Bogarde was offered the chance to play Hamlet at the recently founded Chichester Festival Theatre by artistic director Sir Laurence Olivier but had to decline owing to film commitments.[32] Bogarde later said that he regretted declining Olivier's offer and with it the chance to "really learn my craft".[33]

After his acting career had given him some success, Bogarde moved from London and rented a cottage on the Bendrose Estate in Little Chalfont, Buckinghamshire, the family home of his business manager and partner, Anthony "Tote" Forwood.[34] Bogarde subsequently lived in the area for some 40 years. After an unsuccessful attempt to gain planning permission to convert the estate into a housing development, Bogarde bought the adjoining Beel House and Park from William Lowndes for £4,000. After tearing down the servants' wing, Bogarde and Forwood had the main house redeveloped and refurbished "to bring more light" into the original 1700s core. They lived there until 1960, after the development of Dr Challoner's High School just 200 yards from Beel House. The couple subsequently moved to Drummer's Yard near Beaconsfield. Beel House was later owned by Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne, and Robert Kilroy Silk, who sold it for £6.5m in the mid-2010s. Bogarde and Forwood later moved to Provence, France, then Italy, before returning to France. They moved back to London shortly before Forwood's death in 1988.[35] The critical and commercial failure of Song Without End affected his Hollywood leading man hopes. He struggled with the trauma of his active service, compounded by rapid fame, recounting, "First there was the war, and then the peace to cope with, and then suddenly I was a film star. It happened all too soon."

Bogarde, a heavy smoker, had a minor stroke in November 1987 while Forwood was dying of liver cancer and Parkinson's disease. In September 1996, he underwent angioplasty to unblock arteries leading to his heart and suffered a massive stroke following the operation.[36] He was paralysed on one side of his body, which affected his speech, and from then on used a wheelchair. He then completed the final volume of his autobiography, which covered the effects of the stroke, and published an edition of his collected journalism, mainly from The Daily Telegraph. Bogarde spent some time with his friend Lauren Bacall the day before he died at his home in London from a heart attack on 8 May 1999, aged 78. His ashes were scattered at his former estate Le Pigeonnier in Grasse, southern France.[37]

• Year — Title — Role — Notes • 1939 — Come On George! — Extra — Uncredited • 1947 — Rope — Charlies Granillo — TV movie • The Case of Helvig Delbo — TV special • Power Without Glory — Cliff — TV movie using cast of stage production • Dancing with Crime — Police Radio Caller — Uncredited • 1948 — Esther Waters — William Latch — First leading role in film • Quartet — George Bland (segment "The Alien Corn") • 1949 — Once a Jolly Swagman — Bill Fox • Dear Mr. Prohack — Charles Prohack • Boys in Brown — Alfie Rawlins • 1950 — The Blue Lamp — Tom Riley — First box office hit • So Long at the Fair — George Hathaway — First film produced by Betty Box • The Woman in Question — R.W. (Bob) Baker • 1951 — Blackmailed — Stephen Mundy • 1952 — Hunted — Chris Lloyd • Penny Princess — Tony Craig • The Gentle Gunman — Matt Sullivan • 1953 — Appointment in London — Wing Commander Tim Mason • Desperate Moment — Simon Van Halder • 1954 — They Who Dare — Lt. David Graham • Doctor in the House — Dr Simon Sparrow — Bogarde's first film with director Ralph Thomas • The Sleeping Tiger — Frank Clemmons — Bogarde's first film with director Joseph Losey • For Better, for Worse — Tony Howard — Directed by Val Guest • The Sea Shall Not Have Them — Flight Sgt. MacKay — Bogare's first film with director Lewis Gilbert • 1955 — Simba — Alan Howard • Doctor at Sea — Dr Simon Sparrow — 2nd "doctor" film • Cast a Dark Shadow — Edward "Teddy" Bare • 1956 — The Spanish Gardener — Jose • 1957 — Ill Met by Moonlight — Maj. Patrick Leigh Fermor a.k.a. Philedem — Directed by Michael Powell • Doctor at Large — Dr Simon Sparrow — 3rd "doctor" film • Campbell's Kingdom — Bruce Campbell • 1958 — A Tale of Two Cities — Sydney Carton • The Wind Cannot Read — Flight Lt Michael Quinn • The Doctor's Dilemma — Louis Dubedat — First Hollywood movie • 1959 — Libel — Sir Mark Sebastian Loddon / Frank Welney / Number Fifteen • 1960 — The Angel Wore Red — Arturo Carrera • Song Without End — Franz Liszt — Nominated – Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy • 1961 — The Singer Not the Song — Anacleto • Victim — Melville Farr — Nominated – BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role • 1962 — H.M.S. Defiant — 1st Lt. Scott-Padget • We Joined the Navy — Dr. Simon Sparrow — Cameo appearance, uncredited • The Password Is Courage — Sergeant Major Charles Coward • 1963 — The Mind Benders — Dr. Henry Longman • I Could Go On Singing — David Donne • Doctor in Distress — Dr Simon Sparrow — Bogarde's 4th "doctor" film[42] • The Servant — Hugo Barrett — BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role • 1964 — Hot Enough for June — Nicholas Whistler • King and Country — Capt. Hargreaves • The High Bright Sun — Major McGuire — Bogarde's last movie with Betty Box and Ralph Thomas[43] • Little Moon of Alban — Kenneth Boyd • 1965 — Darling — Robert Gold — BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role • 1966 — Modesty Blaise — Gabriel • Blithe Spirit — Charles Condomine • 1967 — Accident — Stephen — Nominated – BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role • Our Mother's House — Charlie Hook • 1968 — Sebastian — Sebastian • The Fixer — Bibikov • 1969 — Oh! What a Lovely War — Stephen • Justine — Pursewarden • The Damned — Frederick Bruckmann • 1970 — Upon This Rock — Bonnie Prince Charlie • 1971 — Death in Venice — Gustav von Aschenbach — Nominated – BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role • 1973 — Night Flight from Moscow — Philip Boyle • 1974 — The Night Porter — Maximilian Theo Aldorfer • 1975 — Permission to Kill — Alan Curtis • 1977 — Providence — Claude Langham • A Bridge Too Far — Lt. Gen. Frederick 'Boy' Browning • 1978 — Despair — Hermann Hermann • 1981 — The Patricia Neal Story — Roald Dahl • 1986 — May We Borrow Your Husband? — William Harris • 1988 — The Vision — James Marriner • 1990 — Daddy Nostalgie — Daddy — Final film role

For several years British film exhibitors voted Bogarde one of the most popular local stars at the box office:[44] • 1953 – 5th • 1954 – 2nd (9th-most popular international star)[45] • 1955 – 1st (also most popular international star) • 1956 – 3rd • 1957 – 1st (also most popular international star)[46][47] • 1958 – 2nd (also 2nd-most popular international star)[48] • 1959 – 5th • 1960 – 9th-most popular international star • 1961 – 8th-most popular international star • 1963 – 9th-most popular international star[50]

• A Postillion Struck by Lightning, 1977 • Snakes and Ladders, 1978 • An Orderly Man, 1983 • Backcloth, 1986 • A Particular Friendship, 1989 • Great Meadow: An Evocation, 1992 • A Short Walk from Harrods, 1993 • Cleared for Take-Off, 1995 • For the Time Being: Collected Journalism, 1998 • Dirk Bogarde: The Complete Autobiography (contains the first four autobiographies only)

• A Gentle Occupation, 1980 • Voices in the Garden, 1981 • West of Sunset, 1984 • Jericho, 1991 • A Period of Adjustment, 1994 • Closing Ranks, 1997

• Dirk Bogarde collection, 1957–1993 (4.5 linear feet) is housed at Boston University Dept. of Special Collections • Harold Matson Company, Inc. Records, 1937–1980 (68 linear feet) are housed at the Columbia University Libraries. The Matson Company was the literary agency with which Bogarde worked; the collection contains correspondence and other documents related to his literary career.

Dirk Bogarde was recorded at birth as Derek Jules Gaspard Ulric Niven van den Bogaerde. The authorities additionally record the headings Derek Niven van den Bogaerde, Sir Dirk Bogarde and Sir Derek Jules Gaspard Ulric Niven van den Bogaerde. His recorded language was English. He was the child of Ulric Gontran Jules van den Bogaerde and Margaret Niven.

Dirk Bogarde is recorded as having studied at Chelsea College of Art and Design, Allan Glen's School and St Catherine's School. Formation and teaching. Bogarde studied at Chelsea College of Art and Design, Allan Glen's School, St Catherine's School and University College School. He trained under Henry Moore and Graham Sutherland.