Sir Dirk Bogarde (born Derek Jules Gaspard Ulric Niven van den Bogaerde; 28 March 1921 – 8 May 1999) was an English actor, novelist and screenwriter. Initially a matinée idol in films such as Doctor in the House (1954) for the Rank Organisation, he later acted in art house films, evolving from "heartthrob to icon of edginess".
In a second career, Bogarde wrote seven volumes of memoirs, six novels, and a volume of collected journalism, mainly from articles in The Daily Telegraph. He fought in the Second World War and over the course of five years reached the rank of major and was awarded seven medals. His poetry has been published in war anthologies, and a grey ink brush drawing, "Tents in Orchard. 1944", is in the collection of the British Museum.
Having come to prominence in films including The Blue Lamp in the early 1950s, Bogarde starred in the popular Doctor film series (1954–1963). 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), 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.
Early years and education 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,Coldstream 2004, p. 24. 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.Moir, Jon. "Dirk could be cruel – but I know why." The Daily Telegraph (London), 2 September 2004. Retrieved: 29 March 2015.
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". 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).
War service 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. He served in both the European and Pacific theatres, principally as an intelligence officer.
D-Day and aftermath 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.Above The Title, Yorkshire Television interview, 1986. Villages on key routes were heavily bombed to prevent the Wehrmacht's armour from reaching the invasion lodgement areas.Bogarde states that before a village was bombed by the RAF they would always drop leaflets warning the inhabitants but that sometimes the leaflets were blown away by the wind. Other air forces allocated to these same tasks, he states, "didn't drop leaflets, they just bombed everything that moved". 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,
Bergen-Belsen concentration camp 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.
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".
India 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."
Long-term effects 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.Bogarde, Dirk. "Out of the Shadows of Hell". For the Time Being. London: Penguin, 1988. 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,
Career 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.Wearing, J. P. The London Stage 1940–1949: A Calendar of Productions, Performers, and Personnel. Rowman & Littlefield, 2014. p.297 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.
Film stardom Bogarde was contracted to the Rank Organisation under the wing of the prolific independent film producer Betty Box, who produced most of his early films and was instrumental in creating his matinée idol image.Morley 1999, pp. 8–9. His Rank contract began following his appearance in Esther Waters (1948), his first credited role, replacing Stewart Granger. Another early role of his was in The Blue Lamp (1950), playing a hoodlum who shoots and kills a police constable (Jack Warner), whilst in So Long at the Fair (1950), a film noir, he played a handsome artist who comes to the rescue of Jean Simmons during the World's Fair in Paris. He also had roles as an accidental murderer in Hunted (or The Stranger in Between, 1952), a young wing commander in Bomber Command in Appointment in London (1953), and in Desperate Moment (1953), a wrongly imprisoned man who regains hope of clearing his name when he learns his sweetheart, Mai Zetterling, is still alive.
Bogarde featured as a medical student in Doctor in the House (1954), a film that made him one of the most popular British stars of the 1950s. The film co-starred Kenneth More and Donald Sinden, with James Robertson Justice as their crabby mentor. The production was initiated by Betty Box, who had picked up a copy of the book at Crewe during a long rail journey and had seen its possibility as a film. Box and Ralph Thomas had difficulties convincing Rank executives that people would go to a film about doctors and that Bogarde, who up to then had played character roles, had sex appeal and could play light comedy. They were allocated a modest budget and were allowed to use only available Rank contract artists. The film was the first of the Doctor film series based on the books by Richard Gordon.
In The Sleeping Tiger (1954), Bogarde played a neurotic criminal with co-star Alexis Smith. It was Bogarde's first film for American expatriate director Joseph Losey.
He did his second Doctor film, Doctor at Sea (1955), co-starring Brigitte Bardot in one of her first film roles; played a returning colonial who fights the Mau-Mau with Virginia McKenna and Donald Sinden in Simba (1955); Cast a Dark Shadow (1955), as a man who marries women for money and then murders them; The Spanish Gardener (1956), with Michael Hordern, Jon Whiteley and Cyril Cusack; Doctor at Large (1957), again with Donald Sinden, another entry in the Doctor film series, with later Bond girl Shirley Eaton; the Powell and Pressburger production Ill Met by Moonlight (1957) co-starring Marius Goring as German General Kreipe, kidnapped on Crete by Patrick "Paddy" Leigh Fermor (Bogarde) and W. Stanley Moss (David Oxley), and a fellow band of Cretan resistance fighters based on W. Stanley Moss' real-life account (Ill Met by Moonlight) of the Second World War abduction; A Tale of Two Cities (1958), a faithful retelling of Charles Dickens' classic; as a flight lieutenant in the Far East, who falls in love with a beautiful Japanese teacher Yoko Tani in The Wind Cannot Read (1958);The Doctor's Dilemma (1959), based on a play by George Bernard Shaw and co-starring Leslie Caron and Robert Morley; and Libel (1959), playing three roles and co-starring Olivia de Havilland. Bogarde was called "Rank's jewel in the crown."
Art house and European cinema 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.
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. 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 ). 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.