Interview – Jan 1991

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Dirk Bogarde

Dirk Bogarde is a total craftsman whose characters define a standard of film acting that has almost disappeared. Unique among British leading men of his generation, Bogarde chose to work consistently with European art-house directors, spurning more lucrative work in Hollywood. The fruits of this decision include his indelible portraits of Aschenbach in Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice: the ex-Nazi, Max, in Liliana Cavani’s much-banned The Night Porter; John Gielgud’s bitchy son in Alain Resnais’s Providence; and the disintegrating Hermann in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Despair.

Born in London in 1921, Bogarde began acting on the stage in England in the late ’30s. He served in army intelligence throughout World War II and had what used to be called “a good war” – he was there from the D-day invasion straight through the liberation of the concentration camps, also serving for a time in the East Indies. Demobilized in 1946, he resumed a career in the theater but soon was offered film parts.

He became a major box-office star in the ’50s, appearing in police thrillers and comedies, notably as Dr. Simon Sparrow in the popular “Doctor” series, and as Sydney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities. By the end of the decade, he craved more serious roles. Courageously, he accepted the lead in Victim as a married, homosexual barrister who fights back against a blackmail ring. Victim was the first film anywhere to deal sympathetically with gays, and was probably instrumental in the decriminalization of homosexuality in England. It lost Bogarde his following of teenage fans but won the attention of serious directors, such as Joseph Losey and John Schlesinger.

With Schlesinger, he made Darling …, an international success that established Julie Christie as a star; his films for Losey include The Servant, Modesty Blaise, and Accident. He also starred with his close friend Judy Garland in I Could Go On Singing.

Nearly every film Bogarde has appeared in since 1963 has become a classic; but since 1968, the year he made The Damned for Visconti, he has acted only sporadically.

In the widening gaps between films, Bogarde has become a best-selling author, with four books of memoirs, three novels, and, most recently, a curious collection of letters (A Particular Friendship) . They were Written between 1967 and 1972 to a woman Bogarde never met; she was a former owner of his country house, and wrote to him after seeing the house in a magazine article. They avoided meeting each other, fearing it would spoil the relationship developed through the letters. When “Mrs. X” died, the letters were filed away and forgotten about; years later, Bogarde discovered that a collection of copies had been kept by his friend Anthony Forwood, who had recently died of cancer. Rather than send it with the rest of the stuff to the shredder,” Bogarde writes, “I read it with some curiosity and decided, perhaps unwisely, to keep it.”

Bogarde recently returned to England after living in France for twenty years. He ended a twelve-year retirement last year to make Bertrand Tavernier’s Daddy Nostalgie with Jane Birkin and Odette Laure; he is now planning a TV project with Tavernier. This interview took place in a breakfast nook at the Hotel Lancaster In Paris, the day before Daddy Nostalgie opened to huge acclaim.

DIRK BOGARDE: I’ve been coming to this place for forty years. It’s changed a bit, but It really Is more or less the same dull old place. It’s good when I’m doing these terrible interviews – I don’t mean you, I mean with the French, and yesterday the Japanese. A whole table of Japanese. Oh, God.

GARY INDIANA: What kind Of things did they ask you?

DB: Oh, cerebral things, mostly about my books. And how did I feel about my fame, my legend? God. I said I thought you could be a legend only when you’re dead, and I hadn’t really reached that point yet, as far as I know.

“I’M MUCH MORE TO THE LEFT THAN I EVER WOULD HAVE DREAMT POSSIBLE”

GI: Not to shift the subject too dramatically, but you actually saw Himmler’s corpse?

DB: [laughs] Yes, I did. Just after breakfast, too. Yes, he was lying there in the bay window of a little parlor In Luneburg. I was absolutely amazed, the wretched little beast. He’d taken cyanide. Terrible pair of old army boots on, hairy shins, and a blanket. I thought, God, you really have been the bogeyman of all time. He looked like a dead schoolmaster. Those things always surprise me in a war. The contrasts.

Gl: I have a sequence of plodding questions to ask you.

DB: Plod on.

GI: In your memoirs, you discuss when certain shots were being prepared for The Night Porter and the local population saw you in an SS uniform. Contrary to what you had expected, they wildly applauded. What do you think about the reunification of Germany?

DB: It terrifies me. The episode you refer to, though, was In Austria, where they were much tougher, much more Nazi than even the Germans were. We were shooting a scene of The Night Porter in Vienna, outside the Karl Marx Hof of workers’ flats, where the revolution took place. I had to cross the street and exit into a car. And I said to Charlotte [Rampling], “I’m shit-scared.” I was looking very beautiful in my Nazi uniform, quite splendid – it’s built for that, you know, to strike reverence and fear into you. I went and sat in this little bar in somebody’s raincoat and kept my cap off. They told me, “We’ve got you a room in one of the flats where you can hide and no one will see you. The old lady’s very old and very stupid she doesn’t realize what’s going on. She’ll hide you, we’ll give a signal, and you take off the thing at the door and come downstairs and make the exit.” My God. I got into the flat. She was probably eighty and perfectly sweet. There was a canary in a cage, pictures on the wall of chalets and of her daughter and her son-in-law. I had to get rid of the mac and put the cap on and pull on my black gloves to wait for the signal. And she went on her knees and touched my boots, and said to my interpreter: “It’s the good days again.” It’s true! She asked if she could kiss my hand. What do I do? I gave her my hand and saluted and went down feeling ill. There was an enormous crowd – you couldn’t hide the fact we were making a bloody movie – and when I came out, it was like I was Garbo or Dietrich. And they were shrieking with joy and singing the “Horst Wessel Song.” I should worry. And all the kids came running after me, to hold my hand, to touch the uniform – all of them.

GI: You know, I recall that even friends of Rainer Fassbinder, after a few drinks, would go on and on about how they were the good Germans, and then they would say things to me like ”Well, you know, the Jews are cheap … “with a big smile, and they didn’t mean any harm per se-

DB: No, but you see, it’s in them. Rainer and I became enormously good friends. As I’m very ordinary and proper, I disapproved of his group. I didn’t like them because they were destructive to him. But I was devoted to him, and respectful. Couldn’t stand his mother. One day Rainer said to me, after some conversation I had had with her, “Never, never, Dirk, ask anybody of your age-group here what they did in the war.” He loathed the Germans, vehemently. I had a room in the Bauscherhof hotel in Munich, and Rainer came around one night for a script conference or something. He was appalled when he got off the elevator; he was shaking-well, he often was shaking. He’d have taken a little white pill or whatever, and I said, “What’s the matter? Sit down.” So he sat down and said, “I’ve just seen the elevator doors. Have you seen them, the gold doors in the elevator? They’ve all got swastikas scratched on them from somebody’s key.” He couldn’t believe lt. He said, “You see, we’ll never eradicate it.” And he was beginning to get weepy. I said, “Come on, let’s pull ourselves together.” And I gave him a huge … well, half a bottle of brandy, I think, and he staggered out into the night.

Gl: In the prologue to A Particular Friendship, you indicate that over the years, particularly in light of living away from England for a long time, the Tory perspective you expressed in those letters has changed. Can you elaborate on that?

DB: I can elaborate, but not forever. The point is that then [1967-70] we had a particularly savage socialist government that was doing all the wrong things, as far as I could see. I’m from a very Conservative family. When I started paying 98 percent tax on the pound-when the studios were being closed, when American movies could no longer come in because they were being taxed so heavily – I realised It was time to quit. They were giving everything to the famous worker and to the unions. And they were pulling the country to pieces, they really were. But with Mrs. Thatcher, and the overt Conservatism that’s happening now in England, the situation is appalling. I don’t know what to do about it, but I’m there now. I’ve had to go back and live there. My points of view have altered very radically; I’m much more to the left than I ever would have dreamt possible, but what alarms me is that all the politicians have gone weak and wet. Our reputation for brutality at football matches is extraordinary, we behave like lions, we’ve gone mad, all wearing Union Jacks I don’t understand it. And the new rich are much worse than any of the old aristocratic Conservative families.

I decided to keep those letters because they’re an unqualified account of what happened In that period: from ’67 to May ’68, here in Paris, and right up through the invasion of Czechoslovakia and the time when I was going to move away from England, and why. And there’s no reason for not having that point of view. In hindsight, I could have corrected it, but I think it’s terrible to do that, don’t you?

Gl: What you’ve written about your experiences working with Visconti and Fassbinder reflects a total immersion in the character, a real transfer of identity-similar to what I understand of Method acting. Yet I also have the impression that you somewhat disdain Method acting.

DB: Yes, I do.

GI: Can you explain the difference between your own techniques and those of the Method?

DB: I teach now — I do master classes at the Old Vic, the National Theatre, and the Guild Hall- and I get asked that question all the time. It’s very simple. I do not see the point in going into a room on your own for six hours and coming out thinking you’re a tin of condensed milk. That seems to me the wrong way around to go about acting. And I’ve found that every Method actor always asks why but they never ask how. They always say, “What’s my motivation?” I say your motivation Is your pay check, that’s it. But act, for fuck’s sake. They read like parrots, or mumble; they don’t project. When I say the camera photographs thought, it does, but it’s a total concentration on identifying with your character. If you don’t do that, if the thought is not there, the camera will just photograph an empty cranium. It’s no good saying you can do the laundry list at the same time. You can’t. You should be drained for a little while afterward, so the body can recharge- because you’re someone else. That’s what happens In Daddy Nostalgie. All kinds of little details help to make the man I play a real person, but It’s nothing to do with me. I do the work, but it’s not my persona. There’s no point in doing all that other kind of shit-being very tough or breaking up motorcars or shooting people, physical things like that.

Gl: Stunt-people get big roles now.

DB: That’s all it is! And big-tit girls. I remember Judy Garland’s bitterness when she didn’t win an Oscar for A Star Is Born – and there was an actress. She said, “Fucking Grace Kelly won because she took her fucking makeup off.” And it’s absolutely true! That’s what she got the Oscar for – she pulled her hair back and took her makeup off. But she wasn’t very good in that thing [The Country Girl]. She couldn’t touch what Judy was doing.

Gl: In order to make it plausible that you were Gielgud’s son in Providence –

DB: I had to be a reflection of him.

Gl: That seems something extremely subtle to figure out.

DB: Well, It is, but I am in his imagination in the first two acts of Providence, and in the third act I’m completely myself. Therefore, if you’re being imagined by someone, especially with malevolence – and Gielgud thought of his son with hatred – you have to be, partially, the man who is thinking. Because it’s his mind that’s creating the image of his son. So in a way I had to use a slightly histrionic manner – I should think the American critics would call it camp. It probably was – I was copying John’s theatricality and taking it to the furthest degree. I also copied his mannerisms. There were things he did with his hands, with the ring, a way that he turned his head from time to time, which I pinched and copied. I used to watch him carefully. We dined frequently, he and I. I also had to set up a dinner with Resnais, who was studying John like something under a microscope. John kept saying to me, “This is a setup, isn’t it?” I said ‘ “Yes , it is, so go ahead, tell all your funny stories.” And he did. But I was watching, too, and transferring his performance — which he didn’t know – into my own performance of his supposed thought of me. It was very difficult. And then for the third act, I eradicated all that and became a completely different kind of person.

Gl: You made a decision several times to retire from films. What was it about the Tavernier script that lured you out of retirement again?

DB: Nothing much. I didn’t like the script very much. I got it six years ago, and it was very sugary. His ex-wife [Colo Tavernier O’Hagan] wrote it, and she’s half-Irish, so it was a bit cozy. At that point I was dealing with this cancer case in my own life, and I didn’t want to play one of these dying old men. But then It came back to me, only because somebody called me and asked if I had the private telephone number of a certain actor In London, and I said, “Yes, but I can’t give it to you.” She said, “Oh, do, for Christ’s sake. I’m a great friend of Jane Birkin’s, and Jane is desperately trying to find a man to play her father in a film she’s doing with Tavernier in September.” I said, “What’s she doing?” And the girl said, “As a matter of fact, It’s a script you turned down six years ago.” So I said, “O.K., If you’re sure it’s Tavernier and Jane Birkin, could you get me the script?” She biked it round to me, I read it, and then I waited in transparent terror that Tavernier would say no. I wanted to work with him on the script, because I knew if he had an idea about a not terribly good script then he must have some reason to do it, and it would be worth being part of it. It was a very much amended and much better version that I finally read; his ex-wife had rewritten it. But then I imposed my own things on this bourgeois: I decided to make him a bit of a spoiled bastard, not very kind or nice, who suddenly, at the end of his days, finds out what a shit he’s been and realizes all the things he’s lost, and doesn’t know how to make it better. He was a commercial traveler for Yardley’s, but all those stories he tells are total fabrications and lies and I thought, Well, I can invent wonderful things around that. So he tells about staying in a first-class cabin on the Queen Mary, covered with flowers and champagne – of course he didn’t, but it’s the kind of thing he liked telling his daughter; It made him a big guy. He never had those things, and now he’s dying in a small, third – generation retirement village in the South. His wife’s playing bridge all the time and refuses to speak to him In English, and he can’t be bothered speaking French. It’s a sort of dead end. We’ve all had someone who’s dying, we’ve all had someone we were rotten to — male, female, daughter, son, wife, postman, whatever. We’ve seen that barrier in a marriage when suddenly it’s no good, it’s gone, after many years, and the two people retire into their own worlds, and they’re strangers when they meet. It’s as simple as that, and it affects people.

Gl: Are there any directors you wish you’d worked with? Buñuel, for example?

DB: I’d love to have worked with Orson Welles; I only met him once or twice, but I liked him enormously. Truffaut – I adored Day for Night. I’d like to work with Louis Malle, very much. Lots of people like that. And I had a great passion to work with Woody Allen, but the operative word is “had,” because after the impact of the first two or three films, I began to think, Come on, now, are we going to be stuck here forever with this Philip Roth misery? Yes, we were. It’s not enough, It’s masturbation. That’s the trouble with most directors now. I’ve been very fortunate, because from being sort of England’s Robert Wagner I slowly eased my way out of that situation into trying to do something a little more adult when I was forty. And then I was picked up by Joe Losey, and from Losey’s films things followed, and I worked only with the greats. I’m not bragging. I’m just saying what luck I had. I had Losey for five films, VIsconti for two, Resnals for one. I had Cukor for two — by default, because he replaced two other directors. And later on, when Rainer suggested I work with him, I was thrilled, because he was a young man with a brilliant record. I loved the things he’d done. People think of him as just a motorcycle lad who took too many pills, fucked boys, and jumped out the window. It’s not so. He did all those things, but on the side he was a really good guy. He was a brilliant director; he knew more about the camera than even Cukor or Visconti.

Gl: I always think of the debacle of Garbage, the City, and Death at Frankfurt TAT Theater and the accusations of anti-Semitism against Fassbinder – very similar to the reaction to The Night Porter, in a way.

DB: Although we fictionalized a lot of it, The Night Porter was a true story – It’s really the only reason that we did it. The girl now lives somewhere in Oregon, married. But she came every year to Dachau with a big sheaf of red roses and put them down on the corner where the hut was, where she first met her SS guard. He was taken off by the Americans at the liberation and shot. And she was mercifully released and sent off to America. But she never, never forgot.

Cavani, Charlotte, and I … we never thought we were making a porno movie until [producer] Joe Levine got hold of it. The point was, we thought – and I’d been to Belsen, I’d been to Dachau – that it was possible, in that hell and awfulness, that you could find one little seed of human compassion that would grow and form a plant of love. And it did happen. Not very many times, but I know that it did happen.

ALL – CONSUMING LOVE IS A FORM OF PURITY”

I thought that was such an extraordinary thing, that out of human ordure, you could salvage one tiny little flower of purity. Because all-consuming love like that, totally consuming physical love, is a form of purity. It’s a very fierce fire.

“IT’S A FIERCE FIRE”

Gl: One last question. Do you find it easier to remain an atheist as you get older?

DB: Well, my father, who was Roman Catholic, had been through the First World War, and when my war started, he took me off to the train station and said, “Just remember one thing, sweetheart: He doesn’t keep His eye on the sparrows. He’s too busy with other things. So don’t be a sparrow.” I kept that with me all the time. But when I went through Normandy at the end of the war, that was the first time I’d really seen dead people in quantity. Half the marine corps floating around in the sea: they looked like pieces of seaweed. Then I saw my very first bulldozer – a little while later, in one of the orchards- and a great big black gentleman very happily digging away, shovelling everybody into this mass grave like a spin dryer, corpses collected from all over the place. I thought, Where Is Jesus? And in Belsen, crawling through slime, I saw babies stacked up like cordwood- I presume they were babies, they were little. Every time I say this, somebody will send me an American book called Wrestling with Jesus. And I don’t want it.