ABC Film Review – Oct 19674
‘Nobody would call me beautiful’
AGREED … looking at him across the page in his new film Our Mother’s House. But let’s also portray the better-looking Bogarde, the Dirk of distinction, as he looks (left) in his next film, Mister Sebastian. And to show how well he’s wearing at 46 we picture him, on the extreme right, twelve years ago in Doctor in the House.
” No one in his right mind would call me beautiful … I don’t strip-off well and I don’t ride well … I’ve made nearly fifty movies and I’ve liked barely a dozen of them … ” Who’s this running himself down – in a profession where they’re better known for over – praising themselves? It is Dirk Bogarde, Britain’s outstanding perfectionist of motion pictures. Self-effacing, self-denigrating, and even sometimes self-mocking, Bogarde is something almost unique among actors. Yet he is no cynic. Underneath an outward appearance of bland deprecation there lies a rare talent for honesty of purpose and complete dedication.
To him, his work comes first. He leaves himself little time for the leisure his big success on the screen could afford him. To get a film part, to examine and probe it; to convince himself that he can get inside it and make it live – these are the real challenges that animate Dirk Bogarde. It is his ability to take upon himself so completely the character he is playing that is the secret of his unique success.
” I am a character actor,” he says. ” And I won’t stand for compromises. I must really get to grips with what the character I am playing is all about.”
Dirk Bogarde is the son of Ulric van den Bogaerde, a former art editor of the rimes. The ancestral Dutch name means literally ” of the orchards.” His mother was Scottish actress Margaret Niven and Dirk has hereditary gifts from both parents. He won an art school scholarship at 16, and some drawings he made when he crossed to France with the liberation armies on D-Day are now in the Imperial War Museum.
What he derived from his actress mother is too obvious to need stressing! The lure of acting weaned him from art, however, and when he had completed his art school course he began to call on London managers seeking an opportunity to appear in a play. He was not the only one, and the answer to one and all was the same : no dice. Dirk was still determined, and he decided to start at the bottom as a tea boy backstage. In time he became a stage manager and then fate took a hand when one of the cast failed to turn up and he was given a chance to appear on stage. Dirk’s debut – if you can call it that – was something less than an overnight sensation, but what it did teach him was that he needed real training. He went into provincial repertory.
The war intervened and after a distinguished army career in which he saw service in both Europe and the Far East, he was demobbed with the rank of major in 1946 and returned immediately to the stage.
A part in the play “Power Without Glory” brought him exceptionally good notices and as a result he received a number of film offers. He threw in his lot with the Rank Organisation and a succession of films like So Long At The Fair, The Sea Shall Not Have Them, the Doctor series etc., made him the best known young screen idol in the country.
This was not quite what he wanted, however. He heard of a director who was seeking a young leading man saying to someone who suggested Bogarde, ” I want an actor not just a film star.”
“It hurt,” says Dirk simply, but he took the point. He had always been a serious actor and he was, like great actors have always been, ambitious to make a worth while contribution to his chosen profession and not merely glamour. He tried to turn his back on the matinee idol type of role and when he played Sidney Carton in A Tale Of Two Cities, we had a glimpse of the Bogarde of the future.
He strengthened his grip on characterisation in The Wind Cannot Read, The Doctor’s Dilemma and Libel. In Song Without End he played the part of the great composer Franz Liszt and was beginning to be taken more seriously by the leading critics. But it was The Servant that was the great turning-point in his career.
“I thank my good fortune – that is, Joseph Losey and The Servant – for being able to leave the old group behind,” he says. ” Actors today have to have brains. To be able to convey a complex thought, as might be written by Harold Pinter, an actor has to be intellectually on the ball. Julie Christie and Lynn Redgrave are both thinking, erudite girls, and make no mistake about it there’s nothing silly about the Beatles. Their lyrics are pertinent and wry, and their outlook highly sophisticated.”
Since The Servant we have seen the more mature Bogarde in King And Country, Darling and Accident. All three films won wide critical acclaim as well as festival awards. His reputation has never been as high as it is at the present moment.
Another big challenge has been accepted by Bogarde in M-G-M Filmways’. Our Mother’s House in which, as Charlie Hook, he plays the “father” of seven young children. The children have been living with their mother who is gravely ill with tuberculosis. They have never known a father and when their mother eventually dies, they evolve a daring plan to keep the house going in order to avoid getting themselves sent to an orphanage.
Charlie Hook learns of the children’s plight, and disreputable character though he is, he nevertheless succeeds in ingratiating himself into the household and taking on the duties of the children’s father which he claims to be. Although all but one of the children like having Charlie around, his sinister purpose becomes clearer as the story progresses. Bogarde has not often been seen in such an unsavoury role as this, but he gains enormously in stature as an actor.
Another different Bogarde will be seen in Mister Sebastian which he is making for Paramount. He plays a mathematical genius – British Intelligence’s brightest backroom boy. He has a hundred pretty girls on his staff who help him to crack the fantastically complicated codes dreamed up by foreign spies. Sometimes it is the girls themselves who crack under the strain, and a special room – the Breakdown Room – has to be provided for them in which to blow their tops. His co-star is Susannah York.
Still unmarried, Dirk Bogarde has a beautiful home in Sussex. At weekends his house is often filled with interesting and amusing guests. He has played host to such as Judy Garland, Ingrid Bergman, Claudette Colbert, Noel Coward, Rex Harrison, Elizabeth Taylor, Capucine, Cary Grant, Barbra Streisand, Rock Hudson, Olivia de Havilland and John Osborne.
J. WALKER BENTLEY
