Best of British Past and Present – Jan 2009
Idol in the House
Loved for his good looks, cinema heart-throb Dirk Bogarde welcomed a variety of challenging roles
Many matinee idols dream of becoming respected serious actors, but few make the transition as successfully as Dirk Bogarde. His early career was marked by constant friction between his own aspirations and the judgements of studio bosses and casting directors, but his dissatisfaction with the ‘pretty boy’ roles he was given in British films inspired him to seek out unusual and often controversial projects that established an international reputation as a distinguished character actor.
The man who was destined to become Britain’s biggest film star of the Fifties, dubbed the ‘Matinee Idol of the Odeon’, was born Derek Jules Gaspard Ulric Niven van den Bogaerde, to a Scottish mother and Flemish father, in 1921. His film career began with an uncredited appearance in a 1939 George Formby film, but was immediately interrupted by WWII.
Rising to the rank of captain, he served in Air Photographic Intelligence, and was among the first Allied officers to visit Belsen concentration camp. Many of the sights he witnessed there, especially a skeletal Jewish prisoner giving him the ‘V for Victory’ sign, were to haunt him for the rest of his life.
Demobbed and freshly kitted out in one of “those awful trilby hats they gave you,” his exceptional good looks got him noticed by producers, and he was signed to a long term exclusive contract by the Rank Organisation. He was the first post-war studio star, and Rank put considerable effort and resources into promoting him as the next big thing in British movies, and an international property to follow the likes of James Mason and Stewart Granger. Understandably, they were keen to cast him in romantic and heroic roles; he appeared in several war films and was enormously popular as Dr Simon Sparrow in four of the hugely successful Doctor films, beginning with Doctor in the House in 1954.
Though the series would continue on without him for several more instalments, it is Bogarde’s appearances that are chiefly remembered, whether romancing Brigitte Bardot in Doctor at Sea (1955), or giving a young patient the instruction: “Big breaths … ” and receiving the immortal reply: “Yeth, and I’m only thixteen!”
Even in those early years he was keen to vary the kind of roles he played, and attempted serious projects and unsympathetic parts. In fact, the role that first brought him to public attention was as Tom Riley in The Blue Lamp (1950), a young villain who murders Dixon of Dock Green (Jack Warner) – five years before the character was resurrected for the long running BBC series!
He also played a murderer on the run in Hunted (1952) and a serial wife-killer in Cast a Dark Shadow (1955) alongside the great Margaret Lockwood. But the majority of his films played to the matinee idol image, such as A Tale of Two Cities (1958) and the Powell and Pressburger war film Ill Met by Moonlight (1957).
“The ridiculous thing,” he once said, “is I never ever regarded myself as a star. It came about without my willing it.” Tired of salacious fan letters and screaming girls, Bogarde was eyeing enviously the success other actors were having in the new ‘kitchen sink’ dramas. He began badgering Rank to move with the times. He was very nearly cast as Lawrence of Arabia, but Rank dropped out of the project; it was his bitterest professional disappointment.
But, it was now the Sixties, and even Rank could see the filmmaking mood in Britain had turned away from gentle comedies and big-budget action films in favour of grittier, more realistic dramas. At last, Bogarde was given the chance to expand his range.
In 1961, he accepted the role of Melville Farr, a bisexual barrister exposing a blackmail ring at great risk to himself and his reputation, in Victim. Bogarde’s own reputation – and certainly his heart-throb image – was put similarly at risk by this pioneering treatment of a controversial theme. His bravery was rewarded with critical and box office success. He went on to appear in such defining themes of the Sixties as The Servant (1963), Darling (1965) with Julie Christie, and the over the top spy spoof Modesty Blaise (1966).
The third stage of his acting career began in 1969, when he took on the role of the German industrialist Frederick Bruckman in The Damned, directed by Luchino Visconti. From hereon, he would concentrate his energies chiefly on similarly intense and complex roles in European art movies, working with celebrated directors.
The characters he played in these films were often German, despite the resentment he felt towards the nation following the things he had seen in WWII; he claimed as late as the 1990s, that he would be reluctant to share an elevator with a German.
Nonetheless, he gave often sensitive and remarkable performances, as an introspective composer in Death in Venice (1971), again for Visconti, as a Russian immigrant in Thirties’ Berlin in Fassbinder’s Despair (1978) and, most controversially, as an unrepentant ex-SS officer in The Night Porter (1974). As well as these critically acclaimed performances, he occasionally found time for more crowd-pleasing assignments, such as in Richard Attenborough’s all-star war extravaganza A Bridge Too Far (1977).
In a 1970 interview, he explained: “I know now, late in my life, that I am a screen actor. I love the camera and it loves me. But the amount of concentration that you have to use to feed that camera is so enormous that you are absolutely ragged at the end of the day after doing something like a look.”
He made only another four films after Despair (one of them playing Roald Dahl in a TV movie of the life of the author’s wife Patricia Neal). Now living in the South of France, he settled into a second career as a best-selling writer, and a series of autobiographical reminiscences, beginning with A Postillion Struck by Lightning, won him much acclaim and a new set of fans.
He was knighted in 1992, but his health had been poor since a stroke in 1987, and 1990’s Daddy Nostalgie would prove to be his final film. An operation to widen his arteries in 1996 was not as successful as hoped, and a second stoke left him paralysed down one side of his body. Finally, in 1999, a heart attack claimed him at the age of 78.
Bogarde was a rare example of an actor who successfully took charge of his career at a time when it was felt that such decisions were better made by others; ignoring the studios’ predictions of disaster, he managed to be both a popular star and a highly regarded serious actor.
Yet, however hard he fought to shed the well-mannered and debonair image created by his British movies and pursue more challenging work, it is a fact that for audiences who grew up watching him in the cinemas of the 1950s, he remains the impossibly handsome, slightly intense, often devastatingly charming hero of so many thrillers, dramas and action films. And, especially to female viewers, he will always be the dashing Dr Sparrow.
Matthew Coniam
