Film Monthly – Oct 1990
DIRK BOGARDE – INTERVIEWED
“Filming, I reckon, is an odd way to earn a living. But it takes a lot to beat it,” says DIRK BOGARDE in an interview with MARIANNE GRAY
IT is awesome to meet in the flesh somebody that you have admired from afar for most of your life. The person in question for me is Dirk Bogarde. I have been a member of the Dirk Bogarde fan club since I was 12 when I saw him in Doctor At Large at a Saturday matinee while growing up in Cape Town. Earlier this year I met him at the Cannes Film Festival when his latest film Daddy Nostalgia, now retitled These Foolish Things, was screened.
The film, Bogarde’s first in 12 years, is the Bertrand Tavernier’s family drama about an Englishman who lives in the South of France with his irritating French wife (Odette Laure). Their Paris-based daughter Caroline (Jane Birkin) comes to stay while he recuperates from an operation and the changing face of the family builds into a fascinating play of humour and nostalgia.
“I waited 11 years with great patience for this film. I wrote my books and sat quietly in my house in France, sort of accepting that I had retired but waiting, waiting for a wonderful script to land on my doormat.
“Then this one came along. I’d turned it down four or five years ago but it had since been rewritten. Tavernier had been brought in as director and the brilliant Jane Birkin had been cast as the daughter. There is no way I’d be in retirement when there’s a chance to work with Tavernier or with Birkin, one of the most underrated actresses today.”
Bogarde, born Derek van den Bogaerde in Hampstead, the son of an art critic and an actress, is almost as well known for his writing as for his acting.
His four volumes of autobiography have covered his life and brought him best-selling status. They cover his idyllic childhood in rural Sussex; a tough adolescence at school in Scotland where he decided to become an artist; a damaging wartime army career in Europe and the Far East and the start of a glittering life; his adoring love for Kay Kendall and Judy Garland, and a career packed first with romantic comedies, then controversial films.
There are also three novels and to top those talents some of his poetry has been published, and drawings done during the war are hanging in the Imperial War Museum.
His life has been superbly detailed by the Bogarde pen in both words and pictures. Once done, he made a bonfire of all the diaries and letters on which the recollections were based, to close the file. One feels strongly that life in the Bogarde camp has been a restless one not eased by compromise.
When his adoring British public baulked at their matinee idol’s desire to move on to more serious work he simply quit Britain and went to Europe to work with Visconti (Death In Venice); Losey (Accident); Resnais (Providence) ; Fassbinder (Despair); Cavani (The Night Porter). For years he lived in France in a 15th century Provencal farmhouse, then in Paris, returning three years ago to England, to live in a Chelsea flat.
“When I heard the ‘Daddy’ script was going to be done by Tavernier I simply had to get the job. If Tavernier was making the owner’s handbook for a Japanese washing machine I’d do it. But I hadn’t done a film since 1977 and I didn’t know if they wanted me.
“Ultimately, of course, all done, it was a wondrous time. Filming, I reckon, is an odd way to earn a living. But it takes a lot to beat it.”
Although he makes fewer and fewer excursions on screen, occasionally Bogarde makes a television film, like in 1986 when he adapted Graham Greene’s May We Borrow Your Husband, and 1988 when with Lee Remick he made a BBC thriller called The Vision.
“I don’t normally do television. Usually they want me to play somebody’s sick grandfather or senile uncle. But in the case of The Vision the script was so good.
“I played an ageing TV personality recruited by a fundamentalist- backed People Channel who ultimately destroyed himself attempting to denounce the Channel when he discovers that it is broadcasting hidden Right-wing messages from secret sponsors.
“It was tough stuff then but from what I glean from the rare times I watch television, it’s already proving to have an uncannily accurate prediction.
“Now the satellites are going up something like this could so easily happen.”
Meanwhile, it’s back to These Foolish Things and the role he waited 11 years for.
“Both my character and I have reached the age of a man who takes stock of his life,” he said in that famous voice. “The ‘Daddy’ of the film is, in fact, only 65, but then he has just undergone a very serious operation and I am OK, on top of the world actually, so we equal out. Agewise, anyway.
“He had been a super international salesman and I’ve never been able to sell a thing.” Equally so, ‘Daddy’ hadn’t ever been the idol of the Odeons who had to have his flies sewn up before film premieres in case his fans stripped him naked! Ah, those were the days!
