Vogue – Jan 1962

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Actors Abroad

Film stars are much travelled people; here, impressions of their latest locations from three distinguished actors.

ALEC GUINESS and JOHN MILLS
(see article)

DIRK BOGARDE stars with Alec Guinness in “H.M.S. Defiant”; he’s photographed here in the garden of his villa at Denia, where the film was taken.

“Denia lies on the Fabled Shore, that beautiful strip of coast which Rose Macaulay described. It’s still not too spoilt, mainly because communications are bad – it’s two hours from Valencia and Alicante by road and the plane gets into Valencia at four in the morning. I don’t advise the hotels in Denia, they’re noisy and not very Voguish. Much better to rent a villa which you can do-quite inexpensively. I had an enchanting one with a cook, two maids, five bedrooms and a three-acre garden with access to a private rocky beach. It came to £60 a week, which was perhaps excessive, but then they knew I was a movie actor. But if you don’t worry about things like hot water there are some enchanting three-room cottages right on the beach which cost only £8 or £10. And just outside Denia there was a ruin which I longed to buy-a Spanish Colonial Georgian sort of house, completely derelict, with thirty acres of vineyard and a beach. It cost only £400, and to do it up very simply would probably cost another £300.

“Denia is a pretty village, with bamboo groves and citrus orchards in the hills behind the vineyards tumbling down to the sea. Not a smart place, just a little harbour where fishing boats and freighters come in; cosmopolitan in so far as yachts and cruisers stop in sometimes to pick up rum, so you get lots of funny people off them. There are one or two boutiques, bad imitations of Hermes, which open up in the summer, and any number of little bars, which are fun. Altogether, a gloriously untroubled place – and you don’t see too many G.B. cars.”