Woman’s Weekly – Sept 21st 1974
Dirk Bogarde at Home
Once leading the hectic life of an international film actor, Dirk Bogarde has now slowed down the pace to the gentle rhythm of the seasons in the South of France
WHEN DIRK BOGARDE was a matinee idol, his days revolved around shooting schedules and film commitments, meetings with agents, producers and directors, and personal appearances for his numerous fans. Despite his integrity and a natural distance that kept him very much his own man, it was a hectic programme imposed upon him, the price that had to be paid to stay high in the box office ratings.
The pace is different now. His days are no longer structured by clocks, calendars and travel arrangements, but by the seasons and the weather. Dawn and dusk are nature’s timekeepers and the day’s decisions have little to do with diaries and appointment books, but are more likely to be made by glancing at the skies and sniffing the weather.
Gone are the days of spacious homes in the English countryside when the squire image was a natural counterpoint to the many upper-crust roles he played. Today, at fifty-three, he is still very much the gentleman, and lives in the country, but the idea of the country gentleman that this conjures up is deceptive. Elegant as ever, well-spoken in a clipped English voice, he is nonetheless a new man. A toiler of the soil, a drawer of water and hewer of wood, a painter, carpenter, bricklayer, farmer and gardener rolled into one. He seems happier, too. More content and peaceful. He plays his new role eagerly and with conviction, as if it is the one he wanted all along.
Undoubtedly his co-star is Le Haut Clermont, his rural hideaway in the South of France, where he has kept himself very much to himself in the past few years. It is a 17th-century stone-built farmhouse, nestling in magnificent isolation high in the foothills of the Alpes-Maritimes that rise steeply from the Mediterranean. It stands in ten acres of olive groves near Grasse, protected by the mountains to the rear and overlooking the hazy sea along the busy coast.
Le Haut Clermont was a primitive farmhouse in which cattle and sheep were as much at home as the family living there, when Bogarde bought it five years ago. He rolled up his sleeves and got on with the job, cleaning and clearing, knocking down bits here and rebuilding there, putting in a kitchen and plumbing, organising the local workmen. At the same time there was the garden to look after, grass to scythe and mow, roses to prune, and the acres of olives to tend the year round.
It is now a beautiful country home, filled with favourite paintings, records, books and furniture. Yet, though neither excessively large nor ostentatious, it requires the constant love and attention that Bogarde lavishes upon it. In a way, it is symbolic of the turning point in his life when he made Death in Venice, Visconti’s film version of Thomas Mann’s novel.
In the recently published book, The Films of Dirk Bogarde, by Margaret Hinxman and Susan d’Arcy, Bogarde describes Death in Venice as “the peak-the end-of my career. Oh, I shall go on working to earn money, or if a project interests me. But I can never hope to give a better performance or be in a better film than Death in Venice. One critic ended a review with the words ‘it is like the death of a friend’. They understood.”
HIS NEW LIFE
It was then that Bogarde, after toying briefly with Italy, put down roots for his new life. After developing from a matinee idol into one of Britain’s most distinguished character actors, the time had come for a change now that he had given his definitive performance. It was to the South of France that he turned.
“I had wanted to come and live here since I was three or four years old,” he said, flanked by his two dogs on the terrace of Le Haut Clermont. “I have known this area all my life, and have always thought that it would be smashing to come and live down here. Basically, what brought me here is that I feel that I can live the kind of life here that I used to live as a child in England in Sussex-the Sussex that disappeared in the late thirties.”
There is a sense of permanence, too, about his new surroundings. It takes a lot to winkle him out, and even more to persuade him to make the short drive to the coast, particularly to Cannes during the film festival. Yet it was significant that he went this year – to the festival screening of Liliana Cavani’s latest film, Milarepa.
It was Liliana Cavani who directed him and Charlotte Rampling in The Night Porter, Bogarde’s first film after Death in Venice three years earlier. “I am hoping very much that I shall work again with Liliana Cavani,” said Bogarde this summer. “If we can get together, and if we can get the money – it’s always if, if, if – we shall start another film together by the end of the year.
“I find I like work less and less as time goes on,” he said. “But I have been doing it for so long now that it is very difficult to stop completely. So once every three years is O.K. by me. I have to work every now and again for my own excessive energy and steam.
“If a project is exciting, if it looks like fun and there is an exciting director, then I think about it – especially if it is planned for the winter. The winters here are very long. It starts getting dark at three in the afternoon and is not light until nine the following morning, which means that I cannot work outside which I spend most of my time doing. So a film in the winter is fun to do.”
Meanwhile, there is Le Haut Clermont – dogs to be walked, grass to be scythed, a stone wall to be rebuilt, olives to be harvested. It’s a far cry from the retinue of servants, the studio car, the premieres and the fan club, but it is obviously much more satisfying.
