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Monday, September 22, 2008

Dirk Bogarde: The Dark Side of Britain's First Screen Heart-Throb


This article of mine on the late British actor Dirk Bogarde (pictured above) appears in the Daily Express.

With his good looks, easy charm and clean-cut image, he was the archetypal leading man of Fifties British cinema but off-screen Dirk Bogarde was a very different man from the characters he invariably portrayed.

While in films, the actor known as ‘The Matinee Idol of the Odeon’ played the romantic lead, in real life Bogarde was a homosexual, who concealed his true sexuality from his adoring female public, even after homosexuality ceased to be a criminal offence.

When his acting career declining in the 1970s, Bogarde re-invented himself as a successful writer- penning award winning autobiographical volumes, novels and book reviews. But again, all was not what it first appeared. His books helped foster the image of a well-mannered, cultivated and likeable man. The real Bogarde however was waspish, foul-mouthed and incredibly snobbish.

Bogarde resented the rise of working class actors such as Michael Caine and Albert Finney in the 1960s. He said of Caine: “he has to have the ugliest voice in the business… and pop eyes.” He railed against the “lower orders” and what he saw as their increasing influence. “I watch that filthy Telly to get into the feel of things. And the only feel I get is one of frustration and futility; and hatred against the lower orders who demand mediocraty (sic) and get it.” Fellow actor John Fraser recalls Bogarde telling him how, when he was a lonely young actor in London, he would invite studios assistants round to his flat for a meal. “One day I looked round at all these insignificant people with whom I was sharing my precious, precious leisure- and I thought’ If you’re going to be a Film Star, ducky, you better start behaving like one .Get yourself some proper friends”.

As his private correspondence, published in a new book, testifies, the misanthropic Bogarde rarely had a good word to say about anybody, or anything. The Cannes Film Festival was “a sort of nightmare as usual. A record crowd of foul people”. Holland, where he filmed ‘A Bridge too Far’, was “hell”. “Apart from the van Gogh’s, Rembrandts and the Vermeers, it is all a lot of crappy horror”. In a letter to the writer Penelope Mortimer he boasted how he had ditched his old friends. “I have dropped them all, Deliberately and without giving them any real reason. Don’t want ‘em. Useless. They drain me“.

But there was one person whom Bogarde did have a lot of time for: himself. “I am very fond of me” he wrote. “I get on with me. I make me laugh”.

This extremely complex and difficult man was born in 1921 in London of mixed Flemish, Dutch and Scottish descent. His father, Ulric van den Bogaerde, was the art editor of the Times, and his mother was a former actress. In 1941 Bogarde cut short his fledging acting career and joined the Army, and rose to the rank of Major in World War Two. In April 1945, he claimed he was one of the first Allied officers to reach the notorious Belsen concentration camp, an experience he found it difficult to speak about for many years afterwards.

Bogarde’s wartime experiences also made him a strong supporter of euthanasia. "My views were formulated as a 24-year-old officer in Normandy“ he wrote. During the war I saw more wounded men being 'taken care of' than I saw being rescued. they were pumping blood or whatever; they were in such a wreck, the only thing to do was to shoot them”.

After the war, Bogarde soon found success as a film actor, contracted to the powerful ‘Rank Organisation’. In 1947, Sketch magazine named him as one of Britain’s four ‘young men of mark’- and it wasn’t long before Bogarde was playing leading roles in films such as The Blue Lamp, So Long at the Fair and Appointment in London. In the 1950s Bogarde was firmly established as Britain’s most popular film star. His runaway hit ‘Doctor in the House’ was the top moneymaker of 1954. The influential Picturegoer magazine presented him with its Annual Award for ‘best actor’ three years in a row, while more than 4000 cinema managers chose him as ‘the World’s Greatest Money-Drawing Star’.

Bogarde was romantically linked to a succession of beautiful young actresses. But unbeknown to his adoring public, Bogarde’s sexual attentions were elsewhere. Bogarde had first met fellow actor Anthony Forwood in 1940. In the 1950s, Forwood divorced his wife, the actress Glynis Johns, with whom he had a son, to move in with Bogarde and become his ‘manager’. The pair were to be inseparable until Forwood’s death from cancer in 1988. In seven volumes of autobiography, Bogarde never once acknowledged that his relationship with the man he always referred to as ’Forwood’ was other than a business arrangement. But others knew differently. “They were closer than most married couples” recalls John Fraser. “It was abundantly clear that their relationship was deep and strong, but there never the slightest inappropriate gesture between them- no brush of a hand, no touch of a shoulder. Even their conversation was guarded”. In the 1950s, when homosexuality was still a criminal offence, Bogarde and Forwood had good reason to be reticent about their relationship. Many homosexuals of the time were blackmailed, and Bogarde’s ‘outing’ would undoubtedly have meant the end of his career.

Ironically in the ground-breaking film ‘Victim’ in 1961 Bogarde played a prominent London barrister who is blackmailed for being gay. The film was influential in helping change attitudes towards homosexuality- and eventually led to the reform of the homosexality laws in in 1967. But even after the threat of imprisonment was gone, Bogarde still refused to admit his the nature of his relationship with Forwood. Instead he claimed in interviews to be a heterosexual and to have had affairs with the French actress Capucine, and the American singer Judy Garland- claims denounced as ‘ludicrous’ by John Fraser.

By the Seventies Bogarde and Forwood had left Britain and settled in the South of France. In 1977 his first volume of autobiography ‘A Postillion Struck by Lightning’ was published and received excellent reviews. Further books followed, but in 1987, Bogarde had to leave his idyllic house and gardens in Provence to what he called the ‘filthy UK’ on account of Forwood’s grave illness.

There was no mellowing of Bogarde with age. “The girl beside me in the cinema offered me her Malteaser“ he wrote in a 1988 letter “ Wasn’t that pleasing? I scowled at her of course. I always do. Terror lurks not very far beneath this apparently cool façade”.
Bogarde also ridiculed the requests of British autograph hunters. “Could you sign this? Not for me, for my neice (sic), grandmother, wife, son, sister, baby-sitter, cousin Agnes, Eileen, with two ‘es’ please, Anne with an ‘e’. No one, ever, in France behaved like this. Not even in Paris, unless they were British”.

How can we account for his extraordinary bitterness?

John Fraser believes it was down to two factors: his failure to achieve the international success enjoyed by the likes of Michael Caine, Richard Burton and Sean Connery- and also the result of a lifetime spent revealing his true sexuality.

Others believe that it was his experiences of war- and witnessing at first hand man’s inhumanity to man- which made Bogarde into such a misanthrope. Perhaps the clues lie in his unhappy childhood. He once told the film writer Alexander Walker of an incident that shaped his way of life. “He was aged about seven” Walker recalled “when a pet tortoise that had gone missing one summer turned up trapped inside a hole in the meadow: at least, its shell turned up. Ants had eaten out the soft meat of its unprotected belly. The lesson it taught the impressionable child was: don't ever expose yourself. Don't stick you head out of your carapace. Don't let the world see your innards: if you do, it will eat you alive.”

Bogarde, who was knighted in 1992, was a man who above all, valued his privacy. “You haven’t cracked me yet” he once snapped at probing television interviewer Russell Harty. If the price of this prickliness was being left alone, then that was a price well worth paying. “If the tide runs out for me and I am left bereft in chair, then that’ll be fine”.

He died in 1999 at the age of 78.

With his memorable performances in classic films such as ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ and ‘Death in Venice’ Bogarde was undoubtedly one of Britain’s greatest film stars but perhaps the greatest act he played was the one he played off-screen.

13 comments:

KNaylor said...

Interesting piece.

John Osbourne, a contemporary of Bogarde's, was even more bitter and misanthropic, though he had a malicious sense of humour too which comes out in his two volume autobiography.

Osbourne wasn't a particulary pleasant man in many ways but he had that anger about mediocrity of public and private life which he would have applied perfectly to Tony Blair.

it's a pity he died in 1995, two years before Blair came to power.

Osbourne valued those whose convictions were sincere and based on a deeply felt experience of life and loathed fly-by-night trendy orthodoxies and hypocritical cant

I used to enjoy Osbourne's journalistic pieces for the Daily Mail in the early 1990s.

It would be great if you could write a piece about Osbourne too!

KNaylor said...

Ach, John Osborne...not Osbourne.

Anonymous said...

Can I just say that has got to be one of the finest pieces i have ever read about anything and anybody on the internet. The story about the death camps having an impact on him i notice clark stays away from since they is question marks about whether this ever happened. Well done neil Clark

Anonymous said...

A fine article. It reminded me of Paul Scott who, according to his biographer, went one step further than Bogarde and rather than be in public denial about his sexuality, ruthlessly repressed it, married, had children and maintained the lie with alcohol and simmering violence. Highly damaging to his personal life but useful to his art in portraying Ronald Merrick in the Raj Quartet: one of literature's more compelling characterisations of evil ambiguity.

Anonymous said...

As I read your piece, I recall with sadness the life and untimely death of Alan Turing, who committed suicide in 1954 after being prosecuted for homosexuality in 1952.

The reason that the highest prize is computing is called the A. M. Turing Award is because all scholars of computing work in the shadow of Turing's ideas.

Neil Clark said...

karl- many thanks. hope all's well with you.
anonymous and jolies: many thanks too. very good point about Paul Scott.
douglas: Yes, it was tragic about Turing.

Anonymous said...

I could probably tolerate a bit of snobbery from someone who can spell 'mediocrity' properly.

- questionnaire

Balalaika said...

I looked at that Harty interview.. There's a long pause, the camera lingering on Bogarde's face; he's looking directly at Russell, he gives a disarming and beautiful smile, looks down, then up, then says "...but I'm still in the shell and you haven't cracked it yet, honey.." Rather different from Neil Clark's version and hardly 'snapping' How different an impression one gains from seeing the original and how circumspect must one be in judging a man through another's eyes!

Yellow Tiger said...

Very interesting article but Bogarde was simply known as "The Idol of the Odeons", and he spent his entire life concealing his sexuality, not revealing it.

Anonymous said...

univergI wrote a long comment but was posted on face book by mistake. I became angry when I read the article, and especially coming from a British citizen who should be fair o his own people. I do not feel the writer was objective. I am like any average person was scared of homosexuals and got to put up with them then tolerate them. I have many dear friends who are homosexuals now. As Lord Aaron said to Bogarde in his letter thanking him for his two movies victim and the servant that help swing the public opinion about The Sexual Offences Bill then Act that was introduced by Lord Aaron. Bogarde in 1961 by making Victim deliberately chattered his matinee ideal image that lasted ten years to make victim which affected legislation that passed in England. He knew he had to pay a price and he did. That took courage. How many people do you know who will do that regardless whether we agree with the issue or not. How many idiots in hollywood would do that. He was very private and did not offend anyone in public with his actions. He also stayed faithful the same person for over forty years. How many movie stars do you know who share this virtue? He served his country during the war. Britain benefitted financially from his movies. About not being international he did not conform to hollywood standards who wanted to marry him off like Rock Hudson. About Finney and M. Kaine please give me a break. Bogarde is the best actor the cinema has ever seen. A real actor not hollywood made actor. I felt the writer was not objective at all and whoever is Mr Foster who is playing a psychiatrist. Bogarde was a great actor, has very strong personality, was an icon and everything his way and paid the price of not becoming Kaine or Finney or Carry grant etc. I never commented on anything before because I have no time between teaching, raising kids and grandkids, but I had to say something. Britainn should be proud of Dirk Bogarde

Anonymous said...

Can't agree more with the lady commenting. This article was rubbish, sorry Mr. Clark. Sure you can present Bogarde the way you did, but this doesn't make the picture of him true OR complete. He could be waspish, yes, and he could be snobbish. Funny how someone is portrayed as being snobbish, just because he/she doesn't share the taste of the majority. In that regard I'm a snob too and proud with it - mainstream is getting worse and worse. Bogarde might have been a bit strange, sure, but there's more to him than that, and I hate to see his name being dragged through mud. Your 'journalism' is exactly the type of scribbling which people like Dirk dreaded. Anything to upset and have an article and spread half-truths, blown out of proportion so you have you story. And the people who read and believe them, apparently. You do a lot of damage, but probably you don't care. This is so cheap, I will never understand why people fall for this kind of rubbish. But then again, I'm a snob, right? So please...in future do your homework or DON'T write about people you know nothing about. Okay? Bashing one of Britain's greatest cinema-actors... I mean who knows what you do to the next person who has the misfortune to become your victim.

William Frank said...

Bill Frank said:
A brief footnote: in the late Duchess of Devonshire's published letters to her lifelong friend Patrick Fermor (title: In Tearing Haste)- he writes to her on 30 July 1992: Just before leaving England I had a message, through Margaret, Janetta's housekeeper, saying she also did for Dirk Bogarde, who lived just round the corner in Cadogan Gardens, and that he'd love a visit, and that he had had a stroke (only physical) and had been knighted. So I did so and see him, nicer than ever, in his bachelor flat right up at the top. His great pal Tony Forward died last year and he feels very hopeless and bereaved, and works like mad at very well-put-together nvels, since retiring from stage and screen.
Paddy Fermor, a WWII hero, was played by Dirk Bogarde in the movie Ill Met by Moonlight - Mr Fermor had been the subject of a novel which retold the story of the capture of a high-ranking German officer on the island of Crete during the war - hence the long friendship between the two men.

Thomas Bunn/ Bunny Thomas said...

I am reading John Frasers book now its truly wonderful.....I would so much like to contact him....His accounts his humour his fresh writing style is both poininant and revealing His bush baby experiences and his insights to the repression of the 1950/ 60 s and beyond of the closet queens is so true and revealing ......HE is a well studied observer and I hope he is happy and still sharing life with in a close and contented partnership of sorts...mine died a decade ago I wrote my dedication in the book "Sorry Darling Its Way Past Time " Not exactly an exalted film career but more low end of variety and health care !!! Would be interesting to read more of Mr Frasers post film and TV life . I realy should have purchased this book a decade ago , but life took its toll now I do not want to put it down ...but it will be revisited

Does he have contact details ( Agent or the like ) my email is
thomasbunn@hotmail.co.uk
Google " Bunny Thomas"