At the end of this book Coldstream writes that he hopes he “didn’t let Dirk down” with his biography. Certainly Borgarde couldn’t have wished for someone to put in more care and effort – at almost 700 pages this is an exhausting read. It’s very well written, impeccably researched, a work of great devotion and skill. I did found it a hard slog towards the end, particularly when covering the last twenty years or so of Bogarde’s life. But maybe the problem was me – I always find the stuff about movies most interesting when reading a movie star biography.
Bogarde had a really terrific career and an interesting life. Dutch ancestry, dad was an illustrator for the Times, mum was a frustrated actor; he was shunted off to high school in the accepted fashion, tried acting for a bit before going to war; had interesting war service (though he never saw action he saw the concentration camps and also did service during that odd campaign in Indonesia when Britain found herself fighting anti-colonial Indonesians), then a stage career and he got famous pretty quickly: a juicy role in a play saw him signed to a Rank contract, and his brooding dark looks saw him acclaimed as a star even before his first lead role hit the public. He achieved particular acclaim for being an early British juvenile delinquent in The Blue Lamp and Hunted, but achieved real fame in Doctor in the House.
The Doctor series was Bogarde’s franchise, his security blanket as a star. Surprisingly, when you look at the record, he doesn’t seem to have made too many other really popular films during the 50s despite his popularity – I’m sure they did okay, but nothing spectacular (eg Tale of Two Cities). He might have gone the way of Anthony Steel, Donald Sinden and Michael Craig when the local-consumption-only British film industry declined in the early 1960s (indeed, Bogarde starred in the film that was declared in Shepperton Babylon to have killed Rank, the camp classic The Singer Not the Song).
But he was smart and he could sniff out quality. So even as his matinee idol popularity faded, the quality of the films he appeared in shot up and he ended up having perhaps the most distinguished career of any Rank star – Victim, The Servant, Darling, Death in Venice, etc. Bogarde’s career goes to show as long as you keep working with good people, you’ll have a long career – eg Our Mother’s House may have flopped at the box office, but it got Bogarde cast in Death in Venice. It also goes to prove you don’t have to go to Hollywood (Bogarde was offered Gigi which he should have done, but he was also offered the un-memorable The Egyptian and Tobruk; I think he should, however, have taken up Olivier’s offer to work at the National).
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In the 70s Bogarde then started writing, which became his main occupation. A series of autobiographies and novels turned him into a genuinely (though not massively) popular writer, then later on he dabbled in journalism. Accordingly, he never faced the faded star nightmare of being washed up and ignored – he remained in demand for work (writing, personal shows, even acting appearances) up until his death.
Bogarde must have been good company, he had lots of friends and seems witty, but he gets tiresome in this biography. Not a particularly nice person – sort of friend of whom you hang out with because he can be such an entertaining bitch, funny as everything, but of whom people are always saying “oh, Dirk was in one of his moods”, or “Dirk can be such a bastard at times”. His boyfriend seems to have been much nicer – he gave up smoking in the late 60s, but died painfully of Parkinson and cancer whereas Dirk puffed like a chimney forever and had good health apart from a stroke, and died quickly. Make of that what you will.
Inevitably Coldstream tackles Bogarde’s homosexuality; you can’t really look at Bogarde’s career without examining the gay stuff, because in hindsight it informs all his work – the reticence, the feeling he is keeping something a secret. But to give him credit he appeared in an amazing amount of gay roles, and what’s more important ones – Victim, Death in Venice, etc. (Perhaps more than any other star of the era? Certainly more than Rock Hudson).
I think to really enjoy this you have to be a fan of Bogarde’s writings. I’ve never read any – apparently he wrote about himself a lot, growing up, encounters with off people. Sometimes this is a hard slog, especially when it goes into long descriptions of the houses Bogarde lived, his dealings with the publishing world, his medical worries. This is easily definitive but it’s a hard slog at times.
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