He was born in West Hampstead, London, as Derek Jules Gaspard Ulric Niven van den Bogaerde, son of the art editor of the Times and his actress wife. He attended the former Allan Glen's School in Glasgow, and trained as an artist at what is now Chelsea College of Art. His stage career was interrupted by Second World War service as an intelligence officer in Europe and the Pacific. Stage-fright blighted his return to the theatre and he was put under contract by the Rank Organisation.
The respect Bogarde commands has something to do with his
surprising ability to reinvent himself. More systematic criticism recognises
in this ability at testing of male sexuality that extends across his
work - a striking feature in a national cinema that is apparently so
certain its masculinity. It appears in the sexualised delinquency of The Blue Lamp (1950), it is explicit in the homosexuality of Victim (1961) - both 'social problem' films directed by Basil
Dearden - and it is most playfully camp in Modesty Blaise (1966).
It also surfaces in a consistent strain of erotic sadism which is exploited
by Losey in The Servant (1963), by Visconti in The Damned, and by Liliana Cavani in The Night
Porter (1974). If there is a case for considering actors as auteurs,
Bogarde is probably one of the more interesting and complex of British
auteurs.
For a leading British actor he has made remarkably few American films
- Song Without End (1960), The Fixer (1968) and Justine (1969) - but
by the 1970s he had become one of the most European of British actors,
with important roles in films by Visconti, Cavani, Henri Verneuil (Le
serpent/The Serpent/Night Flight from Moscow (1973), Alain Resnais (Providence,
1977), Rainer Werner Fassbinder (Despair/Eine Reise ins Licht, 1978),
and Bertrand Tavernier (Daddy Nostalgie/These Foolish Things, 1990).
