theuofc

Join me in a toast to Sir Dirk Bogarde, born 28 March, 1921, in Hampstead, London, to Ulric and Margaret Van den Bogaerde.

Dirk Bogarde went on to become one of cinema's finest actors, who appeared on stage and in films from the 1940s up through 1991, giving some of his finest performances in the 60s and 70s. He daringly took his career from being a handsome matinee idol to that of an acclaimed international actor. He won the praise and admiration of all serious critics of film and continues to have a broad circle of loyal appreciators around the globe. [img]style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/clapping.gif[/img]

Nominated six times for the BAFTA Award, Sir Dirk was awarded a BAFTA for Best British Actor in "The Servant" (1963) and again in 1965 for Best British Actor in "Darling." In 1988, BAFTA gave him its highest honour, the Life Achievement Award. He was nominated for the Hollywood Foreign Press Award and twice for a Golden Globe Award. In 1992, the London Critics Circle Film Awards awarded him the prestigious Dilys Powell Award. In 1984 he was invited to preside over the Cannes Film Festival, an honour previously unheard of by the British. France awarded him its cherished Commandeur dans l'Ordre des Artes et des Lettres in 1991. He proudly received an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from St. Andrews University in Scotland in 1985 and later at Sussex University in 1993. He was knighted for his services to the cinema in 1992.

In addition to his distinguished acting career spanning six decades, Sir Dirk became an author of 15 best-selling works, many of which were illustrated with his own drawings, in additon to a number of introductions and essays, film and television scripts. After returning to London from his home in France, he began a successful eight-year period writing weekly literary reviews for The Daily Telegraph.

Bogarde suffered two strokes, the last one debilitating in the final two years of his life. He continued to write up until his death. In May 1999, Bogarde peacefully passed away in his London flat while gazing at the garden below. An avid gardener throughout his life, it was a closing scene which would have pleased him.

But let Bogarde speak for himself. In 1991, Dirk speaks to Michael Billington about his work in "Daddy Nostalgie," an elegant way to exit his superb film career.

Barbara
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NY Times interview, April 1991, Dirk Bogarde speaks to Michael Billington, the drama critic at The Guardian.

<Dirk Bogarde Journeys Into "Nostalgia"

After 13 years away from the cinema, Dirk Bogarde is back, in Bertrand Tavernier's "Daddy Nostalgia." He plays an aging businessman, with a French wife and an English daughter, confronting death with all the elegance and irony he can muster in a modest villa in the south of France. Although Mr. Bogarde, a nattily attired, improbably youthful 70-year-old, says it is his last film, he immediately qualifies the assertion by adding, "For Tavernier, I'd do a Japanese handbook on refrigerators, because I know he'd make something magical of it."

Mr. Bogarde's career has a highly idiosyncratic shape. Entering British films in 1947, he quickly established himself as a romantic idol with a large female fan club. After the trailblazing "Victim" in 1961, in which he played a blackmailed, married homosexual, he acquired a new artistic credibility in films like "The Servant" (1963) and "Accident" (1967), both directed by Joseph Losey from scripts by Harold Pinter.

Then in the late 1960s, Mr. Bogarde left Britain for life in a Provencal farmhouse and a new career in prestigious movies, most notably Luchino Visconti's "Death in Venice" (1971). He also turned increasingly to writing, producing four best-selling volumes of memoirs and three novels. Now he is back in London, leading what he calls "a quiet, almost fuddy-duddy bachelor existence," writing novels and, to his undisguised delight, book reviews for a Sunday newspaper.

It quickly becomes clear that Mr. Bogarde the writer had a strong influence on the shape and style of "Daddy Nostalgia," which opens on Friday in New York at the Fine Arts Theater. Mr. Tavernier's Irish ex-wife, Colo Tavernier O'Hagan, wrote the screenplay for the film, in which Jane Birkin plays the daughter and Odette Laure the wife.

"Bertrand and I," says Mr. Bogarde, "got on very well together from the start, but I said the character's awfully sugary and self-pitying. I tried to develop him into a liar and poseur who was really a commercial traveler for a soap company but who talks as if he were a managing director who traveled first class on the Queen Mary.

"I also wanted to bring out the fact that, at the end of his life, he's just clinging to the wreckage. He's got nothing except the brief relationship with his daughter. Odette Laure, who plays my wife, is best known in France as a musical lady who used to sing mildly risque songs at a white piano. She refuses to speak English, so we improvised a line around that fact to make the audience realize that Daddy and his wife not only sleep in separate beds but live in almost total silence."

Mr. Bogarde tactfully says he "rearranged" a lot of the script with Mr. Tavernier, dropping self-conscious references to Stendhal and even providing dialogue for a crucial father-daughter encounter.

"When the film was finished," says Mr. Bogarde, "Tavernier showed it to a group of French friends, including Marcel Ophuls, who all thought it was marvelous but that it lacked a key scene: one where Daddy acknowledges to his daughter that it's the end of the line. This was February last year: Bertrand's father had just died, and I'd seen my own partner die of cancer and Parkinson's. We both knew about suffering."

"Bertrand phoned me and said, 'We've got to discuss pain somewhere in the film.' I'd got flu at the time and said, rather crossly: 'You can't rationalize pain. It's like a bad neighbor. It's there all the time. Sometimes it goes away, and you think it's gone for good and then it suddenly returns.' Bertrand instantly said, "Write it," which is what I did. I flew out to France for a day to do the scene, but because I had flu, we shot it in a parked car with black velvet all round to suggest night, to the dismay of Bertrand who likes cinema verite; but I think it works.

Surprisingly, with the exception of a television film based on a Graham Greene short story, Mr. Bogarde has never written a screenplay of his own. "I'm only a script doctor," he claims. "I mend little bits." But over the years he has doctored a lot of his own movie dialogue, Pinter aside; and currently he and Mr. Tavernier are discussing an intriguing project.

"He wants me to write with him," says Mr. Bogarde, "a feature film about the British cinema from its heyday in 1947 to its demise 10 years later: the period of Ealing Studios and directors like Bob Hamer and Sandy Mackendrick. It fascinates him: he's like Howard Carter at the tomb of Tutankhamun. A lot of it will be based on my own books about the early days with J. Arthur Rank and the contract starlets."

"Absurd things used to happen. The starlet and I would be booked to do a personal appearance outside London. The car would whisk us back to town, park in a quiet mews and a whole covey of people would appear to strip the starlet of her borrowed gown and shoes, return her own clothes and pack her off home. They never, thank God, had anything like that in France."

Mr. Bogarde looks back on that period of his life with wry affection: the pressure of having to turn out three films a year as a contract artist was, he says, his high school. He also credits his knowledge of film to a camera operator, Bob Thompson, who in 1953 taught him everything about lenses, light and sound.

But by the late 1960's, Mr. Bogarde became aware that a new generation of actors, led by Albert Finney, Peter O'Toole and Richard Harris, was taking over and that the studios were getting rid of what he calls "the blue suits and pink carnations brigade." Jean Renoir invited him to France to make a film about the belle epoque with Jeanne Moreau that fell through because no one would give the great director financial backing. But for Mr. Bogarde it was the beginning of a fruitful flight into Europe, where he was known as a Losey lead actor rather than a Rank Organization doctor.

He remains to this day, possibly because his father was Dutch, a passionate European. He has inserted a speech into "Daddy Nostalgia" in which he attacks the smugness of "little Englanders" who retreat behind their suburban hedges. And he finds the climate of Continental movie making infinitely more sympathetic than that of Britain.

"For a start," he says, "there is much greater sexual equality: on 'Daddy Nostalgia' we had four women on the main production team, which you would never find in Britain. Also everyone is totally committed to the film. I always remember when we were making 'King and Country,' a modest, low-budget film, one day the British crew struck in the middle of a setup to have a union meeting. Joe Losey's eyes filled with tears, and he cried, "Don't you really hate making movies?"

"You also find a greater collaborative spirit on the Continent, though I wouldn't say that applied to Visconti. We shot 'Death in Venice' for eight months, and the only direction he gave me, as I did my little facial tics, was "a little more Schubert here' or 'too much Wagner there.' But, with Visconti I enjoyed total understanding and a complicity of silence."

Observation and memory are perhaps the key to Mr. Bogarde's linked talents as consummate actor and acclaimed writer. The former he credits to the influence of his father, who was art editor of The London Times, and who taught his children the crucial importance of visual awareness. "He would make us play games," says Mr. Bogarde, "like going to a shop window and telling him how many saucepans we could see with black lids and how many jars with pink roses. We were constantly learning how to use our eyes."

But it is also clear that, in playing the hero in "Daddy Nostalgia," Mr. Bogarde also dug deep into his bank of private memories. "Having served, " he says, "in a tough war from the age of 18 to 24 and having seen death at close hand, first with my brother-in-law and then with my partner of 50 years, I suppose I have learned something about the importance of confronting pain with dignity. I wanted to put something of that on screen. My last film was 'Despair' for Fassbinder, and I thought you can't possibly go out on despair." >

Fellwanderer

A very fine actor. My particular favourite film of his is Ill Met By Moonlight, not least because it seems to be pretty close to Patrick Leigh Fermor's own account of events on Crete.

[img]style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/cheers.gif[/img]

FELL
[img]style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/angel_not.gif[/img]

All the best
FELL

A signature is no substitute for a life

theuofc

Cheers, and thanks, Fell [img]style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/thumbsup.gif[/img] You're right about Ill Met By Moonlight (1957). Xan Fielding worked closely with Bogarde and crew as a consultant, having been part of the events.

When is Jenny's birthday?

Best,

Barbara

Marky B

Thanks,Barbara - a posthumous happy 85th birthday to a genuine,British acting great,who was also a fine writer and raconteur [img]style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/clapping.gif[/img] [img]style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/clapping.gif[/img] [img]style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/clapping.gif[/img] .
Ta Ta
Marky B [img]style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/thumbsup.gif[/img]

I once shot an elephant in my pyjamas - how he got in my pyjamas,I'll never know

Fellwanderer

20 December!

FELL
[img]style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/angel_not.gif[/img]

All the best
FELL

A signature is no substitute for a life

Freddy

[img]style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/cool.gif[/img]--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Marky B @ Mar 28 2006, 10:28 AM) Quoted post</div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->
Thanks,Barbara - a posthumous happy 85th birthday to a genuine,British acting great,who was also a fine writer and raconteur [img]style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/clapping.gif[/img] [img]style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/clapping.gif[/img] [img]style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/clapping.gif[/img] .
Ta Ta
Marky B [img]style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/thumbsup.gif[/img]
[/quote]

Nothing to add to Marky B's eloquence

Freddy

Marky B

Do you send her cards on her birthday? More to the point,does she send you cards on your birthday? [img]style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/biggrin.gif[/img]
Ta Ta
Marky B [img]style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/thumbsup.gif[/img]

I once shot an elephant in my pyjamas - how he got in my pyjamas,I'll never know

samkydd

I spotted a Dirk Bogarde lookalike whilst watching an episode of Thriller from the 70s. It was the brother of Kay Kendall, Cavan Kendall. He had a beard and longer hair but very similar in facial features and the eyes. I've just twigged that he was also in Sexy Beast as Ray Winstone's pal in Spain.

"...the chairman of Littlewoods stores made a Keynote speech!"

theuofc

[img]style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/cool.gif[/img]-->A wonderful comment, Marky B. [img]style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/clapping.gif[/img]

Quite a few people came to know and appreciate Dirk through his books. Starting last year with the reissue of "A Postillion Struck By Lightning" each of his autobiographies will be reissued. "Snakes and Ladders" is due out 6 April. I like the thought of his living on for new generations through his words.

Best,

Barbara

theuofc

Hello, Freddy,

Thanks for seconding MarkyB about Dirk.

By the way, I rewatched "Brief Encounter" in order to make more informed comments to you in that thread. It's been a while since I saw BE. I'll post a response to you tomorrow about Laura and Alec. I also came across an interesting interview with Trevor Howard on BE with some startling comments on his part. I'll post that too in the BE thread.

Best,

Barbara