Reading Between the Lines: Dirk Bogarde, Part Two.
Actors, Actors, Actors! Part Two of my ramblings about actor-writer-painter-campaigner-professor(?)-etc Dirk Bogarde.
There can be nothing worse, I am certain, than a whining author except a whining actor. Disaster strikes when the two are combined!
—Dirk Bogarde in a letter to friend and literary agent Pat Kavanagh, 18 July 1990.
Hello! Welcome to Issue #2 of Actors, Actors, Actors. If you are new and have not read Part One of Reading Between the Lines: Dirk Bogarde, I would recommend checking it out here, as this is Part Two and is dedicated to post- The Servant on until his death in 1999.
Before I begin this week’s ramble, you might notice an asterisk next to a couple of movies referenced with no further explanation. Those are there to signify that I will be returning to them in the final issue(s? depending on how much space I have to write) in further depth.
With that, let’s pick up where we left off!
The success that came with The Servant paved the way to three more collaborations between Dirk and Joseph Losey: King and Country, which would have its premiere at the Venice Film Festival in 1964, Modesty Blaise in 1965, and in 1967 with Accident*— the last two having their premiere in-competition at Cannes. Despite remaining close friends until Losey’s death on 22nd June 1984, Dirk stated after Accident they had satisfied everything for each other artistically:
I don’t, honestly, see how we could work together again… we have said all there is to say as actor-director… and you decided, a while ago, to take another path my dear… the one with the lolly and the lushness*… I have kept to my rather wobbley one; it has been a bit of a wrench… but, after all, I had the lush one before Our Time, with Rank, I suppose… so now it is refreshing to be free… and to choose. It is frightening like shit… but it is honour regained.
—Dirk in a letter to Losey, courtesy of BFI’s Joseph Losey Collection. 1970.
*Referred to in this phrase is Losey’s employing of the immensely lavish Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, who collaborated with him on Boom! and Secret Ceremony, both released in 1968.
There was truly no ill will between them (despite a rather nasty letter Bogarde jokingly sent to Losey, who did not pick up on its bitter humour), and they would constantly keep each other updated on their respective artistic endeavors.
Not only was Dirk’s artistic partnership with Losey at an end, but also any will he might’ve had to remain in England. Despite being born there (and later dying on the island), he would always consider his home France. Toward the end of the 1960s, he stuck to his craft with English film directors like John Schlesinger (1969’s Midnight Cowboy, 1971’s Sunday Bloody Sunday) on Darling* (1965), a film that would earn Julie Christie an Oscar the following year for Best Actress. Additionally, Dirk recalled fond memories of his time spent working on Our Mother’s House* (1967) with Jack Clayton and a children-led main cast; he took on the role of a mysterious father who suddenly reappears after many years of absence. It did not matter that the film was received poorly both critically and commercially in England (yet, in comparison to a handful of his other more warmly received films at the time, this one holds up best among them), because it would catch the eye of a man who would change the course of Bogarde’s career and overall life for a second time: Luchino Visconti.
Around 1968, when Dirk found himself artistically in the gutter in a similar manner as he did toward the end of the fifties, Luchino Visconti threw him a lifeline with two challenging performances: The Damned* (1969), and more notably, Death in Venice* (1971). Both are extravagant melodramas wistfully indulging themselves in all things decadence, with The Damned following the wealthy Von Essenbeck family as they navigate their social allegiances amidst the rise of Nazism. Staying true to himself, Dirk plays an outsider; Frederick Bruckmann, the lover of the Von Essenbeck matriarch, Sophie (Ingrid Thulin), who pushes his way to the top, clashing with his new (and extremely malicious, I should add) “son-in-law,” Martin (Helmut Berger). I feel there is not much else for me to say about The Damned beyond what I’ve already noted here, so I’ll end with a rather vivid description by Dirk in a letter to Losey:
Götterdämmerung* [The Damned], the Visconti thing, is staggering… it is far too long… by about almost half an hour… but where to cut! The picture is tilted towards the boy*… but then he did that with Delon*… one understands… but the sheer spectacle… the detail… the splendour of the high opera acting… is unforgettable. It is not something that an American Audience in the Bahamas will readily cope with…
It IS obscene, if cruelty is obscene, it is perverted… if fucking your mother is perversion, it IS unrelenting in its castigation of the People in Berlin and the Krupps and Thyssssians in general… (I have to use too many letters to explain my dislike) and it won’t make a sodding penny. Unless Warners cut it, and play it all for the Queer element, the incest and the tarts… not to mention the hero dressed as Marlene singing ‘En richtiger Manne’. Thats not me dear.
—Dirk Bogarde, 12 August 1969.
*Götterdämmerung is used as the subtitle for all versions of The Damned, translated from German into Twilight of the Gods. It is the conventional translation of La caduta degli dei, otherwise known as the Italian title.
*“The Boy” refers to Helmut Berger, Visconti’s lover and star of his later films Ludwig (1973) and Conversation Piece (1974).
*Alain Delon, the French actor who starred in Visconti’s films Rocco and his Brothers (1960) and The Leopard (1963).
*Marlene Dietrich, whose work in The Blue Angel (Von Sternberg, 1930) inspired a scene in the film.
Two years following The Damned would provide what was described by Dirk as one of the best performances throughout his career, the famed composer Gustav von Aschenbach, in a rendition of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice. I will be tackling this one in full later (working hard to avoid redundancies I have already put in another article), so I’ll leave you with a quick synopsis that may or may not leave you with some questions: While taking a vacation in Venice during the twilight of his career, Gustav von Aschenbach becomes obsessed with the image of a young Polish boy, Tadzio (Björn Andrésen).
Beyond Dirk’s collaborations with Visconti helping to ease the transition to a life in mainland Europe, it also catalyzed many invitations for him to play some, for lack of better words, weirdos. A good deal of these offers were declined, that is, until Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter* (1974) alongside Charlotte Rampling— who he worked with in The Damned. One of the most controversial films of his career, which to put it frankly is about a former Nazi SS officer (Bogarde) who reignites a relationship with a girl who was a survivor of the camps (Rampling). Internally, this was one of the most challenging films for Dirk, as it forced him to reconnect with his own trauma from the war and what he had seen in Belsen. Outwardly, he played it off with a classic Bogardian flair:
However there DID come a point, after my fifth stimulated orgasm… lying on my back, flies open, being straddled by Charlotte Rampling like Harvey Smith and wallowing about like a stranded whale… with a vast pizza stuffed crew watching with bored eyes… there was a point when I thought ‘What the hell am I doing here like this, at fifty three, Flies open and Bald spot gleaming.’ In 17 years Rank had never prepared me for THIS kind of lark. However I did it. And I got on with it like a good boy.
—Dirk in a letter to friend and producer Ann Skinner, 1974.
The years Dirk and Tony spent in France were among the happiest in their lives, while simultaneously finding great pleasure artistically. Not only was that gratification found through acting, but also writing. A job Dirk described as perfect for his personal taste, he would end up writing 15 books— six of which were fiction, entering multiple best-seller lists in the process. Concurrently with this newfound love, he would work with acclaimed directors like Alain Resnais on Providence* (1977) and Rainer Werner Fassbinder on Despair* (1978). The latter of the aforementioned films, despite the merit set up behind it with help from a Tom Stoppard screenplay and an original story from Nabokov, would make Dirk much more hesitant to further his acting career, and stick more to his writing— at least for a decade.
The 80s marked a much slower period for Dirk film-wise, and reasonably so. There was still much accomplished in this time, with the previously mentioned best-sellers alongside an honorary doctorate from St. Andrews University in 1985 and another years later from University of Sussex. Even with a decent amount of appearances, one of the most prominent being as the President of the Cannes Film Festival Jury in 1984, he was silently in pain; Tony had been diagnosed with both Parkinson’s and liver cancer. The days, the two confessed to one another, spent in the French countryside were coming to an end, and they would have to move back to England to “suffer in their own language” as he got progressively worse. Tony died, the 18th of May in 1988, with Dirk’s hand in his.
The enormous loss, as it would be with anyone as significant in life as Tony was to Dirk, is what I believe pushed him to make a final cinematic appearance in Bertrand Tavernier’s Daddy Nostalgie* (1991). While numerous other films in Dirk’s oeuvre try and chisel down the shell I discussed in Part One of this issue, I think Daddy Nostalgie is the one that did it most honestly, made clear from the fact that Dirk personally contributed scenes to the final screenplay. His character, Daddy, as a retired businessman, soon comes to realize how he had neglected his only child, played by the luminous Jane Birkin, and seeks to reconnect with her in his old age.
Dirk’s shell he had built over the years became so dense it was impossible for even him to remove. However, the screen provided a space for fiction to become his own reality, a space for reflections on one’s being.
Something greatly fascinating to me about acting is that it truly requires your most authentic self to transform into someone completely opposite (or maybe not!) of you. The desire for stardom finds itself trapped within the confines of this particular career, a factor that can taint much of the magic realized in any given performance. When one is forced to see themselves in a character whose flaws and tribulations are brought to the forefront, only then can an artist like Dirk Bogarde blossom. And it truly is such a beautiful thing to witness.
Dirk’s final years were spent in conversation with people from all walks of life, including a campaign for Dying With Dignity, an organization which he became the Vice President of for a time. A moment he’d been desiring for decades finally arrived in 1992, when he was knighted Sir Dirk Bogarde by Queen Elizabeth II for his achievements in the arts. In addition, he continued writing— even when three years before he died, he suffered from a major stroke that paralyzed half of his body and affected his speech. Being confined to a wheelchair did not stop Dirk from his most favorable of artistic endeavors, with his final book, For The Time Being— a set of collected journalism— being published in 1998.
The day after spending time with a beloved friend, fellow actor Lauren Bacall, Bogarde peacefully died in his Chelsea flat on 8th May 1999. It is rather strange to think I never lived at the same time as Dirk, as I feel I’ve gotten to know him immensely through his larger-than-life performances in many, many films that I’ve come to love. Particularly what I’ve gained most from this is allowing myself to be challenged through projects like Death in Venice, The Night Porter, and even the Doctor in the House series (which more so challenged my patience to live, not an infinite amount of fuzzy cardigans can change that), and learn about a plethora of cultural histories through a man who seemed to reflect many of them, ambiguously or otherwise.
Why exactly I tell you all this comes in handy when thinking about my favorite works of Dirk Bogarde (aka the things you MUST watch not only for my sake, but for hopefully what’ll give you a wider understanding of film history in its entirety), a piece that you should expect to read around this time next week. If you found the in depth discussion around the films here lacking, prepare yourself for a whirlwind of focused analysis to come. Until then, I hope this provides at least a little bit of understanding for my ramblings to come. And I promise after this, we will be moving to another (set!) of actors.
Cheers.
your brain is so beautiful