Night work? Dirk Bogarde with Charlotte Rampling in the 1974 Liliana Cavani film The Night Porter

Dirk Bogarde - In his own words… picture of a two-faced screen idol in Nightporter

Gerald Isaaman reports on a new collection of letters shedding light on the life of actor Dirk Bogarde as ‘a mass of contradictions’

Ever, Dirk: The Bogarde Letters
Edited by John Coldstream, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £25.

Dirk Bogarde was two-faced, to say the least. He insisted that the camera took just one side of his face: the better half, in his view.
And though hailed for iconic performances that made him Britain’s most successful film star in the post-war years, he ended up loathing his profession – “no job for a man,” he insisted.
While working on The Night Porter, for instance, he moaned: “I HATE the work. Honestly… during my fifth simulated orgasm on the film with Cavani in Rome I suddenly wondered what the hell I was doing at 53 with back on the floor, my flies undone, being straddled by Miss Rampling.”
He gave it up to live in France and turned to writing, making a second career for himself. Yet he couldn’t spell and his punctuation was puerile.
“Pleese excuse my terribul spelling,” he wrote in one letter. “Tote and I are quite ALOAN here – we had to leeve all our possesshuns (Is that rite?) in London apart from the Rolls.”
And though it was a new life for him and his partner, Tony Forwood, he denied he was gay and never recognised Tony as anything other than his manager.
Such were his overt prejudices that he was anti-Semitic, referring to Jews as “grasping Yids”, casting racial slurs on “nig-nogs” and believing that the working class were “the great Unwashed with their… silly faces and sillier minds.”
Yet we hail him now as a man of distinction who added significance to the art of the cinema in his performances in such memorable movies as Death in Venice.
Such was the essence of the lad born in West Hampstead, the son of Ulric Van den Bogaerde, an arts editor at The Times, and his wife Margaret, the actress sister of David Niven.
The letters are edited by John Coldstream, who wrote the actor’s authorised biography.
The pair met when Coldstream commissioned reviews from Bogarde for the Daily Telegraph, where Coldstream was the literary editor.
Coldstream took the decision to publish Bogarde’s letters with all their spelling and punctuation mistakes. They begin when Bogarde left England in 1969.
“Dirk was a free spirit,” Coldstream says. “He and formal education were never going to get on. He was at Hampstead’s University College School from 1932 until 1934, and in one of his last reports his house master said, ‘Has still to learn that life is not all cushions and barley sugar.’
“Dirk never bothered to learn the niceties of spelling, punctuation and syntax. When he moved abroad, without access to a secretary, it was too late. He used his typewriter as a telephone, hammering his thoughts on to paper, often at great length.”
The result is 500 pages in which he displays his views with brazen disdain. One moment he declares his admiration for current Hampstead and Highgate Labour MP Glenda Jackson as a magical actress with “integrity and guts” and the next declaring: “Miss Jackson, surely a plain girl, with feet like a goat-herd, hands like a bricklayer, bad teeth…”
He bitched about others, describing Richard Burton and Stanley Baker “both as tiresome as each other”, Michael Redgrave was “unspeakable” and said of Robert Shaw that he “only does two things well… shout above rain and wind and stand with his legs apart.”
Bogarde’s life, which came to an end in 1990, was a mass of contradictions and it is this that makes the collection of his letters so challenging yet compulsive.
“I shall certainly miss him. For all his prickliness, he was both wonderful company and a terrific friend,” adds Coldstream.