Dirk Bogarde - Later Career and Personal Life

Later Career and Personal Life

In 1977, Bogarde embarked on his second career as an author. Starting with a first volume A Postillion Struck by Lightning (an allusion to the phrase My postillion has been struck by lightning), he wrote a series of 15 best-selling memoirs, novels, essays, reviews, poetry, and collected journalism. As a writer Bogarde displayed a witty, elegant, highly literate and thoughtful style.

Bogarde was a lifelong bachelor and, during his life, was assumed to be homosexual. Bogarde's most serious friendship with a woman was with the French actress Capucine. For many years he shared his homes, first in Amersham and then in France, with his manager Anthony Forwood (a former husband of actress Glynis Johns and the father of their only child, actor Gareth Forwood (dec.)), but repeatedly denied that their relationship was anything but platonic. Such denials were understandable, mainly given that homosexual acts were illegal during most of his career, subject to imprisonment and against the conditions for termination specified in Rank Studio contracts with its actors, thus potentially putting his career as a major actor at jeopardy, which few actors of the time would risk.

It was possible that Bogarde's refusal to enter into a marriage of convenience was a major reason for his failure to become a star in Hollywood, together with the critical and commercial failure of Song Without End. His friend Helena Bonham Carter believed Bogarde would not have been able to come out as gay during later life, since this might have too unambiguously demonstrated that he had been forced to camouflage his real sexual orientation during his film career.

Bogarde starred in the film Victim (1961), playing a homosexual London barrister who fights the blackmailers of a young man with whom he has had an emotional relationship. The young man commits suicide after being arrested for embezzlement, rather than ruin his friend's reputation. In exposing the ring of extortionists, Bogarde's character risks his career and marriage in order to see that justice is done. Victim was the first mainstream British film to treat homosexuality convincingly and it had some effect upon a contemporary Sexual Offences Act 1967, a change in English law which decriminalized consensual homosexual acts.

Bogarde claimed he had known General Browning from his time on Field Marshal Montgomery's staff during the war and took issue with the largely negative portrayal of the General that he played in the 1977 film A Bridge Too Far. General "Boy" Browning's widow, the author Daphne du Maurier, ferociously attacked his characterisation and "the resultant establishment fallout, much of it homophobic, wrongly convinced that the newly ennobled Sir Richard had deliberately contrived to scupper his own chance of a knighthood." He was however knighted in 1992 for services to acting.

He was also a shareholder in Pressdram Ltd, the company that owned the satirical magazine Private Eye. Upon his death his shares passed to Brock van der Bogaerde.

According to Charlotte Rampling, Bogarde was approached in 1990 by Madonna to appear in her video for Justify My Love, citing The Night Porter as an inspiration. Bogarde declined the offer.

In 1984, Bogarde served as president of the jury at the Cannes Film Festival. He was the first Briton to serve in this capacity.

Bogarde suffered a minor stroke in November 1987, at a time when his partner, Anthony Forwood, was dying of liver cancer and Parkinson's disease. In September 1996, he underwent angioplasty to unblock arteries leading to his heart and suffered a pulmonary embolism following the operation. Bogarde was paralyzed on one side of his body, which affected his speech and left him in a wheelchair. He managed, however, to complete a final volume of his autobiography, which covered the stroke and its effects as well as an edition of his collected journalism, mainly for The Daily Telegraph. He spent some time the day before he died with his friend Lauren Bacall. Bogarde died in London from a heart attack on 8 May 1999, age 78. His ashes were scattered at his former estate in Grasse, Southern France.