Sir Dirk Bogarde

Sir Dirk Bogarde (born Derek Niven van den Bogaerde; 28 March 1921 – 8 May 1999) was an English actor and writer. Initially a matinée idol in films such as Doctor in the House (1954) for the Rank Organisation, he later acted in art-house films. In a second career, he wrote seven best-selling volumes of memoirs, six novels and a volume of collected journalism, mainly from articles in The Daily Telegraph. Bogarde came to prominence in films including The Blue Lamp in the early 1950s, before starring in the successful Doctor film series (1954–1963). He twice won the BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role, for The Servant (1963) and Darling (1965). His other notable film roles included Victim (1961), Accident (1967), The Damned (1969), Death in Venice (1971), The Night Porter (1974), A Bridge Too Far (1977) and Despair (1978). He was appointed a Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters in 1990 and a Knight Bachelor in 1992.

During the war, Derek "Pip" Bogaerde served in the British Army, initially with the Royal Corps of Signals before being commissioned at the age of 22 into the Queen's Royal Regiment (West Surrey) as a second lieutenant in 1943. He served in both the European and Pacific theatres, principally as an intelligence officer. Taylor Downing's book Spies in the Sky tells of his work with a specialist Army unit that accompanied air force units for the interpreting of aerial photo-reconnaissance information, after D-Day moving to Normandy with RCAF units which by July 1944 were located at the "B.8" airfield at Sommervieu, near Bayeux. As an "Air Photographic Interpreter" with the rank of captain, and subsequently major, he was later with the headquarters of the Second Army where he selected ground targets in France, Holland, and Germany, for the Second Tactical Air Force (2TAF) and RAF Bomber Command to attack. In a 1986 Yorkshire Television interview with Russell Harty, Bogarde said:

"I went to see quite a lot of them" [the targets that he had selected to be bombed], "I mean I went back to the villages, and saw what I had done. I used to go painting, as you know, when I had any time off, and I went to one village in Normandy, and painted it, because I had picked it particularly and it was a waste of time, because everybody" [the Germans] "had got through," [villages on key roads were heavily bombed to block the roads and hinder the Wehrmacht's movement of armour and other vehicles that were hurriedly attempting to reach the invasion lodgement areas before the Allies gained too firm a foothold] "and I found what I had thought in the rubble were a whole row of footballs, and they weren't footballs—I was sitting right beside them, painting—and they weren't footballs, they were children's heads, and what it was, I discovered later, was a whole school of kids, a convent, had been pulled out of school, out of class, and lined up in this little narrow alleyway between the buildings to save them from the bombing, and the whole thing had come in on top of them, plus the nuns, but by that time [when he was there] they were lice-ridden, and there was nothing. I can talk about it now at 65 because it's sort of, dispassionate about it, and I've seen worse things since, but that gave me a bit of a turn, yes, I didn't enjoy that. A row of kids' heads that you thought were footballs and you kick one and it wasn't, and it rolled away down the rubble."

• See Wikipedia... and Biography Site: “Bogarde always publicly denied he was a homosexual, though later in life he did confess that he and his manager, Anthony Forwood, had a long-term relationship. When Bogarde met him in 1939, Forwood was a theatrical manager, who eventually married and divorced Glynis Johns. Forwood became Bogarde’s friend and subsequently his life partner, and the two moved to France together in 1968. They bought a 15th-century farmhouse near Grasse in Provence in the early 1970s, which they restored. Bogarde and Forwood lived in the house until 1983, when they returned to London so that Forwood could be treated for cancer, from which he eventually died in 1988. Bogarde nursed him in the last few months of his life. After Forwood died, Bogarde was left rudderless and he became more reclusive, eventually retiring from films after Daddy Nostalgia (1990).”

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