When Sir Dirk Bogarde died in 1999, the web of speculation about the very private life he had so assiduously guarded throughout his career slowly began to unravel. Bogarde himself maintained that after more than 60 films, seven volumes of autobiography, six novels and a tranche of journalism, there was nothing more to say, and that anybody who couldn't read between the lines hadn't been concentrating. Yet there was much more, and even though Bogarde destroyed many of his private papers, enough information has remained for John Coldstream - in this meticulous biography - to piece together the trajectory of an extraordinary English life.
And extraordinary it was, by anybody's standards. Bogarde's instinctive intelligence, unique talent and razor-sharp wit fuelled not one but three careers - as a screen actor, a bestselling author and, in his final decade, a much-in-demand solo performer. From the outset, there was a question mark over his sexuality, but Bogarde came of age in an inflexible moral climate of repression, witch-hunts and blackmail. Until 1967, homosexuality was an imprisonable offence in Britain. Denial became a hard habit to break.
Everyone close to him knew (though they were sworn to silence) about Tony Forwood, who shared his life as partner and manager for more than 40 years. Yet even Forwood played only a walk-on role in the autobiographies, until the penultimate volume - A Short Walk from Harrods - which, poignantly but unsentimentally, described the onset of Forwood's terminal illness, their reluctant return to England after almost two decades in France, and Forwood's death in 1988. For Bogarde - who, at that stage of his life, considered himself more European than English - it was a bitter homecoming.
Derek Niven Van den Bogaerde was born in 1921 to a vivacious Scots actress and a father of Flemish descent who became arts editor of the Times. He and his sister spent an idyllic childhood between London and the then unspoilt Sussex Downs. However, following the birth of their brother, Gareth, the boy Derek was sent to school in Scotland. He was 12; he would be away for three years. Alienated and resentful, he began to construct the protective shell which, in later life, became impregnable. He studied art for a year at Chelsea Polytechnic - where he was taught by Henry Moore and Graham Sutherland - but was determined to become an actor. Six years of war intervened, which he spent in Europe, India and Java, but in 1947 Rank signed him up as a contract player, and by the mid-1950s his potent combination of beauty and brains had made him into a matinee idol and a major star.
There was a succession of luxurious country homes and an entourage of glamorous friends, but the roles - limited mostly to war heroes and romantic leads - became stifling. By 1961, he was more than ready for the controversial challenge of Victim, in which he played a barrister who sacrifices career and marriage by confessing to his homosexuality. The film changed the course of his professional life.
Bogarde had always enjoyed an intimate relationship with the camera, but up until then his screen persona had relied on his dark, seductive looks and a quintessential Englishness. His face had a remarkable quality of stillness that filtered emotion through his eyes ("The camera actually photographs thought," he once said) and the derisive raising of one eyebrow. The "look" pertained, but after Victim it deepened as he began to mine the ambivalences of his life in ways that would sharpen and enrich his future roles. Bogarde, wrote one of his critics, was "a man who might have been born to play exiles from happiness".
The dramatic ambiguities that he went on to explore with the exiled American director Joseph Losey (The Servant, Accident, King and Country) paved the way for directors such as John Schlesinger, George Cukor, John Frankenheimer and Jack Clayton. In 1969, Luchino Visconti invited him to make The Damned, and that same year, Bogarde and Forwood left England for good, settling first in Italy and then (after Death in Venice) in Provence, where they lived in a 17th- century farmhouse called Clermont. There, they passed what were probably the happiest 16 years of their lives.
Though he continued to play in select films for European directors, it was at Clermont, in 1974, that Bogarde finally began work on his first memoir. He was an inveterate and devoted correspondent, and a natural raconteur. Now, encour-aged by the redoubtable publisher Norah Smallwood, he combined the best of both.
Bogarde was a committed fantasist, as his friends accepted early on, but through his wonderfully erudite and engaging books, he became a master of camouflage, constantly rewriting the past and embroidering the facts to shape his version of the truth. He could be waspish and vituperative and was easily offended, but there was also immense generosity and humour. Women adored him, and he had close female friends all his life - often co-stars such as Jean Simmons, Ava Gardner, Kay Kendall, Capucine, Judy Garland, Lauren Bacall and, latterly, Charlotte Rampling and Jane Birkin.
For all his charm and charisma, Bogarde undoubtedly had a darker side, but by the time he died, this complex, elegant man may have reached a truce with himself and his demons. Coldstream teases in the odd sexual snippet, but fails to follow through. One almost hopes that, if there are any secrets left, they have been scattered with Bogarde's ashes on the Provencal hillside that he regarded as his spiritual home.
