An Unpublic Life

When he was young and easy and prince of the apple towns, Dirk Bogarde was Britain's No. 1 box office star. Always being mobbed, he was attended by mounted policemen wher ever he went. His roles ran to parts like the romantic Sydney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities and the young Doctor in the House. But he was really miserable because none of the right people took him seriously. People like Director David Lean would not even consider him for a serious part. "I think Dirk's great," Lean once said, "but I want an actor, not a movie star."

"That hurt a little," says the new Bogarde, recalling his jaded past. "So I decided to hell with the glamour-boy bit and got into the field of character acting." That was three years ago, and the first character was a homosexual barrister in Victim, which won Bogarde all sorts of praise. Then he groped floppishly through / Could go On Singing and The Mind Benders. Shaken, he signed to do another entrail opera, called Doctor in Distress (still unreleased in the U.S.). But he need not have panicked. He has since appeared in The Servant (TIME, March 20), and critics have given him the serious acceptance he was looking for. More over, just as The Servant opened in the U.S., he was scoring another success on U.S. television -- opposite Julie Harris in the Hallmark Hall of Fame's remake of James Costigan's Little Moon of Alban.

In The Servant, Bogarde plays a gentleman's gentleman who utterly corrupts his employer, using flattery, pimpery, booze, and impudence to turn things around and become, quite actually, his master's master. Bogarde acts so unassumingly that at times the part seems to be playing itself, but afterward, a viewer realizes that he has seen the whole man in Bogarde's face: deception, cruelty, cunning, cynicism, the smirk of testing self-assertion, the pustular hurt of the man who feels that his rights exceed his definable estate, the essential weakness of the citizen slave.

From Art to Act. Most English actors who aspire to stature go to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and later put in long experimental years with, say, the Birmingham Repertory. Bogarde wishes he had. Instead, as the son of the art director of the London Times he was early nudged toward the diplomatic corps. At 16, he interrupted Sunday dinner to announce himself an actor. His half-Dutch father shouted half-Dutch expletives, finally conceded that the boy could have two years to get solvent as an actor, but no more. So Derek Jules Gaspard Ulric Niven Van den Bogaerde went down to London.

Improbably, he got off a bus at the first theater he saw, asked for a job, and got one--painting sets and boiling glue. Two years later, he was making $5 a week doing walk-ons. This was the threshold of solvency, apparently, for he never went near a university or the Foreign Office.

Telly Slouch. He went overseas, though, as an army intelligence officer during World War II, planning the invasion of Malaya that never occurred.

Returning, he played Christ in a children's play, which led to a West End part, which led to a contract with the J. Arthur Rank Organization. His rising fame did not pass unnoticed by old Van den Bogaerde at the Times. He called his son on the phone one morning and tried a jolly joke. He had been walking through an underground passageway, he said, and had seen the name Bogarde on posters all over the walls. "You've brought the family name as low as you can," quipped father.

"Bugger off," shouted Bogarde, misunderstanding his father's Shavian wit.

Dirk Bogarde was 44 last week. He is a bachelor, and lives a most unpublic life. He has a stately manor house on 16 acres in Surrey:-) 1/2 hour commute from London. Owls hoot in the woodlands, the Rolls-Royce ticks in the drive, his horses neigh in the night, and his mastiff Candida barks. Inside, Dirk Bogarde communes with the telly. "After a hard day's work," he says, "I just want to slouch in front of a television set and watch other people make fools of themselves."

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