Sir Dirk Bogarde, who died in London on Saturday, aged 78, was arguably the finest screen actor Britain ever produced.
Turned into a matinee idol by his handsome looks and charming screen presence, he toiled in a succession of mostly undemanding assembly-line productions before radically reinventing his image to deliver many outstanding performances in films such as The Servant, Death in Venice, Providence and These Foolish Things.
He was born Derek Jules Gaspard Ulric Niven van den Bogaerde in London on March 28th, 1921. His Dutch-born father was the art correspondent for the London Times and the young Dirk Bogarde, as he abbreviated his name, worked as a commercial artist before he turned to acting. He notched up a few minor theatre and film roles before putting his acting career on hold to serve in the war.
On his return he was given a contract by the British studio, Rank, and played his first leading role in Esther Waters in 1948, and he moved with ease and versatility between heroes and villains in a series of films which never stretched him. He enjoyed huge popularity as Simon Sparrow in Rank's Doctor series (Doctor at Sea, Doctor in the House etc.) and was named the top box-office draw in Britain in 1955 and again in 1957.
Bogarde was as effective as Sidney Carton in the 1958 A Tale of Two Cities as he was as Franz Liszt in Song Without End two years later. About the same time he made a memorable leather-clad villain taunting a priest played by John Mills in The Singer Not The Song, and became the first major actor to play an admittedly homosexual character, as a blackmailed lawyer in the ground-breaking Victim.
Then, in 1963, came The Servant, the second of five films Bogarde made for the blacklisted American film-maker Joseph Losey. Bogarde scorched the screen with steely malevolence as the sinister and manipulative valet who sets about reversing roles with his decadent employer (James Fox).
Over the next four years he worked again with Losey on the grim first World War court-martial drama, King and Country, as the defending officer; in the cartoon-strip adaptation, Modesty Blaise, humorously camping it up as the arch-villain, Gabriel; and in the compelling psychological drama, Accident, as an Oxford don.
The next and final key stage in Bogarde's career, working with some of the greatest European directors, began in 1969 with Luchino Visconti's The Damned.
His next film, again for Visconti, was an altogether more accomplished production, the 1971 Death in Venice, based on the Thomas Mann novella and featuring Bogarde as an ailing composer based on Mahler, whose music accompanied the film. Set against the background of a cholera epidemic sweeping through Venice, it featured Bogarde in a magisterial performance which, given how little dialogue the film contained, had to be, and was, powerfully expressive.
Bogarde was reunited with Charlotte Rampling for Liliana Cavani's kinky The Night Porter in 1974, and again their performances transcended their material in what was a self-consciously provocative story of a sado-masochistic relationship.
Bogarde was back at the peak of his form three years later working for the great French director, Alain Resnais, in Providence, and a year later for the dynamic German filmmaker, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, in Despair.
In the early 1970s Bogarde moved to France, where he began to reveal his talent as a writer. He turned out four elegant volumes of autobiography, which began with A Postillion Struck By Lightning, and three novels. In the 1980s, in his final leading role, he gave a detailed and sensitive portrayal of an ageing, retired Englishman on the Cote d'Azur, in Bertrand Tavernier's These Foolish Things.
Dirk Bogarde firmly avoided courting Hollywood and shunned many offers to star in American productions. It is a damning indictment of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences that its members never had the discernment or good taste to acknowledge his remarkable achievements with a single Oscar nomination.