Dirk Bogarde

This is a critical study of the actor Dirk Bogarde. It focuses on a career that started almost half a century ago, when Bogarde became the idol of the Odeons in a succession of low-budget thrillers and romantic comedies climaxing in the sequence of "Doctor in the House" movies. But Bogarde clearly wanted something more from his career: precisely the kind of intelligent respect and freedom of choice that is granted unthinkingly to stage actors, but until recently have always withheld from film stars. It has been Dirk's lifelong struggle to make the career of movie actor something greater than a sum of random parts, and it was in a European exile, through films, such as "The Damned", "Death in Venice", "Providence" and "Despair", that he was eventually to find the intellectual and critical stimulus that he had always been denied back in Britain. Sheridan Morley's biographical study looks at the early stage years, the mid-life career and the late-life acclaim that has come to Bogarde as a novelist and autobiographer. Morley is the author of numerous biographies, including the first of Noel Coward, of David Niven and of James Mason, as well as lives of his grandmother Gladys Cooper, Oscar Wilde, Sybil Thorndike, Marlene Dietrich, Katherine Hepburn and Elizabeth Taylor. His most recent publications include "Robert My Father" and "Audrey Hepburn".