Sir Dirk Bogarde (born Derek Jules Gaspard Ulric Niven van den Bogaerde; 28 March 1921 – 8 May 1999) was an English actor, novelist and screenwriter.

Dirk Bogarde was born in a nursing home at 12 Hemstal Road,[4] West Hampstead, London, and was baptised on 30 October 1921, at St. Mary's Church, Kilburn.

Having secured a scholarship at Chelsea College of Art, Bogarde completed his two year course, and landed "a back-stage job as tea-boy at seven shillings and sixpence per week".

[9] Taylor Downing's book, Spies in the Sky, tells of Bogarde's work in photo-reconnaissance in the aftermath of D-Day, moving through Normandy with Royal Canadian Air Force units.

[10]Bogarde said he was one of the first Allied officers to reach the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany on 20 April 1945, an experience that had the most profound effect on him and about which he had difficulty speaking for many years afterward.

[10]There was some doubt as to whether he really visited Belsen, although, more than a decade after publishing his biography, and following additional research, John Coldstream concluded that "it is now possible to state with some authority that he did at least set foot inside the camp".

[13] The horror and revulsion at the cruelty and inhumanity that he said he witnessed left him with a deep-seated hostility towards Germany; in the late 1980s, he wrote that he would disembark from a lift rather than ride with a German of his generation.

[15] Bogarde was most vocal towards the end of his life on voluntary euthanasia, of which he became a staunch proponent after witnessing the protracted death of his lifelong partner and manager Anthony Forwood (the former husband of actress Glynis Johns) in 1988.

He gave an interview to John Hofsess, London executive director of the Voluntary Euthanasia Society: My views were formulated as a 24-year-old officer in Normandy ... On one occasion, the jeep ahead hit a mine ... Next thing I knew, there was this chap in the long grass beside me.

One of Bogarde's earliest starring roles in cinema was in the 1949 film Once a Jolly Swagman, where he played a daring speedway ace, riding for the Cobras.

[19] He did his second Doctor film, Doctor at Sea (1955), co-starring Brigitte Bardot in one of her first film roles; played a returning colonial who fights the Mau-Mau with Virginia McKenna and Donald Sinden in Simba (1955); Cast a Dark Shadow (1955), as a man who marries women for money and then murders them; The Spanish Gardener (1956), with Michael Hordern, Jon Whiteley and Cyril Cusack; Doctor at Large (1957), again with Donald Sinden, another entry in the Doctor film series, with later Bond girl Shirley Eaton; the Powell and Pressburger production Ill Met by Moonlight (1957) co-starring Marius Goring as German General Kreipe, kidnapped on Crete by Patrick "Paddy" Leigh Fermor (Bogarde) and W. Stanley Moss (David Oxley), and a fellow band of Cretan resistance fighters based on W. Stanley Moss' real-life account (Ill Met by Moonlight) of the Second World War abduction; A Tale of Two Cities (1958), a faithful retelling of Charles Dickens' classic; as a flight lieutenant in the Far East, who falls in love with a beautiful Japanese teacher Yoko Tani in The Wind Cannot Read (1958);The Doctor's Dilemma (1959), based on a play by George Bernard Shaw and co-starring Leslie Caron and Robert Morley; and Libel (1959), playing three separate roles and co-starring Olivia de Havilland.

After leaving the Rank Organisation in the early 1960s, Bogarde abandoned his heart-throb image and "chose roles that challenged received morality and that pushed the scope of cinema".

Victim was the first British film to portray the humiliation to which gay people were exposed via discriminatory law and as a victimised minority; it is said to have had some effect upon the later Sexual Offences Act 1967 ending, to some extent, the illegal status of male homosexual activity.

He again teamed up with Joseph Losey to play Hugo Barrett, a decadent valet, in The Servant (1963), with a script by Harold Pinter, and which garnered Bogarde a BAFTA Award.

That year also saw the release of The Mind Benders, in which he played a professor conducting sensory deprivation experiments at Oxford University (and which anticipates Altered States (1980)).

The following year saw another collaboration with Losey in the antiwar film King and Country, in which Bogarde played an army officer at a court-martial, reluctantly defending deserter Tom Courtenay.

In his first collaboration with Luchino Visconti in La Caduta degli dei (The Damned, 1969), Bogarde played German industrialist Frederick Bruckmann alongside Ingrid Thulin.

[20] In 1974, the controversial Il Portiere di notte (The Night Porter) saw Bogarde cast as an ex-Nazi, Max Aldorfer, co-starring Charlotte Rampling, and directed by Liliana Cavani.

The Angel Wore Red (1960) saw Bogarde playing an unfrocked priest who falls in love with cabaret entertainer Ava Gardner during the Spanish Civil War.

The same year, in Song Without End he portrayed Hungarian composer and virtuoso pianist Franz Liszt, a film initially directed by Charles Vidor (who died during shooting) and completed by Bogarde's friend George Cukor, which was the actor's only foray into Hollywood.

Browning's widow, author Dame Daphne du Maurier, ferociously attacked his characterisation and "the resultant establishment fallout, much of it homophobic, wrongly convinced [Bogarde] that the newly ennobled Sir Richard [Attenborough] had deliberately contrived to scupper his own chance of a knighthood.

"[22] While several of his fellow actors were veterans, Bogarde was the only cast member to have served at the battles being depicted in the film, having entered Brussels the day after its liberation, and worked on the planning of Operation Market Garden.

[26] His contract with Rank had precluded him from accepting the lead in the film adaptation of John Osborne's ground-breaking stage play, Look Back in Anger in 1959.

[9] In 1961, Bogarde was offered the chance to play Hamlet at the recently founded Chichester Festival Theatre by artistic director Sir Laurence Olivier but had to decline owing to film commitments.

[28] After his acting career had given him some success, Bogarde moved from London and rented a cottage on the Bendrose Estate in Little Chalfont, Buckinghamshire, the family home of his business manager and partner, Anthony 'Tote' Forwood.

After tearing down the servants' wing, Bogarde and Forwood had the main house redeveloped and refurbished "to bring more light" into the original 1700s core.

He then completed the final volume of his autobiography, which covered the effects of the stroke, and published an edition of his collected journalism, mainly from The Daily Telegraph.