Dirk Bogarde's poetry has been published in war anthologies; a painting by Bogarde, from the war, hangs in the British Museum, with many more in the Imperial War Museum.
43 Facts About Dirk Bogarde
2.
Dirk Bogarde twice won the BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role, for The Servant and Darling.
3.
Dirk Bogarde was appointed a Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters in 1990 and a Knight Bachelor in 1992.
4.
Dirk Bogarde was the eldest of three children born to Ulric van den Bogaerde and Margaret Niven.
5.
Dirk Bogarde was born in a nursing home at 12 Hemstal Road, West Hampstead, London, and was baptised on 30 October 1921, at St Mary's Church, Kilburn.
6.
Conditions in the family home in north London became cramped, so Dirk Bogarde was moved to Glasgow to stay with relatives of his mother.
7.
Dirk Bogarde stayed there for more than three years, returning at the end of 1937.
8.
Dirk Bogarde attended University College School and the former Allan Glen's High School of Science in Glasgow, a time he described in his autobiography as an unhappy one.
9.
Dirk Bogarde secured a scholarship to the Royal College of Arts, completed his two year course, and landed "a back-stage job as tea-boy at seven shillings and sixpence per week".
10.
Dirk Bogarde served in both the European and Pacific theatres, principally as an intelligence officer.
11.
Dirk Bogarde served as an intelligence officer with Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery's 21st Army Group as it liberated Europe.
12.
Dirk 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.
13.
Dirk 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 in 1988.
14.
Dirk Bogarde gave an interview to John Hofsess, London executive director of the Voluntary Euthanasia Society:.
15.
One of Dirk Bogarde's earliest starring roles was in the 1949 film Once a Jolly Swagman, where he played a daring speedway ace, riding for the Cobras.
16.
Dirk Bogarde was contracted to the Rank Organisation under the wing of the prolific independent film producer Betty Box, who produced most of his early films and was instrumental in creating his matinee idol image.
17.
Dirk Bogarde featured as a medical student in Doctor in the House, a film that made him one of the most popular British stars of the 1950s.
18.
Dirk Bogarde starred in the film Victim, playing a London barrister who fights the blackmailers of a young man with whom he has had a deeply emotional relationship.
19.
Dirk Bogarde again teamed up with Joseph Losey to play Hugo Barrett, a decadent valet, in The Servant, with a script by Harold Pinter, and which garnered Bogarde a BAFTA Award.
20.
Dirk Bogarde won a second BAFTA for his role as a television broadcaster-writer Robert Gold in Darling, directed by John Schlesinger.
21.
Our Mother's House is an off-beat film noir and the British entry at the Venice Film Festival, directed by Jack Clayton, in which Dirk Bogarde plays a ne'er-do-well father who descends upon "his" seven children on the death of their mother.
22.
Two years later Visconti was back at the helm when Dirk Bogarde portrayed Gustav von Aschenbach in Morte a Venezia, Death in Venice.
23.
In 1974, the controversial Il Portiere di notte saw Dirk Bogarde cast as an ex-Nazi, Max Aldorfer, co-starring Charlotte Rampling, and directed by Liliana Cavani.
24.
Dirk Bogarde played Claude, the lawyer son of a dying, drunken writer in the well-received, multidimensional French film Providence, directed by Alain Resnais, and industrialist Hermann Hermann, who descends into madness in Despair directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder.
25.
The Angel Wore Red saw Dirk Bogarde playing an unfrocked priest who falls in love with cabaret entertainer Ava Gardner during the Spanish Civil War.
26.
Dirk Bogarde claimed he had known General Browning from his time on Field Marshal Montgomery's staff during the war, and took issue with the largely negative portrayal of the general whom he played in A Bridge Too Far.
27.
In 1977, Dirk Bogarde embarked on his second career as an author.
28.
The abrupt scrapping of Lawrence, a role long researched and keenly anticipated by Dirk Bogarde, was among his greatest screen disappointments.
29.
In 1961, Dirk 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.
30.
For nearly four decades, Dirk Bogarde shared his homes, first in Amersham, Buckinghamshire, and then in France, with Anthony Forwood, who had been married to actress Glynis Johns during the 1940s.
31.
Dirk Bogarde repeatedly denied that his relationship to Forwood was anything other than platonic.
32.
Dirk Bogarde had a minor stroke in November 1987 while Forwood was dying of liver cancer and Parkinson's disease.
33.
Dirk Bogarde was paralysed on one side of his body, which affected his speech.
34.
Dirk Bogarde 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.
35.
Dirk Bogarde spent some time with his friend Lauren Bacall the day before he died at his home in London from a heart attack on 8 May 1999, aged 78.
36.
Dirk Bogarde's ashes were scattered at his former estate in Grasse, southern France.
37.
Dirk Bogarde was nominated five times as Best Actor by BAFTA, winning twice, for The Servant in 1963 and for Darling in 1965.
38.
Dirk Bogarde received the London Film Critics Circle Lifetime Award in 1991.
39.
Dirk Bogarde made a total of 63 films between 1939 and 1991.
40.
Dirk Bogarde was awarded the British Film Institute Fellowship in 1987.
41.
In 1988, Dirk Bogarde was honoured with the first BAFTA Tribute Award for an outstanding contribution to cinema.
42.
Dirk Bogarde was created a Knight Bachelor in the United Kingdom in 1992, awarded the Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government in 1990, an honorary doctorate of literature on 4 July 1985 by St Andrews University in Scotland, and an honorary doctorate of letters in 1993 by the University of Sussex in England.
43.
In 1984, Dirk Bogarde served as president of the jury at the Cannes Film Festival, the first British person to serve in this capacity.