Whether Dirk Bogarde's letters represent the real Dirk Bogarde or a persona he created is anyone's guess, and they are so entertaining that you quickly cease to care. He comes across as, by turns, gruffly British and wildly camp, funny and despondent, tactful and defamatory, petulant and generous. They are not letters in the normal sense, more like stretches of diary or autobiography. Most of them were written to women friends (the novelist Penelope Mortimer, the Sunday Times film critic Dilys Powell, his publisher at Chatto Norah Smallwood), and he often told them he did not expect any reply. Their job was to provide an audience, and a pretext for turning himself and his day-to-day existence into words.

He felt the compulsion to do this, it seems, because his life had changed so drastically. In 1969, he and his companion Tony Forwood upped sticks and left Britain for good. They bought a remote farmhouse, Le Haut Clermont, at Châteauneuf de Grasse in Provence, where Bogarde began a lengthy transition from box-office idol to professional writer. His first book, A Postillion Struck by Lightning, appeared in 1977. Typically, his letters guard against sounding “soppy” about Clermont. The scent of wild broom and carnations in spring, he chaffs, “makes the hill smell like the Cosmetic Section of Boots Cash Thingummy”. But he loved it in every season and all weathers - when its vines and olive trees wilted under a harsh blue sky, or when he was snug in bed with the mistral tugging at the shutters. Being at Clermont gave him time to read and think, and fed his obsessive need for privacy. By comparison, “career, personal success, fame, lolly” dwindled to nothingness.

When he looked back, acting seemed “such balls”. He remembered suddenly wondering, during the making of The Night Porter, what the hell he was doing, at the age of 53, lying on the floor, bestraddled by Charlotte Rampling, and simulating orgasm while an entire Italian film crew looked on and munched pizzas. The stupidity of critics and public still rankled. His contempt for Americans stemmed, at least in part, from the grievances he nursed over the film of Death in Venice, in which he played the elderly Gustav von Aschenbach, besotted stalker of a Polish boy, Tadzio. Warner Brothers, he recalls, was unhappy about Thomas Mann's story, fearing that “an old fag who digs kiddies” might lack transatlantic appeal, and suggested it would be more “youth oriented” to make Tadzio a girl. On a visit to the Cannes film festival in 1975, disgust with his former associates overcomes him: “What a sorry spectacle of ugly, sweating, over-dressed and jewelled people.”

He is not particularly keen on the young, either. Friends who stay at Clermont for summer holidays bring their children, and he eyes them with distaste. They have no interests, so far as he can tell, beyond “the dreary throb of electric guitars and boys with spotty faces and Neasden-Negro-Voices”. However, he is open to persuasion. When his 16-year-old nephew arrives from Chicago he finds him keen to learn, takes his education in hand - art, literature, history, music - and is heartened by the result: “I had no idea that youth was so much fun, so bright, so clever, and so much in advance of what I ever was at that age.”

Steps towards the stage

Extract from A Postillion Struck by Lightning by Dirk Bogarde

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In his autobiography he records how his father taught him and his sister the art of observation by questioning them, when they had been travelling on the underground, about the other passengers - what did they look like, what were they wearing? The discipline helped make him an actor, and it pays off in his writing. Kenneth Tynan, whom he detested, appears “dressed in plastic python, with shoe buckles large enough to frame a Velasquez”. Glenda Jackson (“magical to work with”) astonishes him by her powers of self-transformation. She is “surely a plain girl, with feet like a goat-herd, hands like a bricklayer, bad teeth”, yet she has “an inner magnificence I have only ever seen matched by Edith Evans”. The letters teem with these close-ups, seldom wholly complimentary, of directors and stars: Joseph Losey, Luchino Visconti, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, John Schlesinger, Richard Attenborough, Ava Gardner, Mai Zetterling (“grubby, tiresome”), Richard Burton (“Fatso” in Dirk-speak).

Admittedly, Bogarde's social and racial prejudices remain as 1930s as a hand-pushed lawn mower. He talks freely of “bloody Yids” and “the great unwashed”, without seeming to realise how it demeans him. But you tend to ignore these gaffes, as you might with an elderly loved-one marooned on the far side of the generation gap. His shaky spelling and punctuation add to this feeling of excusable error. In his published works all such irregularities have been ironed out, so the letters are a revelation. Proofreading them to retain his mistakes must have been a nightmare. Quite common words emerge from his typewriter weirdly misshapen, sometimes with attempted apologies attached (“I think I have spelled that rong”), and he tends to put lines of dots between phrases to save struggling with commas and full stops. Far from hindering communication, the dyslexia makes the letters seem special and intimate, almost like a private language.

In 1987, the idyll ended. Tony had been suffering from Parkinson's Disease and liver cancer, and staying on at Clermont became impracticable. They returned to London, where Tony died the following year, and Bogarde, strapped for cash and desolate, moved to a third-floor flat in Cadogan Gardens in Chelsea. London disgusted him: pavements covered with gobs of chewing gum, the stink of cheap fat frying, people swigging from cans in the street. “Why is it that we, the English, have become so foul?” he appositely wondered. But he continued to write, and found new causes to adopt. He toured schools lecturing about the evils of Nazism and the horrors he witnessed on entering the concentration camp at Belsen soon after its liberation. In fact, as John Coldstream showed in his 2004 biography of Bogarde, it is virtually impossible that he saw Belsen or any other camp. Things he overheard or read seem to have entered his imagination and been mistaken for lived experience.

Another cause he took up was voluntary euthanasia. He was amused when, after Tony's death, his doctor limited his prescription of sleeping pills, “for fear that I'd gobble them all up and skip over. Silly fart”. Unbeknown to the medics, he had a bottle of “suicide pills” stowed away, and could have taken them any time, but “it seemed such a damned cowardly thing to do”. Choosing death as a release from incurable and dehumanising illness was a different matter, and he defended it as a right, but did not need to claim it for himself. Although partially incapacitated by a stroke, he continued to dictate letters and the occasional book review until his death in May 1999.

All his best writing, in the letters and elsewhere, is autobiography, yet he was sceptical about how much it revealed: “People just love to think that they actually know you. Madness.” Of course he was right. Writing, like acting, works by illusion. But the pleasure they give is not illusory, and on that score Ever, Dirk is a cornucopia.

Ever, Dirk selected and edited by John Coldstream
Weidenfeld £25 pp542

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