Talent and creative energy find many forms of expression, especially in the arts. Dirk Bogarde has demonstrated an abundance of both, first as an art student, then as an actor on the stage and in films. With some sixty film credits in a little over...

LIKE GARBO before him, Dirk Bogarde mysteriously exceeded the sum of his parts. Many of his 63 films were forever banal, while others initially thrilling and controversial were tamed or stultified by time. In a career spanning almost 60 years he willingly switched disguise,...

Asking poets to expatiate on their techniques is a bit like asking actors on to a chat show. At best you get some rib-tickling anecdotes, at worst the naked ego strutting without benefit of script or rehearsal. Ask them to yield up drafts of...

Sheridan Morley, a theater critic, broadcaster and author of many show-business biographies, has died at the age of 65.Morley, who wrote for such publications as The Times of London, Punch, The Spectator and the International Herald Tribune, died Friday at home. The BBC reported that...

How the English love playing at being naughty boys! Think of the young Martin Amis (or the middle-aged Martin Amis, for that matter). Think of Damien Hirst. And think of Matthew Bourne, who conquered Broadway and the West End with his all-male Swan Lake a...

"Snakes and Ladders," the second volume of Dirk Bogarde's memoirs, [is] drawn from 30 years of journals and letters…. With his keen eye for detail and actor's ear for dialogue, he brings us a picture of survival in an industry in which money is prized more than art…. The successful autobiographer, Virginia Woolf has written, needs to record two levels of existence: "The rapid passage of events and actions; the slow opening up of single, and solemn moments of ...

The author [of A Postillion Struck by Lightning] is Dirk Bogarde—not merely a star but a marvelous actor, who in recent years has tended to choose roles that, while being doubtful at the box office, have had pretensions to art. His book may be accused of courting the same fate. Bogarde divides his memoirs into two parts, Summer and Winter. Summer is highly impressionistic evocation of an English childhood…. This first part draws heavily on dialogue and vignettes for its effect.

[The island setting of A Gentle Occupation] is fictional, but the narrative is based on a chaos of facts which Dirk Bogarde clearly remembers from experience. He has assembled a large cast of characters—British, Indian, Dutch, American and mongrel—and deploys them with a structural adroitness and an imaginative range which belies the fact that this is his first novel. His catalyst is Rooke, an actor by trade, a captain in Intelligence who is happily anticipating repatriation when he is posted ...