Dirk Bogarde was born in a nursing home at 12 Hemstal Road, West Hampstead, London. He was baptised on 30 October 1921 at St. Mary’s Church, Kilburn. He had a younger sister, Elizabeth (born 1924) and a brother, Gareth Ulric Van Den Bogaerde, an advertising film producer, born in July 1933, in Hendon.

He 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. From 1937 to 1938 he studied at the Chelsea School of Art. He began his acting career on stage in 1939, shortly before the start of the Second World War, with his first on-screen appearance being as an uncredited extra in the George Formby comedy, Come On George! (1939).

His London West End theatre-acting debut was in 1939, with the stage name “Derek Bogaerde”, in J. B. Priestley’s play Cornelius. After the war, Bogarde’s agent renamed him “Dirk Bogarde” and he was handsome enough to begin a career as a film actor. He 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 matinée idol image.

During the war, Derek “Pip” Bogaerde served in the British Army, initially with the Royal Corps of Signals before being commissioned at the age of 22 into the Queen’s Royal Regiment (West Surrey) as a second lieutenant in 1943. He served in both the European and Pacific theatres, principally as an intelligence officer. Taylor Downing’s book Spies in the Sky tells of his work with a specialist Army unit that accompanied air force units for the interpreting of aerial photo-reconnaissance information, after D-Day moving to Normandy with RCAF units which by July 1944 were located at the “B.8” airfield at Sommervieu, near Bayeux. As an “Air Photographic Interpreter” with the rank of captain, and subsequently major, he was later with the headquarters of the Second Army where he selected ground targets in France, Holland, and Germany, for the Second Tactical Air Force (2TAF) and RAF Bomber Command to attack. In a 1986 Yorkshire Television interview with Russell Harty, Bogarde said:

Bogarde was one of the first Allied officers in April 1945 to reach the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany, an experience that had the most profound effect on him and about which he found it difficult to speak for many years afterward.

One of 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”. This was filmed at New Cross Speedway, in South East London during one of the post-war years in which speedway was the biggest spectator sport in the UK.

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 due to film commitments. Bogarde later said that he regretted declining Olivier’s offer and with it the chance to “really learn my craft.”

Bogarde was nominated five times as Best Actor by BAFTA, winning twice, for The Servant in 1963, and for Darling in 1965. He also received the London Film Critics Circle Lifetime Award in 1991. He made a total of 63 films between 1939 and 1991. In 1983, he received a Special Award for service to the Cinema at the Cannes Festival. He was awarded the British Film Institute Fellowship in 1987. In 1988, Bogarde was honoured with the first BAFTA Tribute Award for an outstanding contribution to cinema.

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 that he played in the 1977 film A Bridge Too Far. Browning’s widow, the 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.”

In 1977, Bogarde embarked on his second career as an author. Starting with a first volume A Postillion Struck by Lightning (an allusion to the phrase My postillion has been struck by lightning), he wrote a series of 15 best-selling books; nine volumes of memoirs, six novels, as well as essays, reviews, poetry and collected journalism. As a writer Bogarde displayed a witty, elegant, highly literate and thoughtful style.

In 1984, Bogarde served as president of the jury at the Cannes Film Festival. He was the first British person to serve in this capacity.

Bogarde had a minor stroke in November 1987, while Forwood was dying of liver cancer and Parkinson’s disease. In September 1996, he underwent angioplasty to unblock arteries leading to his heart and had a massive stroke following the operation. He was paralysed on one side of his body, which affected his speech. After the stroke he used a wheelchair. He then completed the final volume of his autobiography, which covered the stroke’s effects, and published an edition of his collected journalism, mainly from The Daily Telegraph. He spent some time with his friend Lauren Bacall the day before he died at his home in London from a pulmonary embolism on 8 May 1999, age 78. His ashes were scattered at his former estate in Grasse, Southern France.

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:

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.