Snakes & Ladders

by Dirk Bogarde

In his outstanding first volume of autobiography, A Postillion Struck by Lightning, Dirk Bogarde retraced his childhood and early experiences on the stage. In Snakes and Ladders, he continues his memoirs, from the trials of army training camp to the greatest challenge of his film career—the role of von Aschenbach in Death in Venice. Here, Bogarde recounts all the ups and downs and the people he encountered—family and friends, actors and actresses, directors and producers—on his way to becoming one of the finest cinematic actors of our time.

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction, Memoir, Autobiography, Film, LGBT, Biography Memoir

368 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1978

About the author

Dirk Jules Gaspard Ulric Niven van den Bogaerde was born of mixed Flemish, Dutch and Scottish ancestry, and baptised on 30 October 1921 at St. Mary's Church, Kilburn. His father, Ulric van den Bogaerde (born in Perry Barr, Birmingham; 1892–1972), was the art editor of The Times and his mother, Margaret Niven (1898–1980), was a former actress. He attended University College School, the former Allan Glen's School in Glasgow (a time he described in his autobiography as unhappy, although others have disputed his account) and later studied at the Chelsea College of Art and Design. He began his acting career on stage in 1939, shortly before the start of World War II.

Bogarde served in World War II, being commissioned into the Queen's Royal Regiment in 1943. He reached the rank of captain and 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 unit interpreting aerial photo-reconnaissance information, before moving to Normandy with Canadian forces. Bogarde claimed to have been 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. As John Carey has summed up with regard to John Coldstream's authorised biography however, "it is virtually impossible that he (Bogarde) saw Belsen or any other camp. Things he overheard or read seem to have entered his imagination and been mistaken for lived experience." Coldstream's analysis seems to conclude that this was indeed the case. Nonetheless, the horror and revulsion at the cruelty and inhumanity that he claimed to have witnessed still 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. Nevertheless, three of his more memorable film roles were as Germans, one of them as a former SS officer in 'The Night Porter'.


Bogarde's 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 his agent renamed him 'Dirk Bogarde' and his good looks helped him begin a career as a film actor, 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 1950s, Bogarde came to prominence playing a hoodlum who shoots and kills a police constable in The Blue Lamp (1950) co-starring Jack Warner and Bernard Lee; a handsome artist who comes to rescue of Jean Simmons during the World's Fair in Paris in So Long at the Fair, a film noir thriller; an accidental murderer who befriends a young boy played by Jon Whiteley in Hunted (aka The Stranger in Between) (1952); in Appointment in London (1953) as a young wing commander in Bomber Command who, against orders, opts to fly his 90th mission with his men in a major air offensive against the Germans; an unjustly imprisoned man who regains hope in clearing his name when he learns his sweetheart, Mai Zetterling, is still alive in Desperate Moment (1953); Doctor in the House (1954), as a medical student, in a film that made Bogarde one of the most popular British stars of the 1950s, and co-starring Kenneth More, Donald Sinden and James Robertson Justice as their crabby mentor; The Sleeping Tiger (1954), playing a neurotic criminal with co-star Alexis Smith, and Bogarde's first film for American expatriate director Joseph Losey; Doctor at Sea (1955), co-starring Brigitte Bardot in one of her first film roles.

Bogarde continued acting until 1990. 'Daddy Nostalgie' was his final film.

Reviews

[Nooilforpacifists · Rating 5 out of 5]

Still Proustian at first, but the man can write. And as the war ends, his career takes off. Because this ends with "Death in Venice", it's hard to imagine how there comes to be so many more volumes. I'll bet this works as a stand-alone: there's enough for most people's lifetimes.

[Tosh · Rating 5 out of 5]

The great Dirk Bogarde! I even have his shitty album he made in the late 50's. Nevertheless this great actor wrote an amusing memoir of his acting years from teenage idol to Visconti like perv. Bogarde had to struggle to get out of his early movie star stuff to work with people like Visconti and the underrated Joseph Losey.

This is not a tell-all type of book - Bogarde is too much of a gentleman to do that - and there is no mention of being gay or he or she is gay. For that you have to read between the lines. But what do you get is a remarkable man dealing with a period of European film history that's fascinating. Wasted elegance at its best.

[Beauregard Bottomley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bogarde is a superior writer and writes a memoir that transcends a mere memoir. There is clearly a similarity between how Marcel Proust describes his world through fictional eyes, and in the process writes a semi-autobiographical memoir while describing the world around him as it happened to him, and Bogarde continues his story in a similar vein. For volume II of In Search of Lost Time, Within a Budding Grove, I had wrote this sentence to describe what was going on, “If one is not emotionally repulsed by the snobbery and pretentious French world at the time of the Dreyfus affair described within this book than one probably is missing out on what the author is trying to get at”, that exact same sentiment can apply to this book if one makes it about American and British film making and mores in the 1950s and 60s and the stifling conforming norms striving to make us who we don’t want to be while watching Bogarde finding a way to escape from the suffocating ways around him at least as best as he can.

The world we are thrown into attempts to destroys us or we can learn to bend it such that we are no longer as repulsive as the world we are controlled by. Our live is led on terms set by others and it is up to us to steal our meaning when we can and live life on our own terms when we can. Bogarde shows how he reacts to the absurdities that surrounds him just as Proust ultimately does in his seven-volume masterpiece.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed all of Dirk Bogarde's books. I read them a long time ago, so forget the details, but a good idea to start with the first one " A Postillion Struck By Lightning". This series is autobiographical. I love France and he spent a many years living there. Thoroughly entertaining.

Others in this series are (in order):
2/ Snakes and Ladders
3/ An Orderley Man
4/Backcloth
5/A Short Walk from Harrods
6/Cleared for Take Off

[Lucy Lang · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found it quite hard to get properly tuned into this book. However, by Chapter 3, I really began to see why Bogarde is such an acclaimed and gifted writer. A wonderful read!

[Mike Clarke · Rating 3 out of 5]

Whistle or shout: in the intro to her bestselling autobiography a few years back, the punk legend Viv Albertine stated that anyone who writes such a book must be a wanker - and then goes on to claim hypocrisy for herself as well. You have to have a fairly high degree of self-regard to publish memoirs, even if many of the most successful practitioners manage to offset this with a degree of modesty about their talents. Good writing is essential to this, or it all descends into a mush of either vanity or self-loathing (and in the most disturbing cases, both). In his latter years, Dirk Bogarde revealed a talent as an author that had up till then been unexposed. Snakes and Ladders, his second volume of autobiography, deals with his early struggles to establish himself as an actor in a postwar Britain ravaged by bombs and then austerity, and his realisation, to his own discomfort and distress, that his career was to be in films rather than the stage work he loved.

The book takes in his matinée idol phase, pin-up and star of dozens of variable-quality pictures as a Rank Organisation contract actor, and his move into art house after J Arthur dropped him when he got too old. It includes the ground-breaking Victim, a film thought to have done more to advance the cause of homosexual law reform than a dozen committees or petitions, which he describes with commendable modesty: “married man with a secret passion...that just happens to be a bloke...but I did it and it was one of the best decisions of my cinematic life.”

He spends longer on Death In Venice (perhaps an archetype for gay men) but it’s worth it for a candid description of Visconti’s methods and the depredations they had on the cast - cracked actor isn’t the half of it.

As a writer Bogarde stays admirably free of preening self-regard though what he doesn’t say is just as interesting - frequent references to ‘Forwood’ might leave the uninformed reader thinking this is just a particularly attentive manager when of course it was the man he shared his life with for 40 years. Lest this sound dull it’s not for there are plenty of waspish asides and acute little pen portraits of his co-stars and the era’s greats, some long-forgotten, others like Judy Garland still legendary. He describes an encounter with Noel Coward, who having proffered advice to a young Bogarde early in his career, later invites him for tea at his flat with the reassurance: “I shan’t jump on you. I’m not the type, and Gerald Row police station is immediately opposite you. Would you care for a whistle, or will you merely shout?”

[M.R. Dowsing · Rating 5 out of 5]

In which Dirk talks about his war years, becoming a film star and his struggle to become a serious actor. We find out that he actually killed at least one person during the war, and he writes in detail about making the films 'Song without End' (in which he played Liszt), 'Victim', 'I Could Go on Singing' (and his relationship with Judy Garland), 'The Servant', 'Accident', 'The Damned' and 'Death in Venice'. He also goes on a great deal about the various homes he owned over the years (the finding of the perfect home seems to have been an obsession with him), but fortunately he's such a good writer that it never gets boring.

[Rupert Grech · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very interesting memoir written in a personable and at times, lyrical, style. It is a memoir which exposes the feelings of the author rather than being just a chronicle. I found the haphazardness of the movie industry fascinating and the inadvertent nature of the pivotal moments of a highly successful career, astonishing.

[Aaron Novak · Rating 5 out of 5]

Working my way thru all seven volumes, as I've thoroughly enjoyed the first two. Having seen many of Bogarde's films helped me enjoy this particular volume given its numerous references and anecdotes to his movies.

[Furnison · Rating 3 out of 5]

6/10 i finished the book, which is unusual for this type of book. It doesn't seem like ghostwriting, and he is a pretty good writer himself.

[David Highton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well-written, interesting, self-deprecating

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

Of all the autobiographies written by Dirk Bogarde, this is the best for a film buff. It covers the period from when he was eighteen and his early dalliance with the professional theatre and the transition to appearances in movies, right up to 1970 and the peak of his career in "Death in Venice". There are 52 films listed for this period although not all are mentioned. Such as one of his most commercial films that was a lightweight spy thriller that jumped on the James Bond bandwagon in 1964 called "Hot Enough For June".

Fortunately, he has a lot to say about his best movies. These started with "Victim" in 1961 directed by Basil Dearden. I remember going to see "The Servant" in 1964. A script by Harold Pinter and direction by Joseph Losey, and the same collaboration again with Bogarde made the superb "Accident" in 1967. But most important were his movies directed by Visconti of which "Death in Venice" tops the lot.

The most interesting personal revelations in the book are his friendships with Judy Garland and Kay Kendal. An obituary calls them both "unstable" women, I would say artistically fragile. They both loved Bogarde and found him a safe haven. I have to say that I preferred the writing in his earlier memoir "A Postillion Struck by Lightning" but both fall short of the lyricism of the later "A Short Walk from Harrods".

[Dale Pobega · Rating 5 out of 5]

Perhaps this instalment of Bogarde's autobiography should have been called "Mahler's Nose"? The section on the making of "Death in Venice" with Visconti is just brilliant. Bogarde's revelations about the dangers he was subjected to by the make-up department for the final scene is very amusing.

I found my free, crumpled copy of "Snakes and Ladders" in the Op Shop reject box a couple of days ago and spent about an hour in the street reading the section about Bogarde working with Visconti on his adaptation of Mann's novella.

At home I found myself flicking through the index and on to the description of the actor's role in Visconti's "La Caduta degli Dei" (The Damned) and then on to his part in Losey's "The Servant". Before I knew it, I'd spent most of the day immersed in the rest of the volume.

An excellent, well written autobiography (a genre I barely touch, especially the movie-star variety). What a masterful writer Bogarde was. I must go back and rifle around that reject box in the hope of finding the earlier instalments.

[Lauren Wilder · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favourite of Dirk's autobiographies. It tells of his hey day with rank and his relationships with famous actors and actresses of the fifties and sixties. These were the days of old movie star glamour and real stars. Another great read, I didn't want it to end and have read it again several times.

[Gavin · Rating 5 out of 5]

A reread of this, the second in Dirk Bogarde's autobiographical sequence. An excellent series of autobiography, written by one of the better actors of the 20th century. Interesting indeed and recommended.

[Núria]

Tengo que tener este libro. Aunque sólo sea por la portada.

[Caitlin]

Snakes & Ladders by Dirk Bogarde (2006)

[Karen-Leigh · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lovely man, lovely writing, interesting life.