She played bit parts in three English-language films, the British comedy Doctor at Sea ( 1955 ) with Dirk Bogarde, Helen of Troy ( 1954 ), in which she was understudy for the title role but appears only as Helen's handmaid, and Act of Love ( 1954 ) with Kirk Douglas.

Her next major film role was as Lucie in the 1958 film A Tale of Two Cities, opposite Dirk Bogarde.

The movie was nominated for six BAFTA Awards and won four: Best British Actress-Julie Christie ; Best British Actor-Dirk Bogarde ; Best British Art Direction-Ray Simm ; and Best British Screenplay-Frederic Raphael.

Sir Dirk Bogarde ( 28 March 1921 – 8 May 1999 ) was an English actor and writer.

Bogarde was born Derek Jules Gaspard Ulric Niven van den Bogaerde in a nursing home at 12 Hemstal Road, West Hampstead, London, of mixed Flemish, Dutch and Scottish ancestry, and baptised on 30 October at St. Mary's Church, Kilburn.

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.

While under contract with the Rank Organisation, Bogarde was set to play the role of T. E.

On the eve of production, after one year of preparation by Bogarde and Asquith, the film was scrapped without full explanation to the dismay of Bogarde and Asquith.

The abrupt scrapping of Lawrence, a role long researched and keenly anticipated by Bogarde, was among his greatest screen disappointments.

Bogarde was also reportedly considered for the title role in MGM's Doctor Zhivago ( 1965 ).

In addition, in 1961 Bogarde was offered the chance to play Hamlet at the recently founded Chichester Festival Theatre by artistic director Sir Laurence Olivier, however he had to decline due to film commitments.

Bogarde was nominated six times as Best Actor by BAFTA, winning twice, for The Servant in 1963, and for Darling in 1965.

Awarded the British Film Institute Fellowship in 1987, the following year in 1988, Bogarde was honoured with the first BAFTA Tribute Award for an outstanding contribution to cinema in 1988.

Bogarde was a lifelong bachelor and, during his life, was assumed to be homosexual.

According to Charlotte Rampling, Bogarde was approached in 1990 by Madonna to appear in her video for Justify My Love, citing The Night Porter as an inspiration.

Bogarde suffered a minor stroke in November 1987, at a time when his partner, Anthony Forwood, was dying of liver cancer and Parkinson's disease.

Bogarde was paralyzed on one side of his body, which affected his speech and left him in a wheelchair.

Harris was nominated for the BAFTA that year but was topped by Dirk Bogarde for his role in the Joseph Losey production The Servant.

In 1960, Bogarde was 39 and just about the most popular actor in British films.

Bogarde was suspected to be homosexual, living in the same house as his business manager, Anthony Forwood, and was compelled every now and then to be seen in public with attractive young women.

Initially a matinée idol in such films as Doctor in the House ( 1954 ) and other Rank Organisation pictures, Bogarde later acted in art-house films such as Death in Venice ( 1971 ).

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 ; as a returning Colonial who fights the Mau-Mau with Virginia McKenna and Donald Sinden in Simba ( 1955 ); Cast a Dark Shadow ( 1955 ), as a man who marries women for money and then murders them ; The Spanish Gardener ( 1956 ), co-starring Michael Hordern, Jon Whiteley, and Cyril Cusack ; Doctor at Large ( 1957 ), again with Donald Sinden, another entry in the " Doctor films series ", co-starring later Bond-girl Shirley Eaton ; the Powell and Pressburger production Ill Met by Moonlight ( 1957 ) co-starring Marius Goring as the German General Kreipe, kidnapped on Crete by Patrick " Paddy " Leigh Fermor ( Bogarde ) and a fellow band of adventurers based on W. Stanley Moss ' real-life account of the WW2 caper ; A Tale of Two Cities ( 1958 ), a faithful retelling of Charles Dickens ' classic ; as a Flt.

Bogarde later said that he regretted declining Olivier's offer and with it the chance to " really learn my craft ".

His friend Helena Bonham Carter believed Bogarde would not have been able to come out as gay during later life, since this might have too unambiguously demonstrated that he had been forced to camouflage his real sexual orientation during his film career.

He was replaced by Winston Bogarde, a move widely regarded as one of the most disastrous transfers of all time.

Other film treatments have included a 1983 British television documentary produced by Thames Television, narrated by Sir Dirk Bogarde entitled, Schindler: The Documentary ( released in the US in 1994 as Schindler: The Real Story ), and a 1998 A & E Biography special, Oskar Schindler: The Man Behind the List.

Despair is based upon the novel by Vladimir Nabokov, adapted by Tom Stoppard and featuring Dirk Bogarde.

With Providence ( 1977 ), Resnais made his first film in English, with a screenplay written by David Mercer, and a distinguished cast that included John Gielgud and Dirk Bogarde.

Darling is a 1965 British drama film written by Frederic Raphael, directed by John Schlesinger, and starring Julie Christie with Dirk Bogarde and Laurence Harvey.

After leaving the Rank Organisation in the early 1960s, Bogarde abandoned his heart-throb image for more challenging parts, such as barrister Melville Farr in Victim ( 1961 ), directed by Basil Dearden ; decadent valet Hugo Barrett in The Servant ( 1963 ), which garnered him a BAFTA Award, directed by Joseph Losey and written by Harold Pinter ; The Mind Benders ( 1963 ), a film ahead of its times in which Bogarde plays an Oxford professor conducting sensory deprivation experiments at Oxford University ( precursor to Altered States ( 1980 )); the anti-war film King & Country ( 1964 ), playing an army lawyer reluctantly defending deserter Tom Courtenay, directed by Joseph Losey ; a television broadcaster-writer Robert Gold in Darling ( 1965 ), for which Bogarde won a second BAFTA Award, directed by John Schlesinger ; Stephen, a bored Oxford University professor, in Losey's Accident, ( 1967 ) also written by Pinter ; Our Mother's House ( 1967 ), an off-beat film-noir directed by Jack Clayton in which Bogarde plays an n ' er do well father who descends upon " his " seven children on the death of their mother, British entry at the Venice Film Festival ; German industrialist Frederick Bruckmann in Luchino Visconti's La Caduta degli dei, The Damned ( 1969 ) co-starring Ingrid Thulin ; as ex-Nazi, Max Aldorfer, in the chilling and controversial Il Portiere di notte, The Night Porter ( 1974 ), co-starring Charlotte Rampling, directed by Liliana Cavani ; and most notably, as Gustav von Aschenbach in Morte a Venezia, Death in Venice ( 1971 ), also directed by Visconti ; as Claude, the lawyer son of a dying, drunken writer ( John Gielgud ) in the well-received, multi-dimensional French film Providence ( 1977 ), directed by Alain Resnais ; as industrialist Hermann Hermann who descends into madness in Despair ( 1978 ) directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder ; and as Daddy in Bertrand Tavernier's Daddy Nostalgie, ( aka These Foolish Things ) ( 1991 ), co-starring Jane Birkin as his daughter, Bogarde's final film role.

However, the subsequent period saw the departure of manager van Gaal along with an exodus of many key players including Clarence Seedorf in 1995 ; Edgar Davids, Michael Reiziger, Finidi George, and Nwankwo Kanu in 1996 ; Patrick Kluivert, Marc Overmars, and Winston Bogarde in 1997 ; Ronald de Boer and Frank de Boer in 1998 ; and Edwin van der Sar and Jari Litmanen in 1999.

Examples of performers who went on to universal recognition are Jeremy Brett, Judi Dench, Rosemary Harris, Ian McKellen, Christopher Plummer, Harold Pinter, Imelda Staunton, Lynn Redgrave, Vanessa Redgrave, Patrick Stewart, Geraldine McEwan, Ronnie Barker, Dirk Bogarde, who wrote about his start at tiny Amersham rep in 1939, and Michael Caine, who recounts his time spent at Horsham rep in the early fifties, to present just a few.

When the team of producer Michael Relph and director Basil Dearden first approached Bogarde, they warned him that a lot of people had already turned down the script because the material might be considered dangerous or unwholesome.

His cast included Dirk Bogarde, John Gielgud, John Mills, Kenneth More, Laurence Olivier, Jack Hawkins, Corin Redgrave, Michael Redgrave, Vanessa Redgrave, Ralph Richardson, Maggie Smith, Ian Holm, Paul Shelley, Malcolm McFee, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Nanette Newman, Edward Fox, Susannah York, John Clements, Phyllis Calvert and Maurice Roëves.

Famous residents born or who have lived in the area include the political reformer Thomas Muir of Huntershill, the actor and writer Dirk Bogarde, former Speaker of the House of Commons Michael Martin MP, TV and National Lottery draw presenter Jenni Falconer, singers Amy Macdonald and Lena Martell, as well as former Miss Scotland and Miss United Kingdom Nieve Jennings and actor and rock singer Steve Valentine.

Although not a child actor, aged around seven he played " Ted " ( using the pseudonym Maxwell Findlater ) in the 1967 film, Accident, written by Harold Pinter ( screenplay ) and starring Stanley Baker, Dirk Bogarde and Michael York.

Ajax was so successful under Van Gaal's leadership that during the 1990s, the Dutch national team was dominated by Ajax players such as Patrick Kluivert, Marc Overmars, Dennis Bergkamp, Frank and Ronald de Boer, Edgar Davids, Clarence Seedorf, Winston Bogarde, Michael Reiziger, and Edwin van der Sar.

The Sea Shall Not Have Them is a 1954 British war film starring Michael Redgrave, Dirk Bogarde and Anthony Steel.

Louis van Gaal, who coached Barça at that time, also signed many Dutch World Cup players such as Frank de Boer, Ronald de Boer, Patrick Kluivert, Boudewijn Zenden, Ruud Hesp, Michael Reiziger, Winston Bogarde, as well as Marc Overmars in 2000 and the Spanish team, who was soon nicknamed " Oranje Barcelona " or " Ajax Barcelona ", were crowned league champions in 1997-1998 and 1998-1999.

Its success resulted in six sequels, three starring Bogarde, one with Michael Craig and Leslie Phillips, and the other two with Phillips, as well as a successful television series from London Weekend Television.

Actors enobbled during Gawsworth ’ s reign were Michael Denison, Dulcie Gray, Barry Humphries, Diana Dors, Dirk Bogarde, Mai Zetterling, Vincent Price, Joan Greenwood, and Robert Beatty.