Bogarde’s Long-Awaited Return May Be His Last Film

British actor Dirk Bogarde made a long-awaited return to the cinema screen today as the lead in French director Bertrand Tavernier’s “Daddy Nostalgie,” but said it could be the last film in his long career.

“It was a great, great moment for me, and I think the last. I’m not interested in other things,” Bogarde told journalists after the premiere.

The 69-year-old actor has been in semi-retirement for several years and had not accepted a film role since appearing in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s “Despair” in 1978.

Bogarde, who of late had devoted his energies to writing his best-selling autobiography, said his absence was due to a lack of appropriate scripts.

“For 11 years I waited with great patience. There was nothing to do in France, Italy or Britain. I wrote my books and waited for Tavernier, and finally he came.

“It was worth being patient.”

In “Daddy Nostalgie,” Bogarde plays a terminally ill man helped by his daughter, played by compatriot Jane Birkin, to come to terms with his approaching death.

Shot in the fading autumn light of the south of France, the film is a tender, intimate exploration of the bittersweet relationship between a father and his daughter, who adores him but is all too aware of his faults.

“It’s about time I played my age,” commented Bogarde, regarded as something of a sex symbol in Britain before establishing himself as a serious actor.

Tavernier said the film had been inspired by the deaths of his father and the father of his former wife, Colo Tavernier O’Hagan, who wrote the script.

Apart from “Daddy Nostalgie,” France has entered “Cyrano de Bergerac” by Jean-Paul Rappeneau and Raymond Depardon’s “La Captive du Desert” (“The Captive of the Desert”) for the official competition.