MOVIES : Return of a Screen Idol : Dirk Bogarde, who came out of retirement to work for Tavernier, is living in modest digs in London--and irritating the English again

“I like it here,” says Dirk Bogarde, looking approvingly around the large lounge in the Connaught Hotel. “Everything else changes, but this place doesn’t change. Which, of course, is why I like it.”

If the mere name of the discreet, stately Connaught evokes another, gentler era, so does that of Bogarde, 70, for whom this hotel is a kind of home away from home. Perched elegantly on a sofa in the corner of the room, he sips at a Scotch and water. It is a rare sighting of a man who many critics rate as one of the great screen actors.

His delicate good looks remain and his hair is still jet black. He is resplendent in a gray wool suit, a dazzlingly white shirt and silk tie. People here tend not to dress this well for the afternoons.

But they did in Bogarde’s heyday, which lasted three decades and went through several phases. He was a young heartthrob in the 1950s, appearing in any number of light, forgettable British comedies. Then in the ‘60s, he started acting characters in middle age, and starred in some intriguing films--”The Servant” and “Accident” for Joseph Losey and “Darling” for John Schlesinger. In the late ‘60s, he quit England as a tax exile and moved to France, where he gained renown in classic art-house films (“Death in Venice,” “The Damned,” “Providence,” “Despair”) for great European directors like Visconti, Resnais and Fassbinder. Then in 1977 he gave up movies altogether.

Perhaps surprisingly, he has now returned to the screen in a film for Bertrand Tavernier called “Daddy Nostalgia,” opening Friday in Los Angeles. He plays an elderly, infirm British businessman retired to the South of France; in his last months he finally strikes up a relationship with his adult daughter (Jane Birkin) for whom he never had time when she was a child. His French wife of many years (played by French actress Odette Laure) is withdrawn from him and sullen; she knows that the charm that so attracts his daughter masks self-centeredness.

“It’s just a little movie about three people and a death,” Bogarde says. Perhaps. But this did not prevent it gaining major accolades when it was shown at last year’s Cannes Film Festival. “They stood up and shrieked and applauded,” he says.

Ironically, Bogarde had rejected an earlier form of the script (by Tavernier’s ex-wife Colo Tavernier O’Hagan) some years ago, dismissing it as too sentimental. He heard that it had been rewritten and Tavernier was to direct only by sheer coincidence.

A woman friend called and asked for the home number of another actor whom Tavernier wanted for the role. Bogarde is too discreet to name him, but it was in fact Peter O’Toole. When he learned of Tavernier’s interest, Bogarde asked to see the rewritten script, then let the director know through his friend that he was desperate to do “Daddy Nostalgia.”

What brought him out of retirement? The chance to work for Tavernier. “I’d walk across Antarctica for him,” Bogarde says. “He’s a marvelous director. I’d do a movie for him if it meant reading the owner’s manual for Japanese refrigerators.”

Nothing had come his way since 1977, when he made “Despair” for Rainer Werner Fassbinder, to tempt him back into films. Nothing until “Daddy Nostalgia,” that is. But he had never truly wanted to end his film career on “Despair”: “Well, there’s the title for a start. And the sort of film it was, it might have seemed like going out on a rather down note.”

He saw “Despair” on its completion and was highly impressed. “But it was chosen as the German entry for the next Cannes Film Festival, which was six months away, and Fassbinder had all that time to get bored with it. Basically, he took scissors to it and cut it to shreds, took all the funny things out, all the things that had made it wonderful. It was a great script by Tom Stoppard and basically he fouled it up.

“And I had gone through four months of hard slog making the film in East Germany, and it simply wasn’t worth it, especially when the work gets ruined.”

Accordingly, he retired to his 15th-Century farmhouse among 12 acres of olive trees in Provence and concentrated on writing. Bogarde has for many years made most of his money from books. He is the author of three novels, and has stretched out his memoirs to four volumes of clear, elegant prose, enhanced by his sure ear for dialogue.

“I’m published everywhere now,” he says. “Curiously, America is an exception. My publishers there say that my autobiographies are too discreet, and not raunchy enough.” Bogarde refuses to kiss and tell; nowhere in the four volumes is there a mention of a sexual conquest. “So they think the books are too mild for the audience.

“In fact, I know I have a faithful readership in the States. People order them from Canada.”

His experiences with the United States have mainly been unhappy ones. He made a couple of Hollywood movies in the early ‘60s, including the wretched “Song Without End,” a bio-pic of the composer Franz Liszt, and he returned in 1980 to make “The Patricia Neal Story” with Glenda Jackson, a movie for American TV. “A lot of English actors out there were very suspicious of me,” he remembers. “There’s so little work to go round, you see. It was only when I made it very clear that I had no intention of sticking around Los Angeles, that as soon as the movie was over I was on my way back to Europe, that I started getting dinner invitations.”

After 20 years of self-imposed exile in Provence, Bogarde returned to his native England a couple of years back. The reasons were varied, but one major factor was the terminal illness of his manager and longtime companion Tony Forwood, who was dying of cancer and wanted to see out his last days in England, close to relatives.

Bogarde now lives alone in the top-floor apartment of a house in Chelsea that once belonged to Lillie Langtry, the mistress of King Edward VII. He surmises that he now inhabits what was once her laundry room.

Because he lives relatively modestly--and because he made an unwise crack to the press about narrating a BBC radio series because he needed the money--the British tabloids recently ran spurious stories that he was living as a recluse in penury.

“It was the worst nonsense,” Bogarde sighs. “You can’t win with those people. I mean, think of all the countries where my books sell. Two of my novels are being made into movies. I’m not broke by any means. Figure it out.”

He feels he may be a victim of a peculiarly English form of insular jealousy, extended to those who had the nerve to leave Britain for years and return. He may not have helped his cause by writing an entertaining newspaper article about his return, in which he found himself being invited to tedious dinner parties filled with boring people--”the living dead,” he called them. “Well,” he says now, smiling gently, “they really were the living dead.”

Bogarde says he is a different man now that he is back in Britain. For one thing his politics have moved sharply toward the left. In another of his books, a collection of letters to an unnamed woman from 1967 to 1972, he spends much time bemoaning the power of unions in Britain, and sniping at the then Labor government. But on his return he feels that 11 years of Thatcherism have swung the political pendulum too far in the other direction.

He is a terribly English man, although in fact he is partly Spanish on his mother’s side and partly Dutch on his father’s. He was born Derek Niven van den Bogaerde, his mother an actress and his father art editor of the august newspaper, the Times of London. He studied commercial art and design under the tutelage of Graham Sutherland and Henry Moore, but became hooked on acting through local amateur dramatic productions.

In World War II he served as a photographic interpreter in Europe and the Far East, and witnessed the horrors of Belsen for himself; to this day he is scathing about Germans. After the war, he was signed to a film contract with Britain’s Rank Organization; his personality and handsome, vulnerable features were immensely popular with young women. In the 1950s, he was unquestionably Britain’s leading movie star; he was dubbed “Britain’s Rock Hudson” and “the idol of the Odeons,” Odeons being the name of movie theaters owned by Rank that were in every sizable British town.

He knows the lightweight movies he made during this era were not memorable. “But being on contract to Rank like that meant I worked a lot, and I learned to be a pretty good technician. I managed to do what I was told to conceal the crap.”

In fact, it prepared him for more substantial roles to come. His initial break with his bobby-soxer idol image came in 1961, when in “Victim” he played a homosexual barrister whose life and career are threatened when he tries to expose a blackmailing ring. The subject matter was taboo for the time in Britain, and Bogarde quickly alienated his old fans. He alienated them further when he performed in some theater productions around this time. Women fans turned up to scream for their idol from the stalls as he played Anouilh and Chekhov. In performance a few times, “I made the mistake of losing my temper and letting it show,” he recalls.

After his Losey films in Britain, moving to France was easy. Bogarde quickly adjusted as a European. “I could decide to go to the opera in Vienna the same evening,” he says. “I could drive to Budapest in 12 hours. It was the most wonderful place to be.”

His “Death in Venice” for Visconti brought home to many critics that Bogarde was an actor who could convey a lot by seeming to do very little. It is an acting style that has become a personal signature. “I underplay a great deal,” he agrees. “I soon found that the camera photographs thought. So if you do think on screen, your body automatically does what your brain tells it to.”

His technique does not always excite immediate admiration. He recalls overhearing a wardrobe mistress on the set of “The Patricia Neal Story,” complaining (here he lapses into a whiny Californian voice): “He doesn’t do anything. He just stands there.” Later on, when she had seen some dailies, she came to Bogarde, confessed what she had said about him, and then gushed: “I was wrong. You do everything. “

It’s a technique that might flourish on television, but Bogarde will hear none of it. “I hate that little box,” he says. “It diminishes everything you do. And there’s always the sense that people who are watching it might be getting up to go (to the bathroom), or answering the phone or something. At least with films, you feel the audience has made a commitment to be there.”

So he won’t do TV, he won’t do stage work, he won’t accept small roles. “As one gets older, choices diminish,” he says with a sigh. “The other thing is that three-quarters of my friends are dead. They’ve been . . . gathered.”

Not that he’s inactive. There are his books, which take him a year each on average to write. “I’m a great work avoider,” he says. “If I have to write, I can always think of something that needs doing --scrubbing carrots, or some such chore. And Bertrand wants me to write scripts with him, which I intend to do.”

Grief and age and reluctantly adjusting to new surroundings may have left their mark, but Bogarde seems likely to make a contribution in his ‘70s. “Well, of course,” he says, a little sharply. “You either go under . . . or you keep swimming.”