Though his pretty-boy good looks first propelled him to fame as a British matinee idol, there was always something edgy and intriguingly unwholesome lurking beneath Dirk Bogarde’s debonair surface: a complex, neurotic soul that, in his extraordinary later career, he bared before the cameras of iconoclastic auteurs like Joseph Losey, Luchino Visconti, Liliana Cavani, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Through his brilliant performances in frequently controversial art-house provocations such as VICTIM, THE SERVANT, DEATH IN VENICE, and THE NIGHT PORTER, Bogarde became something of an emblem of transgressive sexuality, moral corruption, and decadence—an actorly embodiment of postwar Europe’s bourgeois malaise. The fearlessness with which Bogarde took on these risky roles and the intelligence that he brought to them has ensured that, one hundred years after his birth, he endures as one of cinema’s most captivating performers.