Bogarde was a master at revealing the swirling interior of characters, where thoughts and emotions spill out in a blast of temper, sorrow, or frustration. His characters came close to breakdown or shattering, yet he brought a fierce determination to them, so that they teetered but rarely plunged into the abyss. He understood the tension created in a scene from contained emotion and the impact it would have on his audience. In prepping for a role, he gave a good deal of thought as to how he would portray a character emotionally, to the point of carefully charting out the character’s ‘emotional highs and lows’ during the course of the film. (Victim script, Bogarde annotations; British Film Library)

Continually honing his ability to slip into the skin of his characters, he became a master of nuance and subtlety, manipulating his face and voice to reflect the personality and psyche of his character, from sneer to stutter to open grin, all of it recorded by the camera. With the right director planning the shots and a good cameraman, Bogarde’s face became subtle magic on screen. In The Servant, Losey and cameraman Douglas Slocombe recorded Barrett’s covert eye and mouth movements, which revealed his disdain for the young master, Tony. Bogarde’s portrayal of von Aschenbach was a brilliant example of his genius in reacting and unfolding for the camera lens the inner turmoil and yearning of the dying man for the boy. It was a role that had few spoken lines in proportion to the length of time he was on camera and the close-ups of his face reacting. Yet as viewers, we feel that we have heard him speak eloquent volumes on his anguish because of those close-ups.