An Actor’s Gift of Observation

To create characters who resonated with audiences, Bogarde drew on a skill his father had taught him as a child, that of closely observing and filing away details from his environment and how people acted and reacted. These details became fodder for future characters he would portray. Not an advocate of Method acting, he pointed out that an actor did not have to experience something in order to portray it in a way that resonates with an audience:

‘Acting is all observation and storing away things. What it’s like to be cold, what it’s like to not have quite enough money for the rent - all the ordinary, human sort of things. It’s very difficult to imagine unless you’ve experienced it... You don’t have to commit a murder to play a murderer... But I think nearly all of us have at one time come to the point of almost committing murder in a rage - which is close enough to a reaction I might use later on. And more important, it’s something almost everyone in an audience has experienced... (Wiedenman, 55)

He constantly searched for the unique gesture that would bring life to a character, ‘an imperfection of speech... a slight laugh, a sigh, a caught word’, which would draw in and involve an audience, whether one was doing a reading or giving a performance. (For the Time Being, 82-83) In Libel and again in Accident, he ‘used a stutter, only twice, when I was telling a deliberate lie. It happens every day. How many times have you heard someone stutter over something, and immediately known it’s a lie? So I borrow all these experiences, store them up, and use them when the occasion comes along. It’s all part of being an actor.’ (Wiedenman, 55)