Throughout his film career, Bogarde repeatedly revealed his ease with accents and the ability to slide easily from his native British English into whatever accent a role required. Starting out he worked hard to bring his voice down which sounded ‘light’ due to the poor recording of the time (By Myself, 56). In his early roles he rarely spoke in his own voice, adopting instead a Cockney or low-class accent. To prepare himself to play the Russian émigré in Despair, he worked with a voice coach for weeks to perfect Hermann’s Prussian accent and then used the accent around the clock. (An Orderly Man, 261) His linguistic skill was so developed that in his last 16 films, he played an Englishman only seven times.