An Actor Needs
Good Dialogue

The quality of dialogue, or lack of it, in a script was a constant thread running through Bogarde’s assessments of films over the years. Crucial to creating believable characters was “good dialogue”. He insisted on dialogue he could speak, and if writers couldn’t provide it, he rewrote, or as he called it, “mended” his lines until they had the ring of truth when spoken. Asked by Films and Filming to comment on film writers, he emphatically noted the scarcity of writers who could write dialogue. While script writers might be excellent “constructionists”, they were rarely “good dialogue writers”. (Jan 1957, 27) Throughout his roles, he was constantly “mending terrible scripts…causing great hostility among the writers, naturally, and often directors” to get them to the point where he could speak the lines. (For The Time Being 114)