In 1978, Bogarde received a phone call from Tom Stoppard who asked if he was “making any more films.” When Bogarde replied, “I’m not making any more crap,” Stoppard rebutted, “I don’t write crap.” The playwright had just completed adapting Nabokov’s novel “Despair” for the experimental young German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder.”We both think that you would be marvelous for the leading character,” Stoppard said. At the thought of “Stoppard, Nabokov, Fassbinder,” Bogarde felt “an old surge of excitement.” An important consideration in accepting was the nagging thought that his days as a major star were waning, and if “Despair” were to be his last film, he was consoled that he “would not fade out on a cameo role. At least I would go out above the title, a position to which I had grown accustomed ever since my first film in 1947.” (An Orderly Man, 248-249) Bogarde embraced the opportunity, giving a brilliant performance as the bourgeois Russian émigré whose personality gradually fragments into two during the film. He considered Despair ‘a bloody good film’ and his best ‘technical’ performance, explaining to Tony Bilbow at a Guardian lecture: ‘I think it’s the best technical performance I’ve given on the screen... it’s the culmination of all the work I’ve ever tried to do, and if you take it layer by layer, inch by inch, step by step, it is a perfect example of a developing madness which becomes paranoia... the lengths I found I could go to in that satisfied me enormously. I did a lot of research for that.’ (220)