The Stage Actor
by John Coldstream

Back from the war in the Far East, demobilised from the Army and out of work, the 25-year-old Derek Van den Bogaerde was introduced to the producer Peter Daubeny. The latter was unmoved. ‘He made no impression on me at all, except that his face, with its Spanish black eyes, reminded me of Eddie Cantor.’ Not long afterwards, Daubeny was persuaded to visit the New Lindsey Theatre Club, where a group of unknowns was appearing in a new play called Power Without Glory. The production had run out of money and the company was ‘stranded’. Daubeny headed reluctantly for Notting Hill, but with a cheque in his pocket, in case what he saw encouraged him to lift ‘a death-sentence upon these young actors, whose whole future might well depend on outside good will.’ He found himself gradually engaged by Michael Clayton Hutton’s play, and then: ‘Suddenly there rushed on to the stage a breathless figure, half choking with emotion: a slight, dark youth, radiating a curious, almost hypnotic power; every movement, every inflection of his voice, uncannily suggesting the poetry of the gutter, of a lost soul. Beyond any doubt, here was an actor of the first quality. It turned out to be the young man with whom I had been so unimpressed shortly before...’ And the name in the programme was Dirk Bogarde.