The private world of Dirk Bogarde

When Sir Dirk Bogarde, the matinée idol, star of European art-house cinema and author, died eight years ago, he left more material than most for any would-be biographer.

On top of over 60 films and 14 books, including several bestselling volumes of autobiography, there were cupboards packed with letters, photographs and film scripts left at the flat in Chelsea, west London, where Bogarde spent his final years.

It was left to his nephew, Brock Van den Bogaerde, to deal with them. He decided that before despatching any material of note to institutions for study by future generations, he should put together a website that would serve researchers and fans alike. The plan was to include everything "from magazine covers to his views on acting, his role in British cinema, in European cinema, in theatre and every book he ever wrote. It was such an enormous life, it really needed a website to put it all in perspective," he says.

The resulting 600-page site, www.dirkbogarde.co.uk, is launched today on what would have been Bogarde's 86th birthday. It offers a reminder of the literary as well as the acting output of the star of films including The Blue Lamp, Darling and Death in Venice, but also a glimpse into the private world of one of the 20th century's more complex leading men.

There are home movies of his life with Anthony Forwood, his partner and manager for many decades, reproductions from his sketchbook and drawings that reveal an artist of talent - and even recipes including a chicken clermont so alcoholic that his nephew warns: "You will get very inebriated if you follow this."

There is a section on style, discussing the influence of Bogarde's dress-sense on the New Romantics, and how performers from Adam Ant to Morrissey have paid homage to him.

And in another section entitled "the discreet reformer," Brock makes clear for the first time his own, decisive view of his uncle's sexuality, a subject much discussed by film-lovers and gay-rights campaigners. "The website nails it once and for all," he says.

For Brock, 48, it is clear his uncle was gay - although even to his family, Bogarde always vehemently denied it. "I never asked. I just thought it would be crass to do so. Eighty per cent of people who knew him say he wasn't and 20 per cent say: 'Of course he was.' I have my own opinion."

He stresses the extraordinary significance of Bogarde's decision to play the part of a married gay - or possibly bisexual - man being blackmailed in the 1961 film Victim. "He was a heartthrob," Brock notes. "It virtually killed off his 'idol of the Odeons' image."

The political importance of the role is reinforced with the revelation on the site of a note to Bogarde from the gay-rights campaigner Lord Arran. Having finally caught the film on television in 1968, Arran wrote: "How much I admire your courage in undertaking this difficult and potentially damaging part." He credited Victim, and Bogarde's subsequent appearance in The Servant, with the swing in public opinion that had aided the introduction of more liberal laws earlier in the decade, writing: "It is comforting to think that perhaps a million men are no longer living in fear."

Some subsequent campaigners have criticised Bogarde for refusing to admit his sexuality, but Brock believes his uncle, who was born in 1921 in Hampstead, London, to mixed Dutch and Scottish ancestry, was a creature of his time. "He did things in his own way, not necessarily the way people would have liked him to do them," Brock says.

Although by the time the actor died in 1999 homosexuality had been long legalised, Brock thinks it was too late for him to change. "He got on with the life he had conceived for himself, and the life he was happy with," he says. "But I'm happy for these things to be on the site because they can explain things which it has been difficult in the past to get across."

Brock Van den Bogaerde, who makes television commercials, is the son of Bogarde's younger brother, Gareth. Growing up abroad, he got to know his uncle only as an adult but they quickly became close, not least because both were involved in the film business.

Brock suspects this was why his uncle trusted him to "do the right thing" with his estate. "He always realised the importance of preserving things like [film scripts] so that film buffs and researchers and students could see the natural progression of how film was made," he says.

Brock has tried to follow in his uncle's footsteps. Even so, he certainly never expected the website to take so long to set up. Although aided by his own nephew, Matthew Barker, who constructed the site, and Christian Sandino Taylor, a graphic designer from Brock's own commercials firm, it has taken 18 months. It has been, Brock says, a labour of love.

Fans are likely to be most intrigued by the 90 photographs, many from Bogarde's private collection and never seen before, and footage from his home movies. "The films are beautifully shot and in wonderful condition. They look so good because the cans were never opened. They're a record of his time with Tony," Brock says.

Five separate sequences are available on the website, with the promise of more to come. Browsers can watch Bogarde in New York, see scenes from the filming of The Singer not the Song in Spain with John Mills, and view footage of Bogarde with Tony Forwood at the home in France that they shared for many years. "I really wanted to show a picture of Dirk with the camera switched off, so to speak," says Brock.

He has his favourite items among the "detritus" his uncle left behind. There is a notebook that shows the actor practising his new signature after the studio, Rank, revised his birth name of Derek Jules Gaspard Ulric Niven Van den Bogaerde to Dirk Bogarde.

And there is a small glass frog, the source of the motif on the website, that Bogarde carried with him throughout his life and which he once drew on the script of The Spanish Gardener. "If he left it at home, he sent Tony back to get it. It sat with him right to the end and it's the thing most dear to me. I even took it to his funeral," Brock says.

Following the publication of Bogarde's official biography by John Coldstream in 2004 and now the website, the one final project in his memory is the editing and publication of his letters. Bogarde himself preferred to be considered a writer rather than an actor, and Brock thinks the roots of his literary success lie in his prolific and "incredibly good" letter-writing.

In person, Brock remembers his uncle as "very, very kind" but also "utterly waspish, spiteful and difficult", and "quite a complicated person". What he hopes now is that, through the website, others will also remember him in all his complexity. "My wish is that another generation can understand who he was and his importance to the world of film," he says.