Dirk Bogarde

Dirk Bogarde was a British actor and writer who was one of Britain's biggest box-office stars of the 1950s before reinventing himself as a serious art-film actor for directors including Joseph Losey and Luchino Visconti. His portrayal of a gay barrister being blackmailed in Victim (1961) — made when homosexuality was still illegal in Britain — was an act of moral courage said to have influenced the Sexual Offences Act 1967's decriminalization of male homosexuality. He was in a discreet, lifelong relationship with his manager Anthony Forwood from 1949 until Forwood's death in 1988. Though he never publicly identified as gay, his queerness was understood, and biographers have thoroughly documented both his identity and his decades of careful concealment.