The Allure of the Englishman

Sitting in his cushy north London townhouse, it's hard to see why he's fretting. His insouciant performance as intelligence officer Guy Perron had women all over America tuning in to PBS's The Jewel in the Crown .His reign as the quintessential Englishman--despite many contenders to the crown (see "The Anglo File," page 96)--seems sure with Plenty, White Mischief and Pascali's Island. In them, he is the true Brit: aristocratic, colonial, cool in the heat of the tropics and the moment. ("How do I stay so cool in those costumes? By using an umbrella and an electric fan... and not moving very much.") There should be some comfort, too, in having Michael Caine name you as his successor (explains Caine, "Because he's got the talent and he wants it") or the Princess of Wales specially request your presence at a Cannes Film Festival banquet. Not a man to dine and tell, he says crisply, "If you want to know what she thinks of me or which of my roles she admires, you will have to ask her." It wouldn't be, well, very gentlemanly, would it?

And Dance is surely that. Unflappable, unfailingly polite, awesomely moderate.

The irony is that for all this pip-pip propriety--and even with a seventeenth-century West Country manor to his name--Dance, forty-two, was not to the manner born. The son of a parlor maid and a civil engineer, he grew up in Devon more like Steve McQueen than Guy Perron--"bored, lazy, rebellious.. .an apprentice rake in Levi's and cowboy boots." The mellifluous voice had a working-class accent picked up from the sailors in nearby Plymouth. "It sounded like water gurgling down a drain: 'Aaargh, I'm Long John Silver and I've me parrot on me shoulder' sort of thing," Dance recalls. And there was the matter of the stammer, which began when he was twelve. Six years later, when he discovered the theater at his art college, it simply stopped, as did his desire to be a graphic artist. Dance ignominiously failed his finals when he admitted to the examiner, "I want to be an actor."

It was fifteen dues-paying, accent-refining years from there--he was, among other things, a dresser and stagehand before joining the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1975--to the "overnight success" of Guy Perron. Although a friend suggested that he try out for the obsequious Merrick--"Lose your arm, get a big scar and be a sadomasochistic homosexual; what more could you want?"--Dance knew a matinee-idol-making role when he saw it and auditioned for Perron instead. "I liked the man. He had a sense of humor, a twinkle in his eye and got the girl. Though--and I hate to blow my own trumpet--I think the big break would have happened whether I had been playing Merrick or Perron."

Though perhaps not his reputation as "the thinking woman's sex symbol"--or "crumpet" to England's Yupwardly mobile Sloane Rangers. "Which I suppose translates for America as 'the thinking woman's English muffin,'" he sighs. Crumpet or muffin, he looked delectable as the cunning archaeologist Anthony Bowles in Pascali's Island and the reprobate Earl of Erroll in White Mischief. Interestingly, sex appeal--costar Scacchi's, not his--figures in his distaste for White Mischief; he won't disagree with those who found that director Michael Radford turned it into a Scacchi paean.

"It is a dishonest film, for many reasons. The way it was put together removed the essential ingredients of my character. What was particularly interesting to me when I saw the script was that Erroll was a man seriously questioning his way of life and looking for redemption. This is not what you see." This is Dance at his most publicly piqued: The gentleman, remember, does not rat on his peers.

Nor is he anything but charming with his public, never bothering, for example, to tell Yanks that they mispronounce his name with those hard a's. (It's "Dahnce.") "I have to pronounce it wrong myself; otherwise they don't know who I am." Friends say that teasing him about that sex-symbol image, however, is a no-no. In his defense, he says, "I am flattered and mildly amused by all the fuss, but it rather lost its novelty when a woman recognized me while I was buying detergent in the supermarket. And I should add that my wife is a very sharp lady."

She is the also very serene Joanna, thirty-seven, an almond-eyed sculptress whom Dance met at college, and, say friends, is the source of his strength. Their eighteen-year marriage has produced two children--Oliver, fourteen, and Rebecca, eight--and the kind of fierce, death-do-us-part commitment (Plenty director Fred Schepisi called it "very well married") that has frustrated many a set hopeful. Is he ever tempted? The warmly affable Dance frosts over: "I neither think about it nor talk about it." Says a producer pal, "Charlie is not the sort of actor who trolls a restaurant and says, 'Waiter, have that woman chilled and brought up to my room.' " "He is very charming with all women," says another, "but Jo is absolutely special." So how do they deal with the adoring hordes? "We laugh a lot," says Joanna, sending him a half-mocking smile. "He's managing to be a sex symbol with practice," she says, patting his bottom.

If Dance tolerates the sex-symbol stuff, it's because it's part of the whole star-making kit and caboodle. Make no mistake: Scratch that surface reserve and you find Oscar lust. He's had his fill of losing plum leads--once to Robert Redford (Out of Africa), again to Kevin Kline (Cry Freedom)--and now says, "I want to be the first person scripts are offered to. I would go to Timbuktu if there was a part I really wanted.

"I'm forty-two now and I like it. I don't want to feel I'm racing against the clock, having to worry about wrinkles or thinning hair. The attraction for an actor is the new parts with each age. I worked with Sir John Gielgud on Plenty; I want to be in demand when I am eighty-one, as he is."

But not still playing to-swoon-for Brits. All the scripts about romantic Englishmen that hit his desk daily can go hang. "I'm not deliberately swapping the image of an English gent for Eighties men," he says. "I happen to have played some gentlemen, but it is not the only thing I can do."

He hopes to break the mold forever by playing Hiroshima Joe, the besotted homosexual in Martin Booth's selfsame novel. When Dance told ex-Columbia chief David Puttnam that he was thinking of optioning the book, Puttnam warned his friend that it was too depressing. Dance shot back, "If I played that role, I would get an Oscar for it."