Submitted by Birgit
Contemporary Dance
 Actor Charles Dance, the freckled favourite of thinking women, confesses that he never went to drama school. He learned his trade from retired actors -- and paid them in Guinness.
In life as in memory, it is Charles Dance's profile that stands out. Hawkish, aloof, speckled with freckles and unavoidably English, this hard-working English actor earned his public laurels in Jewel in the Crown. He then sped off to Hollywood trailing his reputation as "the thinking woman's crumpet" like a banner behind him.
More than slightly uncomfortable with that label -- "it goes in one ear and out the other" -- Charles Dance, 40 this year, wants to be taken seriously as an actor, not a matinée idol. Before his crowning, Charles Dance's career glowed with good solid artisan achievement, and that's what he is proud of.
"I like to think of myself as a working actor," he says, taking time out from rehearsing Tales of the Unexpected. Sinking his 6ft 3in frame into his agent's elegant couch, he succeeds in looking more like a tall man on a small sofa than a rampant sex symbol.
Since coming back from Hollywood -- "quality sacrificed for money" -- where he made Golden Child with Eddie Murphy, he has made three European films. Good Morning Babylon was first out, released last month, and he has also just finished White Mischief for Michael Apted, and the bizarre but brilliant Steven Poliakoff's first venture into feature film directing, Hidden City.
"All totally different roles," he says. "I am more versatile than most people think. I'm intelligent, but not an intellectual, I have a great deal of common sense and work mostly on instinct. I think I'm a good actor, but I could always be better."
He does not see 40 as a fearful turning point, but just another step in his life-path. "I don't feel 40," he muses, "but I don't know how 40 should feel and I still think of myself as a young man. I've been married for 18 years and have two children but it is very difficult to say what kind of man I really am.
"I try to be courageous, I'm a perfectionist and I don't see any point in being anything other. I try to be a good father and husband and hope that I am. I've known my wife for 22 years and she seems to think so. At least I have stamina!
"When Jewel in the Crown broke for me, a number of people came out of the woodwork whom I hadn't seen for years. A friend said, 'Charles, success is relative -- the more success you have the more relatives you got!'
"I want to be successful in this business without being too selfish, but that is very difficult. Acting is a very selfish profession."
So has success, Hollywood, and the gold dust from Golden Child rubbed off on this British jewel?
"Not at all. I don't have a lavish lifestyle. All I have to show for it is a whopping great mortgage [he lives in North London with his wife and his sons -- Mez's note: the article says 'sons', but of course it's son and daughter]. We've moved half a mile up the road to a house that has two more bedrooms and a bigger garden. I've got a jeep and a rather smart little black number (no, not a Porsche) that I'm thinking of changing because people have started calling me a Yuppie."
A country boy, raised on the edge of Dartmoor, Dance did not consider acting until he was 19. He went to art school first and studied to be a graphic designer.
Amateur dramatics at college gave him more satisfaction than "coming up with a design for North Sea Gas", despite the fact that for years a stammer, linked to dyslexia, made it difficult for him to read and speak out loud.
"There seemed to be no physical reason for my stammer. I think it was just my adolescent changes manifesting, like some people have acne. I was introverted as a child, quite shy.
"I didn't do anything consciously to cure it, but it just started to go. I suddenly found there were words I could say that for years I had avoided and I found my confidence started to come back."
He left Leicester Art School when he was 20 and went in search of two retired actors he knew who lived in Devon near his mother and had successfully coached some students into RADA.
"I never went to drama school," he says. "Those extraordinary men taught me everything I've got. We went through all the classics."
He was a labourer -- "for £2 a day, just to stay alive" -- which might account for his impressive physique -- and paid his tutors with Guinness and pints of bitter. When he became ill, he summoned the travelling library and ordered the complete works of Shaw, Shakespeare and Chekov.
"It enriched my life. I learned a hell of a lot from that time."
He learned enough, in fact, to join the Royal Shakespeare Company for five years, where he played most of the classics, to work at the National and become one of television's most sought after, albeit unlikely, heroes.
He moved his family with him when he went to Hollywood, but none of them really enjoyed the experience. Of Golden Child he says: "That awful Eddie Murphy film! If you have a weekend filled with boredom then go see it. I don't advise it otherwise."
The first of his European offerings, Good Morning Babylon, is a whimsical Italian production, lyrically shot in Tuscany by the Taviani Brothers. Dance plays D W Griffiths of the silent movie era, in an "over-the-top performance for a larger-than-life character", complete with fedora and cigar.
Despite the luxurious lifestyle offered to successful English actors, when they visit the City of Angels, it is the less commercial attitude to film-making that draws Dance to Europe. "Unless I'm totally and utterly skint I'd rather make films here," he says firmly. "As long as I've got enough money to pay the bills, what I'm getting paid is relatively unimportant compared with the quality of life and work."
White Mischief will cause quite a stir when it comes out. Big budget for an English film, it was shot on location in Africa and based on a true-life story. It also has what Dance calls a "thumping great cast", including Geraldine Chaplin, John Hurt, Trevor Howard and Greta Scacchi.
Dance is a strongly built athletic man, without those actorish mannerisms that can shrink even the tallest and broadest of men to a whimp. At heart a country lad, he was born in Worcestershire, grew up in Devon, and loves the West Country Moors. He looks as though he should be running in the park -- "I try to run a bit every day which bores the tears off me."
"The only way I abuse my body is by smoking, which I started doing as a choirboy at the age of 11. So I try to treat it well in every other respect, and if I'm feeling out of shape I'll pump iron.
"I find the fact that I've been labeled things like 'the thinking woman's crumpet' mildly amusing and flattering, but I don't believe it. I don't go around looking for confirmation! If you are doing something reasonably well, then you always have other people's expectations to live up to as well as your own.
"My goal is to keep on working as long as John Gielgud. I worked with him when he was 81 and he's still going strong, still greatly in demand. That's really what I want for myself in the future."
Not so much a crumpet, more a speckled knight.
|