On his last day in India, having just shed Guy Perron, his Jewel in the Crown persona, Charles Dance succumbed to eastern mysticism in the shape of a Sikh fortune teller. For a few rupees the man told him accurately such details as his mother’s name (Eleanor), his wife’s name (Joanna), how many children he had (two), and his date of birth (1946). Dance did not have, alas, enough money to find out about his life to come.

A pity: he might well have had some warning this his performance, bush hat, bare chest, ironic humour and all was going to propel him into the vacant, if dubious, role of the viewing, if not always thinking, woman’s crumpet. “I’m here to interview Guy Perron,” announced an Australian reporter shamelessly, last week. “Howd sit feel to be a sex symbol?”

Dance hasn’t got over the “Who, me?” stage enough to seem pleased, but he managed puzzlement and self-mockery. And he’s wary. “This is all very new ground for me. I mean this is the 12th interview I’ve done in two weeks...the Sun, Woman’s Own Australia, Canada...and Kitchen Choice. Kitchen Choice.”

With the name of a cavalier and the looks of a noble Roman crossed with an SAS major, he perhaps should not have been so taken aback. But he is. “Someone described me as handsome. Handsome. I just hadn’t thought of myself as handsome.” His eyes, he claims, are usually bloodshot, and the shadows under them have been there for years (much tugging at lower lids to make the point). When he looks in the mirror, handsome is just not the word that comes into his mind. More like aaarrrghh.

He certainly had not approached the part of Perron, the detached and quiet Englishman who observes the end of the Raj, in a matinee-idol spirit. True he does more washing thus more torso-revealing than anyone else, is lankily tall and good looking, and has one of the only two proper love scenes (albeit fully clothed) in the whole 14 episodes. He conceived Perron very much in terms of his detachment, as the Paul Scott character, in fact.

I tried to explain to him that women -- mums, maidens and memsahibs manquees -- up and down the country were perhaps simply delighted to be offered a hero who was neither a wimp nor a brute. There are far too many pretty men set up in the mould in which some other man thinks romantic or attractive men should be cast. Jeremy Irons for example, who is now wimp for all seasons and seems (to me) so very vapid...Dance jumped. Funny, “vapid” was just the word his wife had used to describe Jeremy Irons...

He has, he says, turned down more trash in the past few weeks than he knew existed. A Woman of Substance -- anything of less substance you can’t imagine...and Mistral’s Daughter. On the other hand, there have been brutish scripts in which people beat each other to pulp and drive cars very fast for no apparent reason. They usually, he notes, start with a masked figure on a motor-bike roaring into the camera leaving some often figure bleeding to death in a garage. He once did a take-the-money-and-run job -- a Bond film -- and hated it.

While he was on tour with the RSC in Paris he took over Coriolanus to great critical praise. “That was wonderful...better than the best orgasm I’ve ever had. I was right in the middle of that part...” But a modern hero? He liked playing Siegfried Sassoon in The Fatal Spring, “he had his tongue placed firmly in his cheek”, he was also the thinking scriptwriter’s investigative journalist in John Pilger’s play about Saigon. He admires Alan Bennett and Tom Stoppard. And he admits gentle chagrin at the news that Spielberg may cast the inevitable Irons as Schindler in Schindler’s Ark. In the end he just wants to do his best in the best projects going. It is, he knows, a buyer’s market, and Charles Dance is a product he has to sell.

Dance went to what he describes as a technical grammar school where they taught English language, but not literature, so he didn’t read any books until he was 20. He got into acting with a college group when studying to be a graphic designer, then ran through the motley mill of theatrical experience: Old Tyme Music Hall, provincial rep, the lot. He learned technique from an old trouper who gave him Mark Antony to read. “O pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth...” “Come on, cry boy, cry...” (And Dance cried). He did pantomine, the Sleeping Beauty -- two shows a day for 12 weeks; that’s experience. What did he play? “The Prince, my dear...men were playing princes long before girls.”

He got into “thinking” theatre via Chichester, Greenwich and, most notably, the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Jewel has been a turning point. Just being in India for four months was an extraordinary experience. Everyone in the cast used it differently: Eric Porter for instance spent a lot of time in the hotel playing Scrabble and getting to know the waiters and their families. Dance walked and walked and took photographs and absorbed: “I was a walking sponge.” He tried keeping a diary but gave up because he couldn’t get away from the clichés. He is obviously equally determined to dodge them in the next stage of his career.

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