Charles Dance looms high in many people's estimation. 'Six foot four,' says his agent, Caroline Dawson, '...and quite devastating.'
Actually, he is six foot three, lean, with eyes that most newspapers agree are 'ocean green' ('naughty blue' said The Guardian wildly) and an effortless English insouciance that does to cultured women what bravado and brawn do not.
This easy magnetism was common knowledge for years among the clientele of the El Sombrero Cafe in Plymouth, where the youthful Dance's natty herring-bone suit left a powerful impression. Not least on his future wife Joanna, an artist, who had about 12 years of relative obscurity to look forward to during which she could enjoy having Dance to herself.
She visited his unofficial drama academy, an old printers' shop at the back of the Royal Oak, Bidbury, Devon, where Dance spent two gruelling years being put through his paces by two reclusive old theatrical gents, called Leonard and Martin, in exchange for two pints of mild beer per lesson. It is the only training he's ever had.
Joanna met Leonard and bought him a pint of mild. 'I don't know whether it was because of that,' she recalls, 'but he touched my hand and said, "You're a lot better than the others, pretty." Now it's getting difficult going anywhere with Charlie. We get stared at a lot, though people don't generally come up unless he's by himself.'
Dance's dutiful morning jog round Hampstead Heath is an obstacle course. If the boredom doesn't get him, female autograph hunters do.
The world found out about Dance when, as Sergeant Guy Perron, he sauntered into Jewel in the Crown and charmed the pants off the colonel's daughter. There was one balmy scene on the veranda of some Indian palace in which he invited Geraldine James, by subtle gentlemanly means, to make love to him, that caused women to exchange little smiles of recognition next day. Don't think it wasn't noticed.
When pressed. Dance recognises his romantic authority, but he resists the sex symbol tag.
'It's flattering, of course, as long as I don't have to live up to it. If you shatter people's expectations they get disappointed. One of the parts I want to play is a character who is homosexual and a social outcast, and where there's also an element of child molestation. That won't do my image of the thinking woman's crumpet any good at all.'
Nevertheless he identifies strongly with Perron, particularly his tendency to be the observer, his cynicism about authority, his sense of humour and his romanticism. 'The eyes are green, by the way,' says Dance with a smile, '...green and red.'
Since Jewel in the Crown, Dance has proved himself a man of more than one part - most notably as the husband of Meryl Streep in Plenty - and has attracted enough attention in America to turn down several big buck offers, including two invitations to be screen-tested as the new James Bond. That took willpower. 'But it's not the way I want my career to go. It would kill me stone dead.'
The most commercial role he has taken was as a high camp devil dressed in black leather and a silk cravat in Eddie Murphy's latest film Golden Child. 'Enormous fun,' says Dance. He also appears in a TV mini-series based on Shirley MacLaine's autobiography, Out on a Limb, playing her anonymous Labour politician lover. ('I've no idea who it is, though I put it about that I modelled it on Eric Heffer!') Then there is the forthcoming British thriller The Hidden City, and the plum part in Vittorio and Paolo Taviani's homage to movie-making, Good Morning Babylon, in which he plays legendary film director D W Griffith: 'I would have swopped 16 years as an actor for the six weeks I did on that.' All these parts were chosen carefully for the quality of their content. He doesn't particularly care about form.
'I'm a reasonably confident actor, but I have an element of hunger. I don't allow myself to be pleased,' he admits. 'I would be more confident if there was more money to make films in this country. Hidden City was bloody tough. It's the first British film I've done, and it was low budget, underscheduled and shot in uncomfortable situations: a huge rubbish tip at Bray, the central incinerator at Edmonton, the tunnels under Tottenham Court Road in which 20,000 American troops were billeted in the war.
'In America, film-making is commerce. In Europe, artistic merit is more important than financial success. In this country we're stuck in the middle, wanting to emulate Europe but having to depend on America for finance.'
Film-making fascinates him. 'I'd be interested in getting into production. I have one or two projects, but although I can decline to do something if it pushes me in a direction I don't want to go, I don't yet have the clout to say I want to do this, or for someone to say: "You do? Fantastic - here's X million pounds! Please go ahead and do it".'
At 40, success is still a novelty for Dance. He, Joanna and their children Rebecca, six, and Oliver, 12, have been living on fringe theatre wages in cramped conditions for long enough. They laugh as they remember a highlight of early married life: a Chinese meal on the Finchley Road, bought by a friend when Dance returned from his first theatre tour as an assistant stage manager. It was considered the height of luxury.
In America, he now gets in a week what it took his mother, a Lyons Corner House assistant manager, years to earn. Yet it still bemuses him when he goes to LA and is put up in a Bel Air apartment complete with swimming pool and convertible Mustang, and it tickles him to make his black BMW wink its lights at his recently acquired Victorian house in North London.
The house is full of expensive builders and Dance has taken his first couple of months off in a year and a half to help do it up. Removed triumphantly to a skip outside is the vulgar fibreglass squat bath which used to fidget dangerously when the Dances sat in it. Meanwhile, he is meticulously erasing every trace of the last owner from his home, re-instating the Victoriana and revealing an obsessive perfectionism in his nature.
'The previous owner was something in advertising,' Dance says. 'That's to do with form and not content. He was very rich, but just look at this...' Dance demonstrates how the facing on the cupboard is taped on. 'The house is full of imitation everything.'
Joanna laughs. The Dances laugh a lot. They are enjoying these rare days together, despite the mess. They cook meals in an upstairs kitchen that doubles as Oliver's bedroom when he is home from boarding school. They are scouring junk shops - Joanna has just picked up the Mona Lisa for £8 - and going to the cinema together.
'The last holiday we had was four years ago, after I finished Jewel in the Crown,' says Dance. 'Two weeks in Corfu - and that was the first holiday since we were married 13 years before.'
Joanna sometimes goes on location with him. 'But it's not quite the same,' she says. 'I went to Hawaii and became very chummy with Shirley MacLaine. I usually get on very well with his co-stars.'
'Jo and the kids came on to LA,' says Dance, 'then left me just before Christmas. That was awful. It was a parting to remember, the first Christmas apart in 16 years.' He had actors Judy Parfitt and Barrie Ingham to sit by the pool with him, listening to the background tinkle of electronic carols. Joanna was getting desperate at home.
'I threw a New Year's Eve party to keep us going,' she remembers. 'Then Charlie phoned and Oliver and I just sobbed on the phone and we got cut off. He phoned back, and I asked everyone to leave. I wouldn't have cared if we'd just had a boiled egg and we'd been in Borneo, as long as we'd all been together.'
Golden Child is set to go on general release on January 23.
