Charles Dance says he enjoys playing bad guys - and Guy Spencer, the pro-Hitler propagandist in the second instalment of Foyle's War, ITV's glossy new Forties police drama, is certainly that.

The two-hour episode, The White Feather, sees Detective Chief Superintendent Christopher Foyle (Michael Kitchen) investigating The Friday Club - a pro-Hitler organisation led by the mesmerising Spencer.

Foyle links a suspicious death in the town with the club that meets privately each Friday, and he's appalled to discover that his right-hand man, Sgt Milner (played by Anthony Howell), is attending their meetings. 'The point,' says Foyle links a suspicious death in the town with the club that meets privately each Friday, and he's appalled to discover that his right-hand man, Sgt Milner (played by Anthony Howell), is attending their meetings. 'The point,' says Charles, 'is that Spencer is loathsome but powerfully charismatic.' It's a role Charles was born to play. He is famously tall (6ft 4in), blue-eyed and blond. 'An Aryan,' he says.

Though he's best known for upper-class roles like Guy Perron in The Jewel in the Crown, Charles comes from a working-class family. From the age of 14, his mother Nell worked as a parlour maid, before becoming a waitress at a Lyon's Corner House. His father Walter, an engineer, died from a perforated ulcer when he was only four. 'My mum was quite bitter and frustrated about a life spent in the service of others,' Charles recalls. 'I loved her, but she made me angry. We can either lie down and let life drive over us like a bus, or we can pick ourselves up and carry on. That, I think, was the essential difference between me and my mother.'

So he chose a career that would afford him 'the most fun'. 'Acting was an antidote to the drabness of my childhood,' says Charles, 56. Shortly before his mother's death in 1984, he was offered the role in The Jewel in the Crown, followed by films such as Plenty (1985) and White Mischief (1987). In fact, he's rarely out of work. He has two upcoming films - Black and White with Robert Carlyle, and Swimming Pool with Charlotte Rampling - plus he lets his hair down occasionally as 'the surprise guest' in the West End comedy The Play What I Wrote, a homage to the comedy duo Morecambe and Wise. He's been married since the age of 23 to Joanna, a sculptress, and says that life at his Somerset home is the perfect leveller after too much celebrity. Of his children - Oliver, 28, and Rebecca, 22 - he says: 'I'm fortunate to have two fantastic kids and I guess some of what they are is my responsibility. But I also believe that, in the end, we all shake off the influence of our parents and say, "This is me".'

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