Charles Dance — heading for the top

Press, 12 October 1988, Page 24

Charles Dance — heading for the top

By

DAVID LEWIN

Michael Caine, who has orchestrated his own career so successfully that today he is Britain’s only guaranteed film star with an international name and audience, has no doubts about which younger actor will take over his position. “Charles Dance is the one,” he told me. "Why? Because he wants it.” Mr Caine and Mr Dance are not friends and apart from one brief meeting at a Hollywood party, they are not in touch. When I told Charles Dance what Michael Caine had said about him, he was delighted because he understood the truth of the remark.

He has already costarred in films with Meryl Streep, Shirley Maclaine and Eddie Murphy. For television he has made two major movies: a romantic thriller, “Out of the Shadows,” and a 8.8. C. drama, “First Born.” Charles Dance is 40 and 190 cm (6ft 3in), with green eyes, lightish red hair and a long, lean face

with a cleft in the chin. He understands the importance of having the right sort of face for a camera.

"Making films, and earning a living out of it, is about people liking your face and your presence and saying — I hope — “that fellow Dance is interesting.”

That fellow Dance is interesting — and determined. He is married, with two young children, a girl and a boy, and the family lives in a Victorian house in Finchley together with a cat named Johnson and three frogs, nine goldfish and two newts who occupy a pond he dug for them.

He understands better than many other artists I know exactly what the business of acting and being a star is about. "If you want any kind of career, you have to accept the fact that you arewhat you are seen to be and if no-one sees you doing it, then you are nowhere.

“So what it is really all

about is putting bums on seats. When I am seen to be selling tickets, then I shall know I am a star.” Charles Dance became an actor in a fairly astonishing way: he didn’t go to

drama school, but was taught to act by two retired theatre men in the back of a country pub in Devon three nights a week. He had taken a diploma

in graphic art but the college theatre rekindled the usual childhood dream of becoming an actor. His mother and his stepfather (his father died when he was four and his mother married the lodger) lived near Plymouth and Charles Dance heard about Martin and Leonard who lived some 25km away and were prepared to coach young hopeful actors. “They lived in a cottage with five goats, two dogs and a cat and they made butter and cheese from the goat’s milk” he said. “The only payment they wanted was that one would try to be the best actor one could be. I’d buy Leonard a couple of pints of mild and occasionally dig the garden for Martin — I was working as a builder’s labourer, a plumber’s mate and a waiter at the time (he finally became a head waiter) — and it was like a private study course for one.” They were hard taskmasters and stinting in their praise. They always addressed Dance as “Boy.” “You don’t know how

bad you are, Boy,” they would tell him at the end of a session. “See you next week, just the same.” What they taught him was invaluable. “Never ask how you do something, but why you do it” he explained to me. "If you answer the why properly, the how will look after itself.” He met his wife, Joanna, while he was still training to be a graphic designer and she was taking an arts course. When he told her he wanted to be an actor, she supported the idea and started to do her own homework by reading and understanding scripts. Her father wasn’t wild about the idea of his son-in-law becoming an actor. “How long are you going to give it before doing something proper?” he asked. “Just you wait,” the new Mrs Dance told her father. “He is a bloody marvellous actor.” When "Jewel in the Crown” came out and his father-in-law started reading that Charles Dance was “the thinking woman’s crumpet” he said: “If anyone had told

me 10 years aago that Charles was going to be a sex symbol, I would have said it is absolutely ridiculous and beyond belief.” So what does the man Michael Caine confidently predicts will be Britain’s next world star want now? “I’d say I want to be in demand until I am Sir John Gielgud’s age,” he replied. “Have I got the ability, the talent, the expertise and the confidence to be in demand? I am attracted to work which pushes me and stretches me and to do that takes a little courage. “But to go through a door, not knowing what’s on the other side — maybe a 100 foot drop — that takes a lot of courage and I believe I’d think first. “I am going through a good spell at the moment, and of course, I hope it lasts. But I have been at it long enough not to get carried away and say, ‘Great, I’ve made it,’ because as far as I’m concerned, I have never made it.” Copyright DUO