‘My sister! If only I’d known, we could have met’
Charles Dance made a shock discovery while filming Who Do You Think You Are? He talks to Julia Llewellyn Smith
Charles Dance is one of our best-known actors – he made his name playing noble Guy Perron in ITV’S 1984 series The Jewel in the Crown, then became famous all over again among a new generation, playing baddy Tywin Lannister in HBO’S Game of Thrones. So it’s hardly surprising that in person, in a Soho office munching on a pain au chocolat – “I shouldn’t really be eating this, but every now and again” – he’s the personification of thespianism, his conversation peppered with mimicry and “darlings”, far more given to anecdotes than introspection.
Yet the jolly flamboyance still jolts, for – as Dance, 70, says when researching his family history for the latest series of the BBC’S Who Do You Think You Are? – he’s “cornered the market for austere, villainous characters”. He’s also long been the go-to man for frosty aristocrats in films such as White Mischief and Gosford Park.
“Gosford Park was very much a precursor of Downton Abbey, upstairsdownstairs, and I remember saying: ‘I should be downstairs, there’s nothing aristocratic about me at all.’” As WDYTYA? relates, his mother started work at 13 as a parlour maid and spent all her life in service.
Dance, who’s tall, lean and hawkish – elegantly besuited but with hippy bangles clanking on his wrist – knew very little about his engineer father, Walter, who died when Dance was four. Dance believed he was a divorcee who’d died in his fifties.
“My mother never talked about him – I don’t know why. I think she had a lot of skeletons rattling around her closet.”
In WDYTYA?, however, he discovers that Walter was 72 when Dance was born and a widower with two daughters – Dance’s two half-sisters, one of whom died in an accident, aged five, the other in South Africa in 1993, aged 94. “My half-sister! If I’d known, we could have met! I could have found out a lot more about my dad.” Still, the programme united him with her granddaughter Noneen, who lives in Pretoria and is keeper of the family archive. From Noneen, Dance learnt that Walter, from whom he inherited his “Roman nose”, was, “quite sporty”.
“Interesting because I’m not particularly intellectual,” Dance says. “I spent a lot of my time at school on the playing fields.” Noneen also gave him a gold medal that Walter had won for elocution. “My mother had told me that he used to do recitations, which were fashionable in the
‘If we retire there’s going to be no one left to play old, wrinkly people. We’ve got to keep on going’
Victorian period.”
Dance knows a thing or two about elocution, but admits that his original accent was an “awful mixture of nasal Birmingham” from his Midlands childhood and “yobbish Plymouth” from where the family moved after his mother married the lodger. It was ironed out of him by two “wonderful” retired actors, who, after he decided he wanted to pursue his childhood dream of going on stage, gave him drama lessons in the back room of a Devon pub. “I was at art school but, halfway through, I thought, ‘I don’t want to be designing house styles for British Telecom or book covers’.”
Dance did a stint in repertory, then joined the Royal Shakespeare Company before winning his part in The Jewel in the Crown. The series proved a phenomenon, the big break for several young actors, including Tim Pigott-smith – immortalised as villainous Ronnie Merrick – who died, unexpectedly, in April. “Bless him – that was a shock,” Dance says meditatively. “Tim was only a few months older than me and a very generous guy.”
Pigott-smith was preparing for a tour of Death of a Salesman. “The last thing he wanted to be doing was schlepping round the provinces for months, but he agreed to do it to work with his wife [actress Pamela Miles]. But then something happened in rehearsal and Pam broke a bone and had to be replaced, so the whole thing was very stressful and then, just like that, he went.”
After Jewel, Dance was asked to screen-test for the role of James Bond. “But my agent said, ‘Oh darling, it will ruin your career – you will be typecast’, and I rather stupidly took her advice.”
He doesn’t seem too bothered. “There is a right time for everything. At that time, I hadn’t done much [work], and I think I would have blown it. Rather like when I was at school, I was a late developer. For the kind of attention that part brings you, I think you need to have your head screwed on.”
He did, nevertheless, make it on to the credits – as “fourth villain from the left” – for the Bond film For Your Eyes Only, starring Roger Moore, who also recently died. “Roger was an absolute gentleman. One day, he said, ‘Come into my trailer, old chap’ – which he really didn’t have to do. He asked, ‘Do you want to be a star or a proper actor?’. I said, ‘Both, if I can’, and he said, ‘Well, if anybody can, you can, but there’s more luck than talent you know. In my case it’s 99 per cent luck and 1 per cent talent.’”
Dance’s favourite Bond is incumbent Daniel Craig, but his money for his successor is on Poldark’s Aidan Turner, with whom Dance starred in 2015’s BBC adaptation of And Then There Were None. “Funnily enough, I said to Aidan, ‘Have you had the call from [Bond producer] Barbara Broccoli yet?’ He said …” Dance effects a faultless Irish brogue … ‘Who’s Barbara Broccoli?’ I had to tell him!” Turner’s already a sex symbol, and Dance, who is divorced with two adult children and a five-year-old daughter from a subsequent relationship (now ended), has had his fair share of admirers too. “After Jewel they called me the thinking woman’s crumpet.”
He keeps in shape, swimming daily in the lido near his north London home. “But today there is a kind of obsession with actors buffing up – they’ve all got gym bodies. “You see someone in a period drama: they take their shirt off and have a six-pack. Yu think, ‘Son, what’s that about?’”
And, thanks to Game of Thrones, in which he starred in seasons two to four, he has a whole new fanbase.
“Thrones was my second break,” he says. “The production values are phenomenal – the battle scenes are like something out of Leni Riefenstahl – and, although it’s set in a strange, quasi-medieval period, people speak English. Never in the script did I see the word ‘gotten’, which makes the hairs stand up on the back of my neck.”
Work is still pouring in. He’s about to leave for the US to film Godzilla 3, has just wrapped the BBC drama The Woman in White and three films, including That Good Night, featuring the last screen performance of John Hurt, who died in January.
“Yes, there’ve been a lot of deaths recently,” Dance sighs. “John, Roger, Tim, Alan Rickman, Peter Sallis.” Do they make him reflect on his own mortality?
Dance bellows with laughter. “They make me think, ‘Right, let’s get the will done!’ Just keep on working, darling! If we retire, there’s no one left to play old, wrinkly people. We’ve got to keep on going.”