From an interview with actor Giles Matthey

http://aboutactorcharlesdance.blogspot.fr/

Born an Aussie, Matthey moved to London where he became exposed to the world of acting at a young age. In the belly of the theatre beast, he became captivated by the skill of actor Charles Dance in Shadowlands. “I was watching his every move and realised that I felt like I was not watching a play, it felt like these events were actually unfolding in front of me,” he tells us. “I thought if I could do that, if I worked hard enough, if I had the talent, I would love to be a professional actor.”

http://www.schonmagazine.com/interview-giles-matthey/

Danny Wallace: Shopping near Charles Dance

I am nearly finished shopping at my local supermarket when I spot a tall, familiar-looking man striding about in the vegetable aisle, pausing to glance at an aubergine.

“That’s Charles Dance!” I think. “The actor famous for playing royals, assertive bureaucrats and villains in such hits as Game Of Thrones!”

I don’t word it quite like that in my head, but you get the gist.

“What’s he buying?” I wonder.

Well, he’s not buying that aubergine, for a start. He hasn’t got a trolley, just a basket, so it appears this is a targeted shop. He will not be tempted by impulse aubergines. Charles Dance knows why he’s here, and he intends to nail it.

I’ve seen lots of celebrities in shops. I saw Jason Donovan in a Tesco Metro in Manchester. He was wearing tracksuit bottoms and a hat that claimed he’d been to Mount Kilimanjaro. I felt sad for him. But then he bought champagne, which made his Mount Kilimanjaro boast more feasible, so I was happy again. I saw Barbara Windsor open a Somerfield in Loughborough in the late Eighties. And I also used to live on the same road as Su Pollard from Hi-de-Hi!, and would often see her in the newsagents on a Sunday, saying mad things and laughing.

But Charles Dance is a whole other level.

“Well, it’s lovely to know Charles Dance is doing a shop,” I think, as a couple of other people spot him and turn, “but I must leave him be. His purchases are none of my beeswax! A Hollywood icon such as Charles Dance must be allowed a few moments’ precious privacy.”

But I’m still looking at him as I think that, and he spots me looking at him, and I immediately stare at my trolley and start pushing it away.

“Now he knows I’ve spotted him,” I think, embarrassed. “He’s going to think I’m a Charles Dance obsessive. Or he’ll be paranoid I’m going to ring Heat magazine and say I’ve spotted Charles Dance near an aubergine, if people still scrape gratification from doing that.”

I resolve to attend to my own business, and dart down another aisle, but this is all just beans and tinned corn and stuff, so I turn my trolley around and head back.

As I do, I get in Charles Dance’s way; the opposite of what I want.

“Sorry,” I mumble, but Charles Dance, elegant as a gazelle and as statesmanlike as some kind of statesman, merely sidesteps me neatly and silently with cold eyes.

“He could’ve said ‘sorry’ too,” I think, as he sidles away. “Well, I hope he likes beans and tinned corn, because that’s all he’s going to find down here, the chump.”

I walk in the opposite direction and turn into a new aisle.

Halfway down, I see Charles Dance coming straight towards me again. Go away, Charles Dance! He’s moving with determination. More people stare at him. I resolve not to look in his direction again.

But he’s carrying something. I have to look. It’s a lemon tart. Charles Dance buys lemon tarts. That’s interesting.

Then I look away, all casual, but I know he’s seen me clock his lemon tart. Why did I look?! I need to be careful, I decide, as he passes. He’s seen me see him, then seen me see him twice after that. If he sees me see him again, he’s going to assume I’m engineering all this seeing him somehow. He’ll think I want to not just see him, but talk to him.

If I turn into the next aisle, chances are Charles Dance will be there – how many times have we all said that? – so I leave two or three aisles, and then hit a right.

Charles Dance is there.

I back away before he sees me, and go back one aisle. Charles Dance will never find me here.

Within a minute, I’m stood next to Charles Dance as he selects a baguette, penned in by two other shoppers. Dance picks a white one – I’m forced to go granary, so I seem capable of independent thought. I can’t help but notice he’s now carrying a packet of king prawns.

“What a weird shopping list,” I think. “A lemon tart, a baguette and some king prawns. Maybe his wife’s chucked him out.”

But then I realise I am being like those stories you read in the Daily Mail; noticing dull things nobody needs to notice, and speculating on what they mean on a wider level in the comments at the bottom. This must happen to Charles Dance and his type all the time. He probably reckons I’m a Mail journalist who thinks he’s stumbled on the story of his career. Hey, king prawns… didn’t Charles Dance play a king in Game Of Thrones? That would be useful when composing the headline.

I get away from Charles Dance, but he’s on my tail headed for the tills. At the end of the aisle, like the Red Arrows, we peel off in different directions. I do not look at him again, except once, just to make sure it was actually Charles Dance.

Dance has three items. He’s out of there fast. A consummate pro.

In the car park, as I trundle my trolley outside, a car brakes hard to let me cross.

It’s Charles Dance.

I make a silly face and give him two thumbs up. He does the same.

Now hopefully we can both just get on with our lives.

http://www.shortlist.com/news/danny-wallace-is-a-man?

Yip

Charles by Andrew Maccoll

great size here :

http://www.theloop.com.au/andrewmaccoll/portfolio/charles-dance/257154

 

http://aboutactorcharlesdance.blogspot.fr/

http://aboutactorcharlesdance.blogspot.fr/

Telegraph and Radiotimes interviews

Charles Dance: 'a stammer in my adolescence ruined my confidence'

The photo above would have been taken around the time my father died, when I was four. I have just one memory of him: a bald man in a raincoat.
When I was a boy, I had no clear idea what I wanted to be. If my childhood self could see me now, he’d be very surprised I ended up as a successful actor.
In my teens, for some reason, I didn’t think I’d live beyond 21. I was obsessed that I’d get some terrible disease and be dead by that age.
I thought I might go into the Navy. After my father died, my mother married the man who had been the lodger. He was a civil servant working for the Admiralty. As a result, we moved to Plymouth, where my mother ran a bed and breakfast for commercial travellers.
My brother, Michael, who is 10 years older, became a difficult adolescent, though no more so than any other 16-year-old. He – poor bugger – was frogmarched off to the Navy, with the suggestion it would make a man of him. It was bloody cruel.
He was my boyhood hero and I worshipped him. He’d come home on leave from far-flung places with his kit bag slung over his shoulder, and there would be the smell of this rough, blue serge uniform.
I think my mother and stepfather realised it had been a mistake to send him off to the Navy, and they wanted more opportunity for me than that.
But I’m not sure I thought of acting as a career choice. I was in the HMS Drake choir and was was not a bad singer, and at primary school I had a lot of fun acting. I liked showing off. I got the impression that I was quite good at it, but I can remember my mother saying: “Stop showing off.” That’s a terrible thing to say to a child.
I developed a stammer in my adolescence that ruined my confidence and made me very unhappy. I used to make up the most complex sentences to get around it, which made chatting to girls very difficult. I’m not sure what brought it on, but my mother had a nervous breakdown when I was eight or nine; she was taken away and put in a padded cell.
The stammer didn’t go until I was 18, at art college in Leicester. Every now and then – usually on stage when a night is not going well and you hope for a bomb scare so you can go home – I can feel myself about to stammer. I have to breathe steadily.
If I could go back to that young boy in Plymouth, I’d say: “Show off as much as you like.”

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/thinking-man/charles-dance-a-stammer-in-my-adolescence-ruined-my-confidence/

Charles Dance on class, taking on bad roles - and why he's sick of taking selfies

Saturday 16 January 2016

Charles Dance has been such an intense, often glowering presence on our screens for so many years, in films like White Mischief and television classics like The Jewel in the Crown and Bleak House, that you would think the man himself is a bit of a grouch in person. But not at all. The 69-year-old actor is as sweet as a pussycat.

A few years ago fellow Londoner and journalist Giles Coren took to mocking Dance in print for looking miserable whenever he spotted his near neighbour in Kentish Town. But Dance’s daughter Rebecca was so outraged she wrote to Coren telling him her dad was “not grumpy”, which (Dance also reveals) in turn facilitated a jolly meeting between the two men. And his daughter is right – he is sweetness and light. Also Dance (who laughs at the story) is not, despite appearances, a posho either. In fact, he characterises his early life as working class.

“I don’t come from a wealthy family. I pretend to be aristocratic because of the way my face is put together, but there is nothing aristocratic about me at all. My mother [a former parlour maid called Nell] came from the East End of London. My father [an engineer, Walter Dance] died when I was four, then she married again to a man who became my stepfather [Edward, Nell’s lodger]. I have not inherited any money. I have not benefited from a will or a trust fund. I do a job that is quite well paid... and I am very lucky in that regard. And I value every penny that I earn.”

In fact when he appeared as Lord Stockbridge in Gosford Park, he told director Robert Altman that he should really be downstairs with the servants. The great auteur replied: “Not with that face, Charles.”

Despite this, Dance has no gripes about the preponderance of posh younger British actors making successes of themselves. But he does admit that the current crop of working-class actors is probably not getting the chances he did when he started out, largely because of the decline in repertory theatre.

“It seems to me there are fewer opportunities now for people who come through the state education system. I didn’t go to a public school but I know from people who did that there is a great drama department at Eton... and they have such charm and confidence. I think of people like [War and Peace star] James Norton [who went to Ampleforth College], he with the cheekbones. There are more opportunities than in the state system, if there is talent there to be developed at that stage. And Old Etonians have enormous charm, Dominic West, Eddie Redmayne... they’re all delightful guys.”

 

Partly as a consequence of occasional money worries, he says, he works constantly (he hasn’t really rested in the last three years). And this can present problems. “I’m not as choosy as I perhaps should be, but I don’t like not working. I’m lucky enough to do a job that I love doing. And even if the work is not of great artistic merit I will try to find a way to give it some, if it hasn’t got it.”

 

Does he feel he takes on things that aren’t as good as they could be? “Yeah. I am not going to be specific about it. But there are one or two things, probably more, that I have done when I’ve thought, ‘Mmmm, I shouldn’t do that.’”

He has also not forgotten the experience “many years ago” when, living with his ex-wife Jo [Haythorn] and their two children, when he deliberately took some pre-planned time off but found that the work dried up.

“We were living in Somerset and I found that I didn’t get any offers for a winter, spring, summer and autumn – a whole year. It scared me. The phone didn’t ring. Horrible.

“I get a lot of fulfilment [from acting]. If I’m not working I feel as if I’m waiting to work, which is a rather sad admission really. And in between acting jobs if I’m not trying to write I’m trying to keep myself fit and healthy because [points to his body] this is all actors have. It also depends on how much money there is in the bank. I’ve not had an overdraft in a while but there was a time when I had a frightening overdraft.”

Fortunately his latest acting project is far from bad. Deadline Gallipoli (above) is a new two-part World War One drama based on real events about three journalists’ struggles to tell the true story of the horrifically botched campaign in Turkey in 1915.

There is Joel Jackson’s prim Aussie Charles Bean, Hugh Dancy’s privately dissolute but professionally quite principled and talented aristocrat Ellis Ashmead Bartlett and Sam Worthington’s grizzled Antipodean Philip Schuler. Dance plays the campaign commander General Hamilton.

Hamilton is not the typical buffoonish donkey leading heroic lions to slaughter, and Dance fleshes him out expertly with warmth, intelligence and understanding.

But let’s not get carried away. Dance is perhaps not always sweet. His work on Game of Thrones as the ruthless Tywin Lannister (who met a grisly fate on the toilet in Series 4) has made him even more recognisable in the street. And this has meant more requests for selfies, which he regards as a modern scourge.

“I am bothered by it sometimes. ‘Can I have a photograph?’ It depends on what kind of mood you’re in and people’s reactions... as if it’s obligatory. ‘Can I have a photograph?’ No!”

There are limits after all.

http://www.radiotimes.com/news/2016-01-16/charles-dance 

 

Co-star Charles Dance – who plays the patriarch Mr Bennet in the movie – says that Smith’s turn as the pompous cleric Mr Collins will have audiences rolling in the aisles.

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“Even the most ardent devotees of Jane Austen I don’t think will be offended,” says Dance of the film which is based on the cult parody novel by Seth Grahame-Smith.

“It’s very funny. Gorgeous people like Lily James and Lena Headey from Game of Thrones are in it and Matt Smith who is hysterical, actually, as Mr Collins. He’s so funny, Matt.”

http://www.radiotimes.com/news/2016-01-12/matt-smith-is-hysterical-in-pride-and-prejudice

Charles on Audioboom

https://audioboom.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=charles+dance

 

Charles about state-educated actors and opportunities....and Ghostbusters

Tuesday 12 January 2016

Opportunities for state school-educated actors have shrunk in comparison with their public school counterparts, according to Game of Thrones star Charles Dance.

Dance, who comes from a working class background, told the Radio Times that a decline in repertory theatre was partly to blame for a reduction in opportunities for state-educated actors since he started his career in the mid-70s.

“There are fewer opportunities now for people who come through the state education system,” Dance said. “I didn’t go to a public school but I know from people who did that there is a great drama department at Eton … and they have such charm and confidence.”

“There are more opportunities than in the state system, if there is talent there to be developed at that stage. And Old Etonians have enormous charm, Dominic West, Eddie Redmayne … they’re all delightful guys.”

Dance’s comments echo those of other actors from his generation, including Judi Dench and Julie Walters, who have in recent years lamented the lack of opportunities for actors from poorer backgrounds. Last year, then shadow culture secretary Chris Bryant got into a row with singer James Blunt over what he said was the over-representation of privately educated people in the arts in the UK.

A House of Commons report from 2014 found that 44% of those working in TV, film and music were privately educated, compared with about 7% of the population overall.

Dance’s first big on screen role was as Sgt Guy Perron in ITV’s 1984 colonial epic The Jewel in the Crown. Prior to that he was part of the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Dance, who has played numerous aristocratic roles including Lord Stockbridge in Roger Altman’s Gosford Park and Tywin Lannister in Game of Thrones, attributed his regular casting in upper-class roles to the “way my face is put together”.

He appeared in the BBC’s adaptation of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None over Christmas, and plays world war one general Sir Ian Hamilton in Deadline Gallipoli, which follows war correspondents covering the ill-fated attack in Turkey and airs on UKTV from Saturday.

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/jan/12/charles-dance-game-of-thrones

 

Game Of Thrones star Charles Dance laments lack of opportunities for working class actors
Charles Dance opened up about his working class background as he lamented the lack of opportunities for state-educated actors.

The 69-year-old distanced himself from co-stars such as Ampleforth-educated War And Peace star James Norton and Old Etonian Dominic West as he admitted his upbringing taught him to “value every penny that I earn”.

He told Radio Times: “It seems to me there are fewer opportunities now for people who come through the state education system. I didn’t go to a public school but I know from people who did that there is a great drama department at Eton…

“There are more opportunities than in the state system, if there is talent there to be developed at that stage.”

Charles might give the impression of high-class breeding but he claims the reality is opposite.

He grew up with his mother, Nell, a former parlour maid and father Walter, an engineer, in Redditch, before the family moved to Plymouth after his father’s death and his mother married her lodger, Edward

“I don’t come from a wealthy family. I pretend to be aristocratic because of the way my face is put together, but there is nothing aristocratic about me at all.

“I do a job that is quite well paid and I am very lucky in that regard. And I value every penny that I earn,” he said.

Charles’s fear of work drying up has led to taking roles he regrets, not just in retrospect, but even at the time of filming.

“I’m not as choosy as I perhaps should be, but I don’t like not working.”

Asked if he takes on roles that aren’t as good as they could be, he replied, “Yeah…there are one or two things, probably more, that I have done when I’ve thought, ‘Mmmm, I shouldn’t do that.’”

Despite introducing himself to a new generation of audiences through his role as Tywin Lannister on Game Of Thrones, the veteran actor admitted he does get bothered by presumptuous fans asking for a selfie in the street. He next stars in Deadline Gallipoli, a new First World War mini-series about three journalists reporting on the events of the front line.

http://www.eveningtimes.co.uk/entertainment/14197573.Game_Of_Thrones_star_Charles_Dance

 

 Charles Dance reveals détails of his Ghostbusters character and he's not a vilain

Game of Thrones star Charles Dance has confirmed that he will be appearing in the Ghostbuster reboot later this summer – but not as an out-and-out baddie as has been speculated.

The actor, whose Thrones character Twyin Lannister died following an unfortunate encounter on the lavatory with his son Tyrion (Peter Dinklage), told RadioTimes.com that he will be appearing in the movie, which had been rumoured but not officially confirmed.

"I’m a kind of straight man to a bunch of very funny ladies," he said of his role in the female-dominated film, which stars Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig, Kate McKinnon and Leslie Jones as a new generation of Ghostbusters.

Asked if he is playing a goodie or a baddie, Dance added: "He’s neither really. He’s not villainous but he just doesn’t understand and appreciate the whole Ghostbusting thing. He is English as well."

The film is directed by Paul Feig with the final cut expected to feature cameos by stars from the original 1984 movie, including Bill Murray.

http://www.radiotimes.com/news/2016-01-11/charles-dance

remember :
and Charles in the cast of Ghostbusters : ???

"Inverse has learned that Charles Dance, Tywin Lannister himself, will appear in an unknown role in director Paul Feig’s upcoming Ghostbusters reboot.

Feig’s representatives declined to comment on the casting news, but representatives at the film’s studio, Sony, confirmed to Inverse that Dance does in fact have a role in the new movie. They declined to elaborate any further."
http://aboutactorcharlesdance.blogspot.fr/2015/12/and-then-there-were-none-trailer.html 

UK Promo interview for Deadline Galipoli

The towering figure of Charles Dance is not easy to imagine skipping across the boards as Prince Charming in Sleeping Beauty as he once did at the Theatre Royal, Windsor. Whether playing fictional roles such as the ruthless overlord Tywin Lannister in Game of Thrones or historical parts such as the icy British Commander Alastair Denniston in the Oscar-winning The Imitation Game, he is invariably cast as cruel, intimidating characters with an abundance of power but an absence of feeling

Christmas audiences enjoyed some classic Dance in the BBC’s stylish Agatha Christie drama And Then There Were None, where he played Justice Lawrence Wargrave, a remorseless hanging judge. And next weekend, over three hours on UKTV’s Drama channel, Dance will play another patrician figure, Sir Ian Hamilton, the British First World War general who oversaw the calamitous Gallipoli landings.

"I’d like to play fewer villains," Dance exclaims from an armchair in the suite of a London hotel when asked about his acting aspirations. "I used to be a romantic leading man, years ago."

As well as one Britain’s most distinguished actors, he is also one of the most hard-working. But for all his many credits in film and television, Dance is at a loss to say when he last had such a part. "Oh! Christ! It feels as if it was about 1986 … I’m a bit long in the tooth for that now."

At 69, he no longer receives the breathless coverage accorded to his breakthrough performance as the dashing Sergeant Guy Perron in ITV’s 1984 colonial drama The Jewel in the Crown, based on Paul Scott’s The Raj Quartet. But he is not too old for romance.

He expects his next project to be as a director, having taken an option on the film rights to Hilary Boyd’s novel Thursdays in the Park. Filming could start as early as May on this story of an older man and woman who find love when they meet on their weekly playground visits with their respective grandchildren. Dance himself has two grown children, a young daughter, and is a grandfather himself.

There are also some acting roles "in the offing" for Dance which will remind audiences that he is capable of more than on-screen malevolence. He says the parts are "not villainous", but admits his past successes have influenced the roles he tends to be offered. "In this business you are what you are seen to be and if you are seen to be doing something reasonably well the chances are you will be asked to do it again."

He is immensely proud of HBO’s Game of Thrones, in which he appeared for four years, saying it has set a "benchmark" in television drama "with the production values especially, and the quality of the writing. It’s cinematic – there’s some breathtaking stuff."

The fantasy series has made him instantly recognisable to a younger audience – "It keeps me reasonably in the forefront of things" – but he is concerned about older television viewers.

"I think we have spent too long thinking about younger audiences and not enough thinking about older audiences, to be honest with you. What’s euphemistically known as the grey pound is a marketplace that it’s foolish to ignore.

"There’s enough stuff made for 18- to 25-year-olds but there’s a lot of us over the age of 50 who would like to see something that reflects our lives a little more often." Dance, looking youthful and casually elegant in a cord jacket, turtle neck and jeans, knocks on wood as he notes that "we are living longer, hopefully".

Game of Thrones is a show that’s typically watched on a mobile device but he has concerns about the rapidity of the digital revolution – and the "a little too fast" pace of modern life in general.

"We are capable of doing so much now, I think there are occasions where we haven’t really learnt the laws of cause and effect," he says. "There are times where we need to stop and think ‘Hang on a second, we can do this but what’s the likely outcome if we do?’ I just think we need to hold on a bit and consolidate. Just pause for a second."

It’s the same on set. He recently had cause to watch The Jewel in the Crown again and thought "My God, this is slow!" The series had 13 episodes, most 50 minutes long and the first double-length. Today’s shooting schedules are pre-planned by the minute, he says. "Television editing especially is ‘Cut, cut, cut, cut … fast, fast, fast fast!’"

Directors live in fear of their audience’s short attention span and the power of the remote.

"I think there’s a habit of underestimating the intelligence of the viewing public, certainly the older viewing public."

But for all this, Dance, a history buff as well as a great period actor, cites the fast-changing 20th century as the era which most engages him. He became "fascinated" by the First World War when playing Siegfried Sassoon in a 1980 BBC2 Playhouse, and he says the 1915 Gallipoli campaign, a catastrophe for Australia and New Zealand, is overshadowed in Britain by the carnage of the Western Front.

He hopes to increase "not sympathy [but] understanding" of the oft-maligned General Hamilton. "He’s the poor schmuck who carried the can for the whole débâcle. It was Winston Churchill’s idea to land troops on that coast."

Deadline Gallipoli sees Dance, a phone-hacking victim, feature in a celebration of the journalists who covered the campaign, including photographer Phillip Schuler (played by Australian star Sam Worthington, who is also the executive producer). The drama also portrays Rupert Murdoch’s war correspondent father, Keith, who became an Australian hero after Gallipoli.

Dance has played a succession of cold British colonial figures in his career, many of them epitomising the notion of a malign empire. It’s not a position that he holds personally. "We did a lot of things that I think benefited the ethnic population of wherever we colonised but we never seemed to leave properly," he says.

"I don’t think we behaved any better or worse than any other colonial power. Probably better than most I suspect."

In person, he is not authoritarian but professional and charming, just as he once was in panto. And, as he covets less villainous roles, he is happy that when people meet him they "seem quite pleasantly surprised that I’m not like Tywin Lannister".

‘Deadline Gallipoli’ airs at 9pm next weekend, 16 and 17 January, on UKTV Drama

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/features/charles-dance