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.”
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.”
Charles Dance on class, taking on bad roles - and why he's sick of taking selfiesSaturday 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.
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.”
Quite a challenging childhood, although I suppose we all have them to some degree. Interesting his mum's name was Nell ... also the name of his current paramour and daughter Rose's mum.
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