Actor Charles Dance: manderlay

https://aboutactorcharlesdance.blogspot.com/

So they ingeniously grafted the ending of Jane Eyre (romantic master hideously injured in doomed rescue attempt, is redeemed by love of simple girl) on to Rebecca, where the unnamed heroine (or Thingy, as I always think of her) spends the rest of her life with Maxim living in hotels and watching cricket matches, in a vain attempt to forget the past. Thus arbitrarily Rochestered by his producers, Charles Dance thereafter sports a bad limp and a black glove. But that is not the worst of it: the tuxedo obviously hides much. "We were not unscathed, of course," Thingy reveals in voice-over. "There will never be children." Nasty.

A classic Dance Jewel In The Crown star lands lead in another gem: Rebecca

Seventeen years ago Charles Dance shot to stardom as Guy Perron in the 14-hour mini-series The Jewel In The Crown, one of TV's everlasting gems. Now he's back in his first mini-series since those heady days - a two-part, 3112 hour adaptation of the Daphne du Maurier novel Rebecca.

``People must think me crazy,'' he laughs over the phone from his New York city hotel suite. He's on a quick tour to the city to attend the official PBS screening along with his co-star, new actress Emilia Fox, who is waiting patiently for her turn to get on the phone.

These days Rebecca is about as opulent a TV production as one can hope to see. Dance is thankful he was in on the glory days of the mini-series but says as national networks fragment ``there just isn't the will to mount anything quite as epic as Jewel. The cost is tremendous and it takes a lot of courage - we had enormous sets built in Manchester studios and the cast was huge. And yet it is the one people seem to remember. I was just told of a Jewel party where they rented the videocassettes, had a houseful of guests and entertained everybody for a weekend.''

Toronto Star - Toronto, Ont.. : By Jim Bawden Apr 12, 1997

"There is a funny prejudice that is shared by a lot of people. When I played Maxim de Winter in Rebecca on television the Carlton producer Jonathan Powell tried to get me to dye my hair. He said we can't possibly have a ginger-haired Maxim de Winter. It's the kind of petty prejudice you find on the school playground but you don't expect to find it in these kind of people."

SERIOUSLY MINDING THE GAP.

APPEARING as the husband of 22-year-old actress Emilia Fox in the itv adaptation of Daphne Du Maurier's Rebecca proved embarrassing for ageing heartthrob Charles Dance: he kept being mistaken for her father.

Emilia, who played Darcy's sister Georgina in the BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, is the daughter of Day Of The Jackal star Edward Fox and actress Joanna David - who played the same role in the 1970s TV version.

Charles, 49, laments: `I was made painfully aware of Emilia's youth during rehearsals, as well as at the French restaurant across the road from the studios.

`One day, Emilia left early and the waitress came over and said: `Could you remind me what your daughter had to drink?' When I told her that she wasn't my daughter I got a very strange look.'

In the four-hour drama, to be screened over 5-6 January, Charles plays Maxim de Winter and Emilia his second wife. `All the way through filming I kept getting gentle reminders about the age gap.'

Publication : The Daily Mail London, Dec 25 1996

the sheet around his leg....

the scriptwriter Arthur Hopcreft seems to be following Du Maurier's initial idea for an ending. Originally leaning heavly on Bontë's novel and conventions of Victorian fiction, Du Maurier has Maxim physically disabled in a car accident and an epilogue reveals how his second wife looks after him...Maxim enters the burning house to try to save Mrs Danvers, echo of Rochester trying to save Bertha in Jane Eyre...the last scene is Maxim with a walking stick somewhere abroad, being aided by his wife, the implication being that Maxim's resulting injuries accounted for De Winter's childlessness....10 years later : memory of Manderlay sweeten their permanent exile in this foreign country, supposed to be Italy

Who have you learned the most from working with?

Charles Dance. I worked with him on my first big role in Rebecca and he taught me all the technicalities of film acting because I didn’t have a clue. Just the basics of hitting marks and how to act within the frame. He talked about acting from your heart rather your head. I’d just left university so was acting with my head, trying to get things in from the book, whereas acting’s really about being emotionally giving and receiving from your heart.( Sept 2012)
http://www.metro.co.uk/showbiz/interviews/911987-emilia-fox

I went to bed with my pal's daughter; Why Charles' face turned red on set.

Charles Dance admits that his latest TV sex scene might bring a blush to his cheeks. Because he slips between the sheets with the 22-year-old daughter of a couple of acting chums.

Charles - who became a hit in The Jewel In The Crown - stars in ITV's four-hour version of the Daphne Du Maurier thriller, Rebecca.

In tomorrow's opening episode, he and lovely newcomer Emilia Fox act out a tender nude scene. Young Emilia is the daughter of a couple of Charles' showbiz contemporaries, Eward Fox and Joanna David.

And he's a touch apprehensive about how Millie's famous dad might react to the bedroom sequence.

He said: "It's not hours of rumpy pumpy, no thrashing around, just a very tender, short bedroom sequence. But I don’t know what Edward and Joanna will make of me being in the sack with their daughter.

. "I suppose that when I meet them I shall blush and quietly apologise."But Edward knows that it is all just part of the job. There are usually 30 or 40 people on the set anyway, so it's just another scene.”

Millie, who tackles her first major TV role in Rebecca, was a little apprehensive about stripping for the cameras. But the youngster thought that the love making scene was important.

She said: "It shows the physical side of their relationship, but it's not a full frontal or anything like that, so I don't think that it is a big issue.”"I didn't feel embarrassed and everyone was very kind. But, nevertheless, I kept my dressing gown quite close by."

This classic story - which was previously filmed by Hitchcock with Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine - tells of Maxim de Winter, whose wife has died and who marries again after a whirlwind romance.

BUT, when the new bride comes home with her husband, she finds that her home is haunted by the memory of Rebecca, Maxim's first wife.

It features an all-star cast, including Diana Rigg and Oscar winner Faye Dunaway.Those two had very different reactions when they were approached about being in this production.

Faye Dunaway - best known for her roles in Bonnie and Clyde who is Mrs Van Hopper, wasn't a fan.She confessed: "I didn't know Daphne Du Maurier's novel at all, but I fell in love with the part as soon as I saw the script."

Diana Rigg, however, who is cast as the housekeeper, Mrs Danvers, knew the novel inside out. And she was determined not only to be involved but to portrayal; a specific character. She said: "At a dinner party producer Hilary Heath mentioned she was to make Rebecca, and I told her there and then that I wanted to play Mrs Danvers!"

So the award-winning actress was on board right from the start. Charles Dance - recently seen on the big screen in Michael Collins - says that it took such a quality production to lure him back to the small screen. He doesn't pull any punches in his condemnation of the general state of British television.

He said: "TV really depresses me. We do costume drama and adaptations really well, but the rest of it is derivative. "It's the same old stuff over and over again. They made a wonderful job of Hillsborough and Our Friends in the North but they were shows that took a gamble. "I've turned down a lot of television - this is the first that I've done in seven years - because the stuff that was sent to me was total garbage. I didn't want to play another TV cop or vet."

But Charles has been busy making movies. He has appeared with Dennis Hopper in the sci-fi comedy Space Truckers and filmed the steamy drama Blood Orange, which is set to be screened at the Cannes Film Festival .

He's hoping that those movies are more successful than his big budget Hollywood experience when he was the baddie opposite Arnold Schwarzenegger in the flop, Last Action Hero.

As Charles discovered when he read the script, another actor had turned down the role. He said: "The script went ...` The door opens and there stands Alan Rickman'.

"So, on the first day of shooting, I had a T-shirt made which read: "I am cheaper than Alan Rickman!"

John Millar, Daily Record (Glasgow, Scotland), Jan 4, 1997

Tyntesfield Manor as Manderlay

TELEVISION : Monarchy? On TV, only the mob rule, Sunday 12 January 1997

THE BUSTLES were stored and the crinolines folded; the horses stabled and the stagecoaches mothballed. We were in Charles Dance-land, a Twenties world of Bentley convertibles and cigarette-holders, and the story was that old favourite, Rebecca
But while Daphne's original might have seemed sufficiently melodramatic to the easily satisfied pre-war public, Carlton's commissioners knew that a modern audience would require something more.
But let us not dwell upon Maxim's singed manhood, but rather be positive. I would welcome readers' suggestions for how other televised classics might be improved by matching the beginning of one with the denouement of another. I will then sell them to Carlton as if they were my own ideas. Or publish them in this newspaper.

What was very good about this Rebecca, though, was Diana Rigg's conversion of Mrs Danvers from pointless nutter to Suppressed Lesbian from Hell. "When Mrs DeWinter was alive," smouldered Rigg, in a voice charged with lost sensuality, "she and I always dusted the valuables together." Someone who can get her rocks off doing the household chores is not to be trusted to give good advice, whether it be "wear this costume madam", or "step out of this window".

Rigg had to be good, since she and the rest of the cast were competing with the original black-and-white film. This was entirely shot on a studio set, allowing Hitchcock to create surging seas and terrific storms. But in this version, filmed on location, the steamboat comes to grief on a completely flat sea and Thingy is not invited to dash herself on the jagged, spray-swept rocks far below, but on some Magnet Yorkstone tiles (pounds 15 per square metre) so close that the worst possible injury she might have suffered would have been damaged ligaments - painful, but not excitingly fatal.

And Charles Dance (good actor though he is) is no Olivier. This Maxim is all stiff upper lip and self-repressed Englishness; only when he hits the sack with the nicely breasted Thingy (Emilia Fox) does he unstiffen. In his attempts to infantilise his young wife, while hanging on to the memory of the old one, Dance's performance recalls another situation in which there were "three in the marriage and it got rather crowded". For Thingy read Diana; for Rebecca, Camilla; for Mrs Danvers, the Duke of Edinburgh.

It was perhaps appropriate then, that when Rebecca finished, we should find in its place the immodestly titled The Monarchy: The Nation Decides (ITV, Tuesday). An "egregiously frivolous extrav-agance" was how the Daily Telegraph pompously billed ITV's massive live event. Fergie has bought whole shops on lesser recommendations. But the Telegraph's bombast was outdone by Trevor McDonald himself, in his introduction to the extravagance. "There's only one thing that this country has been talking about this week," he told us, "and that's this programme!" Such self-serving hyperbole is acceptable from Des O'Connor, but sounds a bit daft coming from the anchorman of News at Ten.......

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/television--monarchy-on-tv-only-the-mob-rules-1282808.html

gossip from 2001 : Friends in the wood(2001)The Mirror

Just wood friends; ..so what were married Charles Dance, 54, and actress Emilia Fox, 27, doing in these bushes?

TV smoothie Charles Dance and stunning actress Emilia Fox have struck up an extraordinary friendship. The couple were spotted enjoying an affectionate walk in a park's shaded woodland during which they kissed, cuddled and strolled arm in arm.

It's an unusual alliance. He's 54 and married to wife Joanna for more than 30 years with two grown-up children.

At 27 Emilia, who split from comic Vic Reeves 19 months ago after a brief engagement, is just half his age.

But aides insisted last night their display of togetherness in London's Primrose Hill Park was merely par for the course for two people whose relationship is "entirely professional".

Emilia, daughter of acclaimed actors Edward Fox and Joanna David, was plucked from her English Literature studies at Oxford University to star with Dance in the TV version of the thriller Rebecca.

The drama called for them to act out raunchy sex scenes which Dance admitted were embarrassing, as he knew Emilia's parents.

But the close friendship they struck up four years ago has endured through other working relationships.

Charles - who Princess Diana always cited as "my favourite actor" - enjoyed a guest appearance on Fox's TV series Randall and Hopkirk Deceased, also starring Vic Reeves.

They spent months together on stage in the West End production of Good, in which Dance played a professor who seduces a nubile student portrayed by Emilia.

And only last week millions saw Emilia appear as one of the guests in a repeat screening of Dance's This Is Your Life on BBC1, recorded in February.

They were clearly delighted to see each other as Dance's wife looked on.

Yesterday Emilia's agent Jeanette Chalmers confirmed the actors are close friends but denied there was anything significant about them kissing in the park.

She insisted: "They are not having an affair. This is not unusual for two people who are good professional friends.

"I can assure their relationship goes no further than that. "Actors do tend to be demonstrative people. But I must stress Emilia categorically denies she is romantically involved with Mr Dance."

Lawyer Craig Dixon, of Peter, Fraser and Dunlop, said: "We've spoken with our client Emilia Fox and she categorically denies she is having an affair with Charles Dance.

"She is a good friend of Mr Dance's. But she is very upset at the suggestion they are anything more than friends."

At 6ft 4in, Dance has carved a lofty reputation for portraying upper crust characters while his looks earned him the nickname of the English Robert Redford. But his own background is solidly working class. He left grammar school with two O-levels and discovered a talent for acting when he was studying typography and photography at Leicester College of Art and Design. He joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1975 and shot to fame seven years later when he landed the role of Guy Perron in the classic drama series The Jewel In The Crown. His epic film career has included starring roles in hits such as Plenty, Last Action Hero and White Mischief.

Emilia's former boyfriends include Susannah York's son Orlando Wells and Sam West - son of actor parents Timothy West and Prunella Scales. She fell for Vic Reeves two years ago when they starred in the revival of Randall and Hopkirk. Almost immediately they were making plans to wed.

But within three months Emilia called the whole thing off citing Vic's constant partying. She split from her subsequent other half - T-shirt designer Toby Mott - last year.

Last night Dance's agent Paul Lyon-Marris refused to discuss his client's friendship with Emilia.

He said: "No comment. I have no comment to make."