The gentrification of acting, hacks, schools... Charles Dance is pulling no punches, finds Celia Walden
When Charles Dance was a boy, his mother would often tell him to stop showing off. "I think that’s the worst thing you can say to a child," the 66-year-old says now, his broad frame rigid with indignation. "You should encourage a child to show off. You can say to a child 'stop being rude’, 'stop shouting’, 'stop jumping around on the furniture’. But 'stop showing off’? That’s awful."
Something about the reprimand must have stuck. Although showing off might be de rigueur in the Worcestershire-born actor’s chosen profession, in private it doesn’t seem compulsive. He dislikes interviews (surely a braggart’s dream), grimaces his way through my praise (I tell him that I watched the 25th Anniversary DVD of The Jewel in the Crown over a single weekend and that he stole the show in François Ozon’s Swimming Pool), and for years has steadfastly refused to offer up any part of his personal life to flesh out his brand.
He isn’t, however, in the least bit disingenuous about what that brand is. From urbane, romantic leading man, Dance has become the go-to guy for every icy aristocrat and patrician villain role going. His character in the gangster film St George’s Day (in which Dance plays a lordly crook) is an amalgam of all three. "We’re all victims of typecasting in this business," he shrugs, "and the roles I get offered these days tend to be of not very pleasant, well-heeled people. It’s just the way this," he says gesturing at his still handsome, aquiline features and impassive blue eyes, "is put together. It’s actually quite funny, when you think that my mother came from the East End of London."
Both Dance’s physique and his speech – schoolmasterly authority meets languid luvvie lingo – have contrived to fool people for decades, but the actor has always been honest about his origins. "My mother was a waitress in a Lyons Corner House but she married up. She was keen on bettering herself. She taught me how to use the right knives and forks and behave properly."
Yet it wasn’t Eleanor Dance or her confectioner husband Walter who gave their son his upper-class inflections. That honour fell to two retired gay actors named Leonard and Martin, who saw promise in the striking, strawberry-blond graphics and photography student and put Dance through his paces at their unofficial drama academy – an old printers’ shop in Bidbury, Devon.
"I don’t think I would have got anywhere without them," he says. "I had a stammer through adolescence. Any fun I’d had performing in school plays disappeared and only came back at 18, when the stammer started to go. Then I thought: well perhaps I can show off now."
Despite becoming a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company in the mid-to-late 1970s, and appearing in TV dramas that kept him afloat, Dance didn’t land his breakthrough role as Guy Perron in The Jewel in the Crown until he was in his late thirties.
"I look at young actors now and they’re all really impatient," he says. "Sometimes I’m in the make-up trailer next to actors in their very early twenties who are in a successful TV series, and the minute that happens, bang – they’re on a plane to America in search of a good series or a movie. It’s all now, now, now. And although some stay the course, a lot of them get burnt out. There is no long-term thought there. But they’re certainly much more streetwise than we were."
When The Jewel in the Crown earned Dance the moniker "the thinking woman’s crumpet" and TV stardom was followed up by film roles in Plenty, White Mischief and For Your Eyes Only, he had to be taught how to play the game. "Ignorance on my part and the bad advice of an ambitious agent" explains the uncharacteristically frank interviews he gave early in his career. "It was also flattering to one’s ego. If your ego hasn’t been stroked that way before, you think 'Oh this is rather nice’ and you get a bit carried away."
Surely his ego must have been stroked enough over the years? "Oh it has now," he laughs dryly, "but all the stuff that came with Jewel in the Crown was a surprise to me – I never saw myself as a romantic leading man." Did it go to his head? "A bit. I didn’t hold back as I should have."
He came to regret that early candour when he and his wife, Joanna Haythorn (with whom he has two children, Oliver, 37, and Rebecca, 28), divorced in 2003 and a dalliance with Thunderbirds actress Sophia Myles (then in her early twenties) made him tabloid fodder. His subsequent relationship with 40-year-old Eleanor Boorman (now his wife and mother of their eight-month-old daughter, Rose), only fanned the flames.
"I don’t want to talk about my private life at all. I just don’t believe you have to do that." Isn’t it normal that one should be interested in the man behind the scenes? "No," he flings back. "And if people are, don’t let them know. Mystery is an attractive quality."
It’s not mystery but the occasional softening in Dance’s stern demeanour that’s most attractive about him. When – amid the finger-wagging – you get the odd smile or "darling", you feel pathetically grateful. One topic that invokes his ire is a recent report that today’s young British actors are (genuinely) posher than ever – that the world of theatre, television and film is dominated by the privately educated, whether it’s Parade’s End’s Benedict Cumberbatch (Harrow), Rebecca Hall (Roedean), Downton Abbey’s Dan Stevens (Tonbridge) or The Great Gatsby’s Carey Mulligan (Woldingham). Dance suspects he knows why this is.
"Maybe whoever runs the English department at Eton is pretty bloody good. They have the time and the resources to put on productions of Hamlet or the great Greek plays, whereas your ordinary comprehensive isn’t able to do that. It’s very sad.
"The argument that it’s about choice doesn’t work. No: pump money into the state system and make it so good that nobody in their right mind is going to pay thirty grand a year to send their children to a private school, because the state system is so brilliant. Well it isn’t: it’s under-funded and under-staffed.
"Remember kitchen-sink drama? Actors of the calibre of Albert Finney and Tom Courtenay? They were from the days when some of the best repertory theatres were to be found in Doncaster, Bradford and Leeds – that’s where working-class actors came from. Those places don’t exist any more, so people can’t learn their craft and cut their teeth there either."
Another thing that makes Dance cross is the attitude of distributors, who seem to be interested largely in making "comic-strip films starring bankable commodities". "I made Ladies in Lavender [the 2004 drama he directed, with Judi Dench and Maggie Smith] for the grey pound. We’re living longer, even if Hollywood isn’t quite waking up to the fact that there is a market out there for old people. People over 50 look at what’s on at the local multiplex and think 'I don’t want to see that.’ But it needs a change of attitude by distributors for things to change."
Is that a reason he may delay retirement? "Retirement?" he repeats, bemused. "Actors can’t retire. If actors retired there would be nobody left to play old wrinkly people. You have to keep going, darling – don’t you?"
