Actor Charles Dance

jeudi 20 octobre 2016

In the Guardian...about the Washington award

http://aboutactorcharlesdance.blogspot.fr/2016/09/the-event.html

From The Jewel in the Crown to Tywin Lannister, the actor has been in era-defining TV dramas – and he suggests the best are no longer made in Britain
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Take Charles Dance. On a visit to Washington last month, strangers approached the actor to say his 1989 Coriolanus for the Royal Shakespeare Company had changed their lives. He was here to collect the William Shakespeare Award for Classical Theatre at the Harman Center for the Arts annual gala.
But the ceremony began.............with Dance’s friend and fellow actor Tim Pigott-Smith sent a video message that tried to make the case that some Game of Thrones dialogue has a Shakespearean metre, at least the way Dance delivers it.
Finally, the honoree himself took the stage and, evidently gratified if a little bemused, said his thank yous with a few digressions then delivered a rendition of the seven ages of man speech – “All the world’s a stage/ And all the men and women merely players,” – from As You Like It. He added, by way of a parting shot: “Finally, if I may, I would just like to wish you all a Trump-free future.”

In Washington’s arts community, where Donald Trump voters are rarer than BlackBerrys, there was rapturous applause.

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Dance, who shares nothing with Trump but age (both are 70), is an Englishman to his boots with disarming mix of tall, aristocratic bearing and demotic earthiness and candour; he would doubtless be at ease both in the club and the pub. He casually admits he had little idea what he was getting into with Game of Thrones, having been put off the books by their “frightening” thickness.

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“I didn’t know what it was about and I hadn’t read and I haven’t since read any of George RR Martin’s books,” he muses in an interview at the Shakespeare Theatre Company. “Do you happen to know what the RR stands for? Neither do I. Nobody can seem to tell me.”

The answer, Google reveals later, is Raymond Richard.

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blah !blah ! blah ! Games of thrones : give the poor man a fuc.... break with Games of Throne....his character is dead.....

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As for his own notorious demise, which rivals anything in King Lear or Titus Andronicus, the news was broken to him by a man in the street. Dance puts on a cockney accent as he recalls the stranger saying: “You’ve got this great death scene!”

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Improbably, in 1994, he went to Sun City in South Africa to be a Miss World judge along with Iman, Patrick Lichfield and Nelson Mandela’s daughter Zindzi. It was six months after the end of racial apartheid. “I didn’t get to meet Nelson Mandela, unfortunately. I met [his wife] Winnie, who scared the shit out of me I have to say, actually.”

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In 2003 he was in Beirut, Lebanon, to play a professor called Charles Lushington in the movie Labyrinth. Sometimes, he admits, he does it just for the money (or the travel). “No shame. Purely because every now and again – it’s called no money. You go and think, ‘OK, I’m going to try and do the best I can with this pile of shit, and I’m doing it because it will enable me for a few months to perhaps say no.’

“The Beirut job in particular: one of the worst scripts I’ve ever read. It’s far too late now; it will never see the light of day, I hope. But I did it purely because I wanted to go to Beirut. I thought, ‘This’ll be interesting,’ and I asked for a ridiculous amount of money, assuming they would say absolutely not, and three weeks later I get a call saying, ‘Remember that job in Beirut? Well they’ll pay.’ Fuck.”

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Dance went, hooked up with the journalist Robert Fisk and spent a couple of “fascinating” evenings discussing the history and tragedy of the place.

Visiting America, he now finds New York’s commercialism overwhelming but Washington charming, at least while it remains Trump-free. “If he makes it into the White House, we’re going to have to find another planet to live on,” Dance sighs. “It’s alarming, really.”

He was no less depressed about Britain’s vote to quit the European Union. “It’s kind of xenophobic, little Britain, pull up the drawbridge.” Yet, soon he’ll be on the road again. He’s off to Botswana to promote Savage Kingdom, six National Geographic films he has narrated about nature red in tooth and claw. “It’s as violent as anything you’ll see on Game of Thrones.”

Indeed, the Seven Kingdoms keep cropping up in any conversation with Dance these days. But he is philosophical about having been killed off in a series where a being a lead character offers no armour. In his video message, Pigott-Smith urged him to brush up his Shakespeare.

So, with retirement apparently off the table, what would be his dream role? “I’d like to do a bit more of the Scandinavian plays, just because of the way I look, and I haven’t done enough. There’s a fair amount of Shakespeare I haven’t done. I love the history plays, actually, much more so than the comedies. It would take a brave person to ask me to do it but I would love to play Malvolio in Twelfth Night. He’s wonderful.”

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2016/oct/19/charles-dance-game-of-thrones-interview