samedi 10 avril 2021

April 2021

 
death of Prince Philip...
By his own admission, Charles Dance has always been a private man. He doesn’t court publicity – “I don’t have a press agent,” he says, “I’ve never understood why people do” – and certainly doesn’t court the paparazzi. But last September he dropped the ball, and boy, did he pay for it. Dance was in Venice with his girlfriend, Italian film ­producer Alessandra Masi, when he thought he’d found a quiet portion of beach, away from prying eyes and snapping lenses, to enjoy a splash. As it happened, he hadn’t gone far enough. The next day, the tabloids were ablaze. Photographs, lots of photographs, showed Dance and Masi, 53, canoodling in the surf, but the headlines all picked up the same theme. “Charles Dance shows off his impressive beach body at 73,” panted one. “Game of Thrones star Charles Dance shows off his buff physique,” heaved another.

Some three decades after he turned down an audition to be James Bond on account of believing he was “too ginger”, here was Dance’s 007 moment at last. So, did he see the coverage? He emits a rasping, baritone laugh and squirms slightly. “Yes, let my guard drop a bit there... I shouldn’t have, the number of years I’ve been doing this job... but, you know, that terrible old cliché – it’s better to be looked over than overlooked in our business.”

In his study at home in north London, Dance, now 74, is full of mirth, anecdote and wisdom. As early spring sunshine pours through the gaps in a blackout blind, he rocks on a desk chair in front of a stack of old CDs, the light catching on his ­silvering locks. “I mustn’t grumble. The sun is shining, spring looks as if it’s finally here...” He’s just been to the garden centre. “What I plan to do is start a better vegetable garden than last year. I grew a few potatoes, some carrots... the cabbages didn’t turn out too well. Boring broccoli. I’m going to do that a bit more efficiently.

Dance and Masi, who moved in last year, have spent lockdown together. She may be one reason for his contentment, but another might be the late-career flourish he is enjoying. From Game of Thrones, in which he was the scheming Lord Tywin Lannister, to The Crown, in which he was the scheming Earl Mountbatten, he’s never been more profligate in stealing scenes, and never more in-demand. As one US publication put it recently, “Instead of, ‘Hey, it’s that guy,’ it’s [now], ‘Hey, it’s Charles f..king Dance’.”
His last memorable turn was as newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst in Mank, David Fincher’s film about the making of Citizen Kane. Set in 1940 and shot like an old Hollywood noir, it has Gary Oldman playing the titular Herman Mankiewicz, a volatile screenwriter trying to pen his big picture debut. Dance enters the fray at key moments as Hearst, whose life as a tyrannical press baron famously inspired the character of Kane. And, yes, he pinches most of his scenes.
Dance appeared in Fincher’s first film, Alien 3, some three decades ago, and they’ve kept in touch over the years. “Out of the blue, I got this email saying he’s making a film around the making of Citizen Kane, and how would I like to play Hearst? He said, ‘It’s a glorified extra, but I’d love you to do it’,” Dance recalls. “I read the script and thought it was a bit more than a glorified extra, more of a telling cameo, but I said, ‘David, I would come and change light bulbs for you’.”

Decades of playing villains – from For Your Eyes Only to Last Action Hero, right up to Game of Thrones – has given his hooded eyes and hooked features a gently menacing air. Add to that age and fine ’40s tailoring, and he’s perfectly ominous. I tell Dance I am curious about the source of his energy, specifically how he can still command lustful tabloid spreads dedicated to his strapping torso. Apparently it’s all down to his fitness routine. “It hasn’t been much very lately, other than a 6km walk on Hampstead Heath each morning. My obsession is swimming. For the last five or six years I’ve tried to swim [in the Lido, a public pool on the Heath] every morning. One year I did mid-March to November – that was my limit, then it becomes more medicinal than pleasurable.” The Lido, he says, “is a great place to think, once your body is used to the cold. Then you get up, have a full cardiac-arrest breakfast, and you’re fit for the day. I can recommend it.”

He used to run, but the knees are shot, and he likes to cycle, but a stiff neck makes that dicey, so it’s “swimming, vigorous walking, and chucking a few weights around”. “I’m lucky to have a fast metabolism... but I actually find it terribly boring, the whole business. I don’t go to a gym – you get all that gym talk, surrounded by people in Lycra and with buff gym bodies. I am just in ­reasonably good shape for a man of my age.” Still, he feels he has a couple of kilos to shed. “It’s going in all the wrong places,” he says, prodding at the sides of his plaid shirt. “You get something called ‘love handles’, which are not nice. Either I go on a very strict diet, or I have to change my swimming apparel.”

This is not the first time Dance’s looks have been scrutinised so closely. In the late 1980s, flush from a string of romantic roles, including as Guy Perron in British Raj series The Jewel in the Crown, he was repeatedly compared to Robert Redford (“Not very fair to Robert Redford”) and branded “the thinking woman’s crumpet” by journalists. “I can remember the first time somebody called me that,” he says. “Shortly afterwards, I was in Cannes, walking along the Croisette, and coming towards me was [broadcaster] Joan Bakewell, who was known as ‘the thinking man’s crumpet’. As we met, we both said, ‘Hello, crumpet…’” A rasp. “Thankfully that’s passed. Clever journalists would come up with something else.”

Dance’s mother, Nell, was a cook who worked all her life; his father, Walter, was an electrical engineer who’d fought in the Second Boer War. Dance grew up in Plymouth with a brother 10 years his ­senior, Michael. Walter died when Dance was four, after which Nell remarried, to Edward, a civil servant. For most of his life, Dance had been under the impression that his father was in his 50s when he died. It wasn’t until he appeared on the BBC’s Who Do You Think You Are? in 2017 that he learned Walter was in fact in his mid-70s when he died, and had previously had another family whose descendants now live in South Africa.

Dance worked as a labourer and plumber’s mate after studying at art school, where he’d ­fostered an interest in acting. He then met two retired thespians, Leonard and Martin, who coached him in the classics, bullied an RP (Received Pronunciation) accent into him, and taught him all they knew in exchange for a couple of pints in the local. Praise was hard to come by. “I can remember driving Leonard back from the pub, I thought I’d been pretty shit-hot ­working through Julius Caesar, and he got out of the car and said, ‘You don’t realise how bad you are, do you boy? See you next week!’” Dance smiles at the memory. “It’s very important to know when you’re not being good.” But he was good – good enough to soon join the Royal Shakespeare Company without having been to drama school. Not that it impressed his mother much; she was nonplussed by news of her son’s glamorous career.

Dance married sculptor Joanna Haythorn in 1970, and had two children, Oliver, now 46, and Rebecca, 40, before they divorced in 2004. He had another daughter, Rose, in 2012 with his then-­fiancée Eleanor Boorman, a former model 26 years his junior. “I think every child tries to do ­better than their parents did. My mother did teach me to be independent – how to look after yourself, basically,” Dance says. “One thing she used to say, which I realise no parent ever should, is ‘Stop showing off.’ You should never stop a child ­showing off. Show off more!” So that’s how he has tried to be with his own children.

Is it different, parenting again in a younger ­generation? “Different in as much as we live in a different place,” he says. “My contribution is co-parenting, because we’re not together, and so it’s different in that respect. But [Rose] is a fantastic little girl. I do like children, I think they’re very special.” Boorman and Rose live “200 miles away”, so the homeschooling responsibility “has been down to her mother. But we FaceTime on a pretty regular basis”. And he has a granddaughter, too? “I do indeed. She’s about six months younger than my daughter. I think they think they’re like cousins.” He throws his hands up and flaps them away. “It’s all rather complicated but it doesn’t really matter at all, whatever their ‘titles’ are.” Would he consider marrying again? “N-no,” he says, after a split-second’s thought. 

Curiously, much of Dance’s success has come in the past two decades. He trained at the RSC during the ’70s before moving into television and film, finding acclaim in both, not least in the ’80s, when the success of For Your Eyes Only and The Jewel in the Crown led to starring opposite Meryl Streep in Plenty and Greta Scacchi in White ­Mischief. But his is a career that has strengthened as it has matured. The noughties brought Robert Altman’s film Gosford Park and the BBC adaptation of Bleak House, while the past decade has seen him gain a small-screen Midas touch, instantly enhancing the class and quality of anything he appears in, to the extent that his name now looks unfinished without a “Sir” before it. “It’s swings and roundabouts in this business; I’m sure that Game of Thrones had something to do with it. To get offered a plum part in the most successful television series to date...”
That show has made him instantly recognisable to an entirely new generation. “I’m amazed. I can be sitting in a car, at night, in the rain, at traffic lights, and somebody on the other side of the road points and says, ‘Hello Charlie, you all right?’” A word of warning, mind: don’t approach him for a selfie. “No, hate it. I try to decline as graciously as I can, but I’d rather not. Most people accept it, but some say, ‘Oh, really?’ As if it’s obligatory! Which it’s not.”

Theatre seems to be one place we won’t see him. I mention that Sir Ian McKellen, his old RSC mucker, is to play Hamlet at the age of at least 81, in an age-blind show. “Is he really?” Dance says, with what may or may not be a roll of the eyes. “I wonder who’s playing his mother...” Not for you, then? “Not the parts that are traditionally for younger people. Other than for an intellectual exercise, I don’t really see the point of that,” he says. “I have this odd feeling about theatre. There are nights when I pray there’s going to be a bomb scare, an announcement – ‘Ladies and gentlemen, you must leave the theatre!’ – and the show is ­cancelled. And then there are nights that are ­fantastic and it goes well and that’s great, you get this applause and your ego has been boosted. But if I’m honest I prefer to be on a film set.”

So that’s where he’ll be, especially once the pandemic is over. I assume he’s vaccinated? “No,” Dance says, insouciantly, “I’ve had my invitation [to get the jab], but I went to Iceland to film in ­January, got tested every day, came back, went to the shops, woke up the next morning feeling shit, so did Alessandra, then we were positive. So we isolated for a couple of weeks, and now I think I’ll go and get jabbed.” Never has a man sounded so casual about catching a deadly disease at 74.

Post-lockdown, he’s looking forward to catchups with old friends, and being on set. He holds Sir John Gielgud, with whom he used to share an agent, as a role model. “He used to ring up and say, ‘Hello, Johnny Gielgud here, got any work?’ In his nineties! That’s what I’d like to do.” You can bet he will, too. That gives Dance another 20 years, at least. There must be some ambitions left? “Just keep working,” he replies modestly. Then he leans ­forward, narrows his eyes and steeples his fingers. “I would like to front more stuff,” he decides, finally. “I’m forever being asked to come in and play telling cameos...” And why not? He’s only just become Charles f..king Dance.

mercredi 3 mars 2021

March 2021 - news - Charles Dance

Nearly three decades after appearing in David Fincher’s ill‑fated Alien3, Charles Dance is back with the director. Screen talks to the actor about his rich run of screen roles.

Charles Dance and David Fincher go back a long way, the veteran UK actor having appeared in the director’s first feature, Alien3, almost 30 years ago. That was an infamously troubled shoot for Fincher and the result much-maligned — neither of which affected Dance’s regard at the time.

I thought, ‘My god, this guy is smart,’” he says. “It was very apparent, even then, that he could talk to any department about their job on equal terms, there wasn’t an aspect of filming that he didn’t know about. He is a film animal from the top of his head to the soles of his feet.”

They had kept in touch only rarely — “the occasional Christmas card” — so Dance was pleasantly surprised when he received an email from the director, preceding a script for Mank and the juicy role of William Randolph Hearst. He didn’t hesitate.....................
Dance has only a few scenes, but all integral as they chart the relationship between Gary Oldman’s Mankiewicz and Hearst, the press magnate and inspiration for Kane. On approaching his real-life character, he says: “Principally what I needed was in the script, because it’s one of the best scripts I’ve ever read. And we had two or three weeks sitting round the table talking about it, pulling each sentence apart and not leaving any stone unturned.”

Beyond that, he read about Hearst and found what footage there was of the man speaking. “I tried to pinpoint his accent, which really is very strange. There are elements of southern American, but then there’s this sharp, precise Philadelphia sound, so I put all that into the pot.”

Having discovered the power that a newspaper magnate could wield in 1930s America, Dance thought about recent media moguls, such as Rupert Murdoch and Robert Maxwell. “But I guess I thought more about Donald Trump than anybody else,” he laughs. “And one identifying thing that I could latch onto for Hearst — I bear no resemblance to him physically — is that he did have a rather peculiar hair arrangement, which of course Trump has. So we got a pretty good wig.

Hearst’s dress sense was all his own. “When throwing his many parties, he was pretty outrageous,” Dance observes. Even in the film’s black and white, his circus costume in the film’s pivotal scene — a fancy-dress dinner upended by the drunken Mankiewicz — looks suspiciously like gold lamé. “Yes! It was something that Elton John would wear… on a subtle day.”

That long, complex scene, taking place in production designer Donald Graham Burt’s recreation of Hearst’s grandiose San Simeon home, epitomises for Dance his director’s perfectionism. “I became more aware this time of David’s eye for composition,” he says. “We were working with four cameras all the time. You set something up and go into a take, and maybe two of the cameras will be right and the other two not quite, so we go again, and then those two are okay but there’s a problem with the other one. So we do take after take after take after take. And then, when he’s happy with the composition, he’ll hone in on the acting.

So it’s incumbent on all of us to maintain our energy level and focus and concentration. It’s a long process. But although we might moan about it, you don’t moan very much, because you know that we’re contributing to what’s going to be a special film.”

The most takes Dance was involved in for a set-up was “in the upper 30s”, during that dinner scene. “That was very tough on Gary [Oldman]. We got sore arses sitting around for two or three days, but Gary drove that scene, and in every single take he went from beginning to end. It was an extraordinary scene to do.”

Speaking from his London home, Dance is in good form considering he is recovering from Covid-19. “I’m 90% back to normal,” he reports, wryly noting the insidious nature of the virus. “I was at Shepperton Studios doing [Neil Gaiman’s TV series] The Sandman, after that I went to Iceland to do a film [Netflix’s Against The Ice], being tested every day and always coming back negative. Then I get back here and go to do a weekly shop — and I pick it up.

Work-wise, the actor agrees he has been on a roll, from Lord Mount­batten in The Crown and the stern, dictatorial puritan of Fanny Lye Deliver’d, to roles in Matthew Vaughn’s upcoming The King’s Man and the aforementioned Netflix adaptation of The Sandman.

The amount of work I’ve had in the last two or three years is remarkable, because I’m 74 now, and as you get older in this business decent parts begin to thin out.” He credits the high demand to his role as the formidable patriarch Tywin Lannister in Game Of Thrones, equating the show’s impact to that of his breakthrough TV series in 1984, Granada’s The Jewel In The Crown.

Despite demand as an actor, Dance is soon to step behind the camera for the first time since 2004’s Ladies In Lavender, for his own adaptation of Alice Thomas Ellis’s The Inn At The Edge Of The World. The film is aiming to shoot later this year, with a cast — previously announced but subject to scheduling — that includes Joanna Lumley, Celia Imrie and Freddie Fox.

Has anything changed in his attitude as he has gotten older? “Not really. I try to do less and less with the work, to demonstrate less. And I’ve been thinking lately that maybe I should get more choosy than I’ve been. I just like working. But I should perhaps have been playing fewer cameos and fronting more films than I’ve had the good fortune to do.”

Charles Dance on Tywin Lannister’s death and resting villain face

Charles Dance is feeling much better, thank you. Just out of isolation from “this wretched virus,” he’s looking hale and up for a discussion of his role in “Mank” (as William Randolph Hearst), but clearly politics are also on his mind. At 74, he’s a stage-trained actor who broke big in “The Jewel in the Crown” in 1984,......He spoke remotely with The Envelope about the size of “Citizen Kane,” battling COVID and having a resting villain face.

I hope your recent illness wasn’t too debilitating.
- It’s not very pleasant. I guess I had a mild version — it was like a bad case of the flu. You feel weak a lot of the time. But let’s not dwell on that. Spring is on the way. It could be a whole lot worse, darling. That awful man could still be in your big White House.

Indeed. So on to “Mank,” in which you’re Hearst. When did you first see “Citizen Kane”?
- Probably when I was about 18 or 19. I admired it at the time as a piece of rather extraordinary filmmaking, and I have the imagery of it seared into my mind still. When I knew I was going to be doing “Mank,” I saw it through much more mature eyes. And it is an extraordinary film. I’d forgotten how actually big it was. I had a memory of it being rather claustrophobic, but there are moments that are almost as big as “Ben-Hur.”

Have you ever visited Hearst Castle?
- No. It might have been useful for me to go there, from a sense of morbid curiosity. But if someone ever asked me to play Donald Trump, God forbid, I don’t know that it would be important for me to go to this terrible club he’s got down there in Florida where he’s going to be living. There are definite parallels between what we know of the life of William Randolph Hearst and Donald J. Trump, though I think Hearst is in a much better class than Trump.

So was Trump in mind when you decided how to play Hearst?
- I did think about Donald Trump. I thought, well, who is the central character [in our modern society] now? Is it Rupert Murdoch or Donald Trump? I bear no physical resemblance to Hearst, nor Orson Welles. Though he did have this peculiar hair arrangement. But this isn’t a film about Hearst; it’s a film about Herman Mankiewicz.

Hearst, as you play him, survives the film. But you’ve actually played quite a lot of death scenes over the years. More than your share, maybe?
- I was thinking that the other day — that I’ve died in almost everything I’ve done. It would be nice not to die. There are a few things that I’ve managed to stay alive in — but most of the time, I’ve died a very ignoble death. Especially in “Game of Thrones,” that was quite a death scene, darling.

Ah, yes, Tywin Lannister gets skewered with a crossbow while on the toilet. What were your thoughts on how the series ended?
- I was underwhelmed. I thought, “No, come on. Really, guys, you could do better than that.” But, never mind.

You bring a kind of contained stillness to your roles, which I find more effective — particularly in villainous parts — than someone who has to flail all over the screen to get a point across. Is that an intentional thing?
- I hope it’s the case most of the time, unless I have a legitimate excuse to flail my arms around and be theatrical. I learned a long time ago the value of that well-worn phrase “less is more.” One of the first actors I noticed and thought, “I’d love to be doing what you’re doing,” was Peter Finch. But I’ve never seen an actor or actress do what Isabelle Huppert does with nothing. You look at her face in close-up, and you won’t see a single muscle move on her face. But a thought crosses her eyes and you know exactly what she’s thinking and feeling. I’m not putting myself in the same league as her. But if I can get close to achieving that, I’ll be a happy bunny.

You played a heroic lead in “Jewel in the Crown,” but it feels as though at some point you began playing more villains. Is that still a good place to be?
- I was doing a podcast recently, and I noted that there was a time I was a romantic leading man. But if you seem to be doing something reasonably well, odds are you’ll be asked to do it again. I don’t know what the first villain [I played] was, but obviously, I did it reasonably well. And my face in repose — unless I’m smiling or feeling very, very happy — my face can look rather somber.

So you have resting villain face?
- Well, the way it is put together, it lends itself to rather severe characters, often villainous. There have been times when I’ve had enough money in the bank to say, “No, I’m not going to do that; no more villains.” But I think I am going to say it with a vengeance now: No more villains. I think I’ve done enough villainy. Though, they can be enormous fun.



Charles Dance at 74: ‘I’m in reasonably good shape for a man of my age’
As he steals scenes in the Oscar-buzzy Netflix film Mank, he talks about having a late career flourish and his new-found heart-throb status

Dance was delighted to work with Fincher again and admits he would have done anything on set.
Out of the blue, I got this email saying he’s making a film around the making of ‘Citizen Kane’, and how would I like to go over and play Hearst?” Charles tells The Daily Telegraph magazine. “He said, ‘It’s a glorified extra, but I’d love you to do it’. I read the script and thought it was a bit more than a glorified extra, more of a telling cameo, but I said, ‘David, I would come and change light bulbs for you’.”

“I read a couple of books, tried to get examples of his voice, (but) also thought about people of my generation, like Rupert Murdoch and – although he’s considerably down the intellectual scale – Donald Trump. Hearst was an extraordinarily wealthy man, but he was a bit of a megalomaniac, and veered between being entertaining and charming and being a complete b**tard.”

Fincher famously has exacting standards and shot most scenes dozens of times, with one lengthy dinner scene taking over 40 takes to perfect, which Charles admitted was “very hard” on lead actor Gary Oldman.
It was very hard work for Gary, because wherever David was shooting, it was either on Gary or a reaction from one of us – so Gary, rightly but also generously, was just firing on all 12 cylinders [in every take],” he explains.

lundi 1 février 2021

February 2021 - news - Charles Dance


The Liar
A film adaptation of Stephen Fry’s novel of the same name, following a public schoolboy whose proficiency at lying opens up a marvellous fictional world of espionage. Starring Asa Butterfield, Tom Wilkinson, Hugh Bonneville, Charles Dance, and David Walliams. Director Tony Hagger is attached, as is casting director Jina Jay. Filming is planned for summer. 

mercredi 20 janvier 2021

January 2021 - news - Charles Dance

 Nikolaj Coster-Waldau and Joe Cole are leading the cast of Against The Ice, a survival movie ...
In 1909, Denmark’s Alabama Expedition led by Captain Ejnar Mikkelsen (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) was attempting to disprove the United States’ claim to North Eastern Greenland, a claim that was rooted in the idea that Greenland was broken up into two different pieces of land. Leaving their crew behind with the ship, Mikkelsen sleds across the ice with his inexperienced crew member, Iver Iversen (Joe Cole).
The under-the-radar project recently wrapped filming in Iceland and Greenland. Additional cast include Charles Dance (The Crown) and Heida Reed (Poldark). Danish director Peter Flinth is helming.
Netflix will release in 2021.
Charles Dance is Roderick Burgess, Charlatan, blackmailer and magician
The highly-anticipated Netflix adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s popular comic book series The Sandman is coming together. Tom Sturridge, Gwendoline Christie, Vivienne Acheampong, Boyd Holbrook, Charles Dance, Asim Chaudhry and Sanjeev Bhaskar have been set to star in the dark fantasy series based on the DC comics.
The series is described as a rich blend of modern myth and dark fantasy in which contemporary fiction, historical drama and legend are seamlessly interwoven”. The Sandman  follows the people and places affected by Morpheus, the Dream King, as he tries to fix all the cosmic and human mistakes he’s made during his vast existence.