Charles narrator of Dahl

5 tales : Way to heaven, Hitchhiker, Edward the Conquerant, neck, taste : 00:75mn
Available until 1:17PM Sat, 5 Jan 2013
 http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01phj36/A_Little_Twist_of_Dahl_Omnibus/

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BBC radio 4 : Episode 3: The Hitchhiker

In The Hitchhiker, Andrew Pym, a successful author, is driving to London in his brand new BMW. He stops to give a hitchhiker a lift. Unwisely, he allows the man to persuade him to see if the car can go as fast as its manufacturers claim. Stopped for speeding, his details are noted down by a policeman who warns him to expect a heavy fine and sends him on his way. Blithely unconcerned at causing so much trouble, the hitchhiker starts boasting that he is engaged in a line of work that requires exceptional skills. And it's these skills that can get Andrew out of his present difficulty.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01pg3qr

New interview from Telegraph

Charles Dance: 'Actors can't retire. Who would play the old wrinkly people?'
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?"

BBC radio 4 episode 2: The Way Up To Heaven

Charles leads the cast as the urbane Storyteller in dramatisations of five classic tales by Roald Dahl.

In The Way Up To Heaven, despite living in a New York mansion so vast that it requires its own elevator, the Fosters are not a happy couple. Mrs Foster has a pathological fear of being late and her husband deliberately torments her by doing everything as slowly as he can. When she accepts an invitation to visit France, he insists on taking her to the airport only to leave her waiting outside in the car. Nearly hysterical, she goes to see what's keeping him but, when she reaches the front door, she hears a particular sound and realises, if she's cunning, she need never be late again

at 02:30 mn : 7 days left to listen

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01pfwhq

DVD release

Shades of love will be released on January 7, 2013 

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B009NDIA2K/

                               

Secret State is available on DVD since 3rd December 2012

  

Charles D. narrates a Little twist of Dahl

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01pftbg/15_Minute_Drama_A_Little_Twist_of_Dahl_Taste/
Broadcast on BBC Radio 4, 10:45AM Mon, 24 Dec 2012
Available until 11:02AM Mon, 31 Dec 2012

Episode 1: Taste

Charles Dance leads the cast as the urbane Storyteller in dramatisations of five classic tales by Roald Dahl. Bizarre and amusing by turns, these black comedies are justly famous for their surprise endings.

In Taste, whenever Mike Schofield and Richard Pratt dine together, they play a little game. If Pratt, a conceited wine buff, can identify a rare vintage in a blind tasting, he wins a case of the wine in question. When Schofield boasts that he has acquired a wine whose obscurity renders it unguessable, Pratt suggests they increase their stakes. If he fails to identify it, he forfeits both his houses but, if he succeeds, he wins the hand of Schofield's delectable daughter in marriage. Despite the girl's protests, Schofield agrees to the wager.

Charles is Thomas Arlington in The Door(short film)2012

The Door is the third short film in the series produced in conjunction with Andrew Steggall and Motion Group Pictures
Runtime: 20mn
Release Date: 2012-10-12

The Door is based on "The Door of the Wall" by H.G. Wells. This new adaptation tells the story of Thomas Arlington, a man of incredible wealth and power. He is the chairman of a bank, has his suits made by the greatest tailors and he has a yacht (on which he has recently entertained the Chancellor of the Exchequer). But he also has a memory that haunts him. It is the childhood memory of a green door in a wall in West London that led to an enchanted garden. It is the garden of his imagination and of his childhood. Now, in his sixties, Thomas Arlington want’s to go back.

Charles with Andrew Steggall

https://aboutactorcharlesdance.blogspot.com/

Patrick has officially finished shooting....

......" - and to prove it, here's a snap of the stragglers at the wrap drinks."
So Charles is back in England
https://www.facebook.com/Patrickthefilm

Charles in a BBC radio 4 production

at 01:42 mn on BBC radio 4 here : 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p012sdwd

15 Minute Drama: A Little Twist of Dahl
Mon 24 Dec 2012, 10:45, BBC Radio 4

First broadcast: Monday 24 December 2012
A series of stories by Roald Dahl, dramatised by Stephen Sheridan.
Episode 1: Taste

Charles Dance leads the cast as the urbane Storyteller in dramatisations of five classic tales by Roald Dahl. Bizarre and amusing by turns, these black comedies are justly famous for their surprise endings. 

The stories show Dahl at the height of his powers as a writer of adult fiction. They are stylishly plotted, vividly characterised and made unforgettable by their breezy cynicism, presenting as they do, a hilariously bleak view of family life. Their satisfying conclusions invariably leave bullies, schemers, adulterers and frauds soundly punished. 

In Taste, whenever Mike Schofield and Richard Pratt dine together, they play a little game. If Pratt, a conceited wine buff, can identify a rare vintage in a blind tasting, he wins a case of the wine in question. When Schofield boasts that he has acquired a wine whose obscurity renders it unguessable, Pratt suggests they increase their stakes. If he fails to identify it, he forfeits both his houses but, if he succeeds, he wins the hand of Schofield's delectable daughter in marriage. Despite the girl's protests, Schofield agrees to the wager. 

Credits 

Storyteller - Charles Dance
Richard Pratt - Jonathan Hyde

as Floyd again

in Common Ground

 

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or

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Charles as Floyd in Common Ground

Common Ground – initially entitled Common People – is a series of eleven minute comedy shorts set in South London, featuring new comedy scenarios, linked by characters and locations. Comedy talent lined up to appear includes Charles Dance, Jessica Hynes, Alex Lowe and Tom Palmer. The shorts will air in double bills from Monday January the 14th at 9pm

 .....he was cast in a short comedy film for Channel 4 called Bad Grandad.

“He’s a retired rock’n’roll tour manager and it was so far removed from what I’m normally asked to do, so I couldn’t say no and I had a hoot doing it,” he says.

 or :

BAD GRANDAD is written by Mark Warren and Fraser Steele, who have previously worked on Never Mind the Buzzcocks. It stars Charles Dance as a retired rock and roll tour manager who remains a ‘flamboyant, free spirited, party goer’. It also stars Amelia Bullmore as his rather uptight ballet teacher daughter Becky and Hugo Speer as her husband

http://aboutactorcharlesdance.blogspot.fr/2012/10/charles-will-be-in-common-people.html

Episode 1.1 : Floyd  , previously known as Bad Grandad.

Ex tour manager Floyd (Charles Dance) is used to mingling with the stars. Now in retirement, he is still as rock 'n' roll as ever.

 Floyd is a flamboyant, free spirited, party goer. His rather uptight ballet teacher daughter Becky (Amelia Bullmore) and her palliative care consultant husband Jack (Hugo Speer) certainly have their work cut out with this firecracker, especially when their teenage daughter Becky wants to attend a music festival.

Date: Mon 14th January 2013

Time: 9:00pm...Channel: Sky Atlantic...Length: 30 minutes

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Charles was Captain Ritcher in In the presence of mine enemies in1996

November, 1942, Warsaw, Poland. Just two months before, 350,000 were taken away to be exterminated by the Nazi's in what was called the "Great Action." In the Warsaw Ghetto, there are rumors of revolt.

In this remake of "In the Presence of Mine Enemies," we are concerned with the the week prior to the revolt, particularly the story (fictional) of one family—Rabbi Adam Heller (Armin Mueller-Stahl), his daughter Rachel (Elina Lowensohn) and son Paul (Don McKellar)—and their physical, emotional and spiritual struggle to survive during the 1943 uprising.

Shot in Montreal, Quebec, exactly eight days prior to the 53 anniversary of the January revolt.

  

 

 

https://aboutactorcharlesdance.blogspot.com/