 Charles Dance is a conundrum. Like many actors blessed with matinee idol
looks, but cursed by not living in a matinee idol time, he seems to have gone
out of his way to escape typecasting as a romantic leading man, seeking instead
more interesting roles.
He first came to the notice of alert theatregoers in the 1970s - a tall,
striking blond playing assorted lords in the background of various history plays
for the Royal Shakespeare Company, as well as understudying the company's
leading man, Alan Howard. Howard's shadow evidently loomed large over Dance, for
20 years later he returned to the RSC to play several of the older actor's most
conspicuous successes, such as Coriolanus and John Halder in C.P. Taylor's
Good.
Born Walter Charles Dance in Redditch, Worcestershire, on 10 October 1946, he
was set for a career in graphic design until a meeting with two elderly actors
led to private acting coaching, and he exchanged his regional lower-middle-class
accent for the cultivated tones he uses today. While toiling at the RSC, he
played small roles on television until his casting as the upright, decent
British soldier Guy Perron in Granada's groundbreaking dramatisation of The
Jewel in the Crown (ITV, 1984) made him a star and a sex symbol.
For a while in the 1980s he seemed trapped as a patrician figure in a white suit, in films such
as Good Morning, Babylon (Italy/France, 1987), playing filmmaker and perfect
Southern gentleman D.W. Griffiths, and as a British archaeologist in Pascali's
Island (UK/US, d. James Dearden, 1988), although he attempted to break the mould
as the amoral Jos Erroll in White Mischief (d. Michael Radford, 1987). The 1990s
saw him in films as diverse as Alien 3 (US, 1992), The Last Action
Hero (US, 1993) and Kabloonak (France/Canada, 1994) in which
he played Robert Flaherty making Nanook of the North (US, 1922).
Some of his best work has been in TV drama: 'Rainy Day Women' (Play for
Today, BBC, tx. 10/4/1984), in which he played an officer recovering from combat
neurosis who becomes embroiled in a tragedy in an East Anglian fens village in
1940; Fingersmith (BBC, 2005), as the shady uncle dealing in pornographic
literature; as haunted Maxim de Winter in Rebecca (ITV, 1997); and as ruthless
lawyer Tulkinghorn in Bleak House (BBC, 2005), for which he was Emmy nominated.
After leading roles in the 1980s, his film career has subsided into supporting
parts in such films as Swimming Pool (France/UK, d. Francois Ozon, 2003) and
Gosford Park (d. Robert Altman, 2001), and he is often lazily cast as a villain.
Perhaps this is why he has recently turned to screenwriting and directing,
scoring a notable success with Ladies in Lavender (2004), in which he proved he
could sensitively direct actresses of the calibre of Judi Dench and Maggie
Smith. He has continued to play occasional leading roles in the theatre,
receiving the Critics' Circle Best Actor Award for Shadowlands in 2007.
Janet Moat
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FILM & TV CREDITS
