The only time I have ever lunched at the Garrick, I sat opposite Henry McGee, the fruity old character actor who, I was sad to read, died the other week. He mentioned that he had once been in rep with the wife of an actor I was about to interview. Was she any good, I asked. “It was Agatha Christie,” he drawled. “It was rather difficult to tell.”
On ITV’s high-rating Marple, on the contrary, the actors are of such high calibre that they make Agatha Christie look good. This coming Sunday’s episode, By The Pricking of My Thumbs, is an example. Apart from Geraldine McEwan as the pensioner sleuth, its cast includes Greta Scacchi, Lia Williams, Steven Berkoff, Anthony Andrews and Leslie Phillips. Stealing a scene too is Charles Dance, who is my guest for lunch — not at the stuffy old Garrick but at London’s groovy Soho Hotel.
It’s fortunate that his name mingles in distinguished company on the Marple cast list. Otherwise it might look a little infra dig for the former Jewel in the Crown heartthrob, triumphant last year as the sinister lawyer Tulkinghorn in the BBC’s Bleak House, to be playing a curmudgeonly vicar cameo in a Miss Marple mystery. But Dance brings value to the part. Striding into the church where Miss M is scrutinising clues, the Rev Septimus Bligh barks: “Right, sling your hook. We’re closed.”
“I haven’t seen it,” says Dance when I praise the moment. Well, I say, I have seen only a rough cut, minus the huge Sunday-night production values. “They don’t have huge production values at Granada,” he harrumphs, although, yes, it is true, the series ends up looking good, and they attract phenomenal casts and the episode’s director, Peter Medak, is a “great filmmaker”. He ran into him at a film festival in Dubrovnik last year, a “total disaster”, with eight people turning up to Medak’s tribute and nine to the director John Irvin’s.
“I said to this woman who was supposed to be the artistic director, ‘Look you’ve got a tribute to Chris Walken on Friday. If you don’t have a better turn-out than this I think blood might be spilt.’ She said, ‘Why are people complaining to me?’ I said, ‘Because you’re the artistic director of the festival, sweetheart’.”
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Mercifully, there was a decent turn-out for Ladies in Lavender, which he wrote and directed in 2004. It is a touching film about two sisters, played by Dames Maggie Smith and Judi Dench, living on the Cornish coast, who take in a Polish stray just before the Second World War. Despite the star names, finances were a struggle. He was on the point of abandoning filming when the UK Film Council finally came through with the money. “Thank you very much. But they didn’t half f*** around for months.”
And it did well? “Yes, grossed $21 million (£12 million). None of it has found its way into my pocket, I hasten to add. I’ve since found out that on top of the distributor getting 75 per cent of the box office gross — which is a difficult pill to swallow but that pill has always been there — the bastard’s also getting 80 per cent of the DVD sales.
“So a tiny per cent now has to be distributed among all the other investors in the film before it comes down to the little people like me who wrote and directed the bloody thing.”
It is clearly a tough old business being Charles Dance, much tougher than it looks on paper or, indeed, in the papers that, to his fury, have been following his recent, postmarital adventures. He looks all right on it, however, his pale skin set off well against the blue of the Captain Haddock jumper he is wearing. He is 59, has enough ginger hair for it still to count as a thatch and, at 6ft 3in, remains a commanding restaurant presence who takes care of the food ordering. The waiter, whose English is not good, reminds me, I say, of Andrea, the Polish lad in Ladies in Lavender. “Reminds me more of the John Cleese line: ‘He’s from Barcelona’,” says Dance, whose aptitude for caustic comedy has been undervalued.
He has mutated gently from the glamour-puss roles he took in the Eighties, when for artistic reasons he always seemed to be taking off his shirt, to a fine line in desiccated villains. In 2001 he played wicked uncle Ralph in ITV’s Nicholas Nickleby, on whose set he fell for the now ex-girlfriend, Sophia Myles (Lady Penelope in Thunderbirds.) He followed this up as Christopher Lilly, a creepy Victorian pornographer in Fingersmith, and then with Tulkinghorn — although he insists he was no shoo-in for the part. “I happen to know that the producer and the director really had to fight to get me on board. Word is that they wanted somebody younger and sexier. Excuse me! I mean I’m much younger than the character in the book anyway.”
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It was, after all, only a quarter of a century ago when he was all the raj as the heart-throb Sgt Guy Perron in Jewel. Back then, in the days he turned down a screen test for James Bond, everyone wanted a bit of him and he did far too much press and . . .
“Excuse me,” he interrupts himself, “I have to greet this extraordinarily glamorous creature.”
The extraordinarily glamorous creature is the extraordinarily short-skirted Carrie Wicks, operations director at the Soho Hotel. His greeting is a prolonged, knee-trembling embrace. “Shall I find you afterwards, darling?” he purrs.
When he is quite finished, I suggest that the press now wants to know everything about his love life. “Yes, but we’re not going to talk about that. Right? Because it’s nobody’s business. People get hurt by it and I wish the people who wrote about other people’s private lives thought how they would feel if they were in that position.”
I am certainly not one to dwell on his 18-month liaison with 25-year-old Myles, nor on his relations with his ex-wife, Joanna, a sculptor to whom he was married for 23 years. Nor is it for me to ask about the rumours that he then dumped Myles. It makes no odds to me if his next alleged relationship with a “former fashion model”, 33, came to anything. The only thing I ask is was he a good father.
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“Yes, I think I was a good father. Perhaps not the greatest husband in the world but I think I’m a good father.” His son, Oliver, is now 31 and works some way down the food chain in the movies, while Rebecca, 26, is in publishing. “Like most parents, I still subsidise my children to one extent or another. It never stops. That’s what you pay for the joy of having children.”
As for women, he levels with me: “I like women, to be perfectly frank with you.” ()
Over his four decades in the business, he has worked with only one female director on stage and just three behind the camera. He wishes there were more around. Oddly enough, he, on the other hand, has directed two of drama’s grandest dames, Smith and Dench, with whom he is particular mates. I notice he employed Dench’s daughter, Finty Williams, in Ladies in Lavender as, according to the credits, “pretty local girl”. “Village bicycle, ” he corrects me.
Is it possible, I begin to wonder, that Dance’s attitude to women is a little unreconstructed? He loves women but unless they are called Judi or Maggie, I notice that they tend, like the luckless Croatian festival director, to be at the wrong end of his anecdotes. One woman in particular gets it from him, and that is his late mother.
Nell Dance, a deferential East Ender who moved to the West Country, spent most of her life in service, although, he says, she briefly rose to the “giddy heights” of a Lyon’s Corner House manager. Walter, her husband, an engineer, died from a perforated ulcer when Charles was 4.
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She then married the lodger, Edward, a civil servant, who drank lots of tea and did the pools. She nursed him through cancer and then died six months after he did. It sounds as if there was not much happiness in her life. “Indeed. And I think not so much that she blamed other people for the lack of it, but that she didn’t seem able to think, ‘Well, you’ve got to go out and get it’.”
She died from a heart attack at Victoria Coach Station in 1984, the year Jewel in the Crown was making her son’s name. “I was very sad when she died but we just used to have the most colossal rows. Terrible emotional scenes. She was a very emotional woman.”
I’d read that he laughed at her funeral. No, he says, it was afterwards, when the tatty West country co-op funeral director told him “the sacred remains” would be scattered just to the left of the main gate of the crematorium. “It was the accent, plus this phrase — I snorted nervously. But no I didn’t laugh at my mother’s funeral. I cried, in fact, at my mother’s funeral.”
What he has, he says, is a fear of the ordinary — and they do not seem to have come more ordinary than Nell and Edward. Charles escaped by taking his career in his own hands, abandoning his training as a graphic artist and paying for acting lessons from two retired thesps — his “encounter with great men”. Leonard and Martin were homosexuals, but secretive ones as the age demanded. “Thankfully, we are arriving at a point where nobody give a monkey’s who you f***. Except a f***ing paper like the Daily Mail.”
He spots an ITV press officer looking for us. “Here she is, the press woman. Can’t see the wood for the trees. No, it is not that ‘ordinary’ is necessarily a bad thing,” he clarifies. “But I have a fear of it, whether it is an ordinary room or an ordinary car.”
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Or, I risk, an ordinary old age. “Yeah.” Does he think about turning 60 this autumn? “I try not to think about that too much. I suppose one should have a big party and make a big deal of it. I’m not sure. I’d rather it slip by unnoticed. Was it Gertrude Stein who said we’re all 25 inside or something? I don’t know what 59 is supposed to feel like. I’m blessed with good health. I look after myself.” He could still remove his shirt on camera? “Possibly. Not in bad shape at all.”
He lives alone in a flat in Camden, North London, irons his own shirts and does not employ a home help, a couple of those “charming middle-European girls who come over here and work for next to nothing” having “scarpered”. His small garden is no real susbsitute for the five acres he had in the grounds of his matrimonial home in Somerset, where, when work slowed, he would pursue manly pursuits such as chopping down trees and note the seasons turning. With London he has a love-hate relationship. “It’s a very overcrowded city, not the cleanest of cities and becoming quite dangerous. There was a murder just down the road from me in Camden Town last Saturday night. Gangs of Somali drug dealers, running battle in Camden High Street.”
Does he worry that he might end up alone? “I think about that from time to time. And then I think about something else.”
He is lucky. He does not need much — although there are limits to what he doesn’t need. A few years back, he was in A Long Day’s Journey Into Night in the West End, opposite Jessica Lange.
“I went into the dressing room. There was a kind of bed, actually, a mattress, and it had a bit of cloth over it that looked like one of Monica Lewinsky’s old dresses. There were curtains that looked not dissimilar, two little trays of rat poison, one in one corner, one in the other. The carpet was disgusting. Three of the six light bulbs weren’t working. It was grimy. Now, I knew they’d decorated two dressing rooms for Jessica upstairs. Yes, two. One for her to receive her guests. Well fine. She’s got that kind of clout, good luck to her. So I just said, ‘Can we paint the dressing room?’
“So they brought me round a colour-chart of shades of white. I said. ‘White, just white, please.’ The curtains and the bed? No, they couldn’t do that. So I went to John Lewis and got some ready-made curtains. I got a piece of decent fabric from a shop in Soho. Threw it over the bed. I replaced the light bulbs. And when I left I took the curtains down and I took the bedspread and put the old dingy, stained one back. And that’s the only time I have ever been demanding.”
He just wanted to be shown a bit of respect, I offer. “Yes,” he agrees with solemnity over his tarte tartin. “Indeed. Respect.”
Agatha Christie’s Marple is on ITV1 this Sunday at 9pm.