Article from Horizon Magazine, 1987

The Latest Dance Craze

A former construction worker becomes the thinking woman's sex symbol. By Donald Chase

"I think our two cultures," Charles Dance says of England and the United States, "have the best actors in the world. It's the continuous threat of unemployment -- which is a dangerous thing to say. But I think you have to be hungry. You look at the great subsidized theaters of Europe -- the Comedie Francaise, the Schiller in Berlin -- and they're all on long-term contracts, it's like working for the government. They know they're going to be playing this part for a year and something else next year, and they develop a finely honed technique...Whereas, I might be out of work next week."

In truth, inactive periods have been few and short for Dance lately. The six-foot-three, ginger-haired, forty-year-old Englishman has been in constant demand in the three years since he won raves -- and the sobriquet "The Thinking Woman's Sex Symbol" -- for playing Guy Perron in the BBC/PBS miniseries "The Jewel in the Crown."

He was Meryl Streep's long-suffering husband in Plenty. He was Eddie Murphy's baroque nemesis in The Golden Child, a film he calls "appalling...a mess." He was Shirley MacLaine's lover in the miniseries "Out on a Limb", which he hasn't yet seen but whose supernatural subject matter, he allows, "invites cynicism."

More recently, there have been two films, both headed for the 1987 Cannes Film Fesitval, that seem more worthy of his talents. Good Morning Babylon, made in Italy, was co-written and co-directed by the acclaimed Taviani brothers, Paolo and Vittorio. And while being interviewed, Dance -- blue-jeaned and workshirted, ingesting ginseng amd cigarette smoke -- is in the grimy, noisy East End of London, on location for The Hidden City, English playwright Stephen Poliakoff's directorial debut.

"I'm a director's groupie," Dance says. Indeed, Babylon's directors attracted most of the European and American critical establishment into their fold with Padre, Padronne, and Night of the Shooting Stars. The first, released in 1977, records a young shepherd's progression from brutality to enlightenment through literacy, and the second, released in 1982, is a panoramic, tragicomic look at a small Italian town over the course of twelve hours during World War II. Babylon is, according to Dance, the Taviani's "homage to filmmaking," and in particular to the pioneer director D. W. Griffith. The actor plays Griffith at the time he was making his classic 1916 epic, Intolerance.

"I went to the British Film Institute, where I saw stuff from the old March of Time newsreel showing Griffith directing documentary footage during World War I. It was interesting but rather jerky, so I couldn't get any idea of his body language. I also saw footage of him as an actor -- he was not very good." And since this footage was silent, Dance and his dialect coach extrapolated from Griffith's Kentucky birth and New York upbringing and theatrical experience that he would "have a certain voice. It ended up sounding like a cross between John F. Kennedy and Franklin D. Roosevelt."

Dance's most valuable source of information turned out to be Griffith-star Lillian Gish's memoir, The Movies, Mr. Griffith, and Me. "I got from it," he recalls, "the impression of a man who commanded enormous respect, who was called the Father of Hollywood for a reason. He was an artist and an innovator -- and thought of himself as such. He was excited and invigorated by doing what he did -- it meant everything to him. And he had the gift of inspiring affection -- a rare gift, especially in our business. It's such a difficult business, making films -- especially now.

"It's become a question of the piper -- the money men -- wanting to call the tune." In the case of The Golden Child, Dance says, the money men at Paramount decreed that additional, more "typical" Eddie Murphy material be shot after sneak previews indicated the audience didn't quite "recognize the package" they were being asked to buy. Though he "thoroughly enjoyed" working improvisationally with Murphy and is "pleased to be part of a commercial success," he insists that the originial package amounted to a "better film artistically."

Working on Babylon was a different story. "During the shooting, we would sit down each evening and discuss the next day's work. They'd ask for my ideas and tell me theirs -- I think English actors are used to working with directors in a more democratic way (than Americans), partly because most have a background in theater, where you rehearse with both the writer and the director. But if there was any doubt, I'd go with them, because they're both master filmmakers."

Dance himself tends to be introverted during the period he's preparing a role and extroverted when performing it. It was to acquaint him with actors and their methods that Dance's mentors -- two eccentric theater verterans who taught him privately in exchange for pints of beer and gardening services -- insisted that he work in the theater, no matter what the role. Soon enough, the former construction worker and plumber's assistant was dressing the male choruses of the London productions of Fiddler on the Roof and The Canterbury Tales.

Then, after playing small roles in rep companies, Dance was asked, in 1975, to join the Royal Shakespeare Company, where he eventually appeared in the title roles in Coriolanus and Henry V. He also worked frequently on British TV before winning his career-making role in "The Jewel in the Crown." But despite his participation in amateur theatricals at a very young age, acting was not the only career he considered.

"For some adolescents it's acne, but for me it was a stutter," says Dance, to explain why he shunted aside his childhood dreams of acting and began to train as a graphic designer -- probably to the relief of his mother, who had known some insecurity in her life. Her engineer husband died when the boy was four, and after resettling her family from the Midlands to Devon, she cooked for an aristocratic household and nursed her ailing second husband virtually up to her own death. But while Charles was at art school and she was still alive, the stammer disappeared suddenly and he began to think of the theater again.

"I met my wife at art schol, so the experience wasn't entirely wasted," Dance laughs. They have now been married for sixteen years, and have a son, twelve, and a daughter, five. "And that experience, plus the fact that my wife's a painter and a sculptor, probably makes me more responsive to the visual aspects of theater and film. For example, my character in The Hidden City is a very black-and-white man. He's very sure of his ideas until he's drawn into the search for some old, suppressed film of a bizarre nuclear accident in the 1950s."

Snippets of the suppressed film first appear among the material the character rents from the video library in the course of researching educational methods. The research is meant to support his thesis that the video revolution has made traditional teaching methods obsolete. "I myself wouldn't go as far as he does -- I don't say throw out all the books," Dance says. "What I do think is that television's influence is too strong to fight and so, speaking as a parent, we must use it responsibly and give more thought to its content."

Dance's responsibilites as a family man in North London contribute balance to a life increasingly open to disruptions as his career options multiply. (He will next go to Africa to shoot White Mischief, in which he will play the real-life character of Lord Erroll, a leader of the decadent colonial set in pre-World War II Kenya.) Certainly his son's nonchalance toward his recent success keeps him from thinking of himself as any kind of star.

But one of the perquisites of stardom definitely appeals to him: "I'd like to get pretty quickly to the point where I can choose what I want to do. At the moment, I'm in a position to choose what I don't want to do." One of the things Dance would like to do is return to the stage, where he's not performed for over two years. "I'm not one of those people who think you really can't act unless you're in the theater," he is quick to note. "But it's a different sort of buzz, and I think it's good to exercise those theatrical muscles. At the same time, it's good discipline in creating a very immediate kind of truth to do a lot of work in front of a camera, and I would hope to bring that back to the stage with me.

"I haven't played Hamlet and would like to before I'm too old. There's also Sydney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities and Rochester in Jane Eyre." But the potential role that really captures the imagination of the former art student is Vincent van Gogh. "I was in Amsterdam," Dance continues, "to do Henry IV with the Royal Shakespeare Company, and I wandered around the van Gogh Museum. At the time I had cropped hair and a beard, and when I came to that very famous self-portrait of van Gogh, I thought I was looking into a mirror...."

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© 1987 Donald Chase for Horizon