This week, in Goldeneye, ITV recreates the glamorous, mysterious world of lan Fleming, creator of the James Bond legend and, it's said, himself the prototype for 007. Charles (Jewel In The Crown) Dance plays the debonair Fleming and Phyllis Logan – Lady Jane in Lovejoy, and star of Another Time, Another Place, the 1983 film for which she won a BAFTA award – is his mistress and later wife, Ann.

For Dance, who was invited – but declined – to test for the role of James Bond, there is a fascination in playing Fleming that could never be matched by becoming the latest incarnation of 007. “The Bond films have little in common with the kind of thing I want to do these days. Bond is pretty two dimensional, whereas Fleming is dark, multi-faceted. Any character who is as enigmatic as Fleming is immediately attractive to me.”

And the green-eyed, 6ft 3in Dance is immediately attractive to a large number of ladies, a fact not lost on the programme's producer, Brenda Reid, who had to find an actor who could play someone: “debonair, handsome, and said to have been one of the greatest lovers in England”. Just this once, Dance was prepared to put his matinee idol looks to good dramatic use – although in the recent TV series First Born, in which he played a genetic scientist, he had his sandy locks cropped close because, “I wanted to shake off the ‘thinking woman's crumpet’ tag”. And he's about to take the process a step further with a new TV movie: he is to play the hideously deformed Phantom Of The Opera.

Where most actors would be pursuing the glamour-boy roles, Dance, who spent several years with the Royal Shakespeare Company and is returning to them in the autumn to play Coriolanus, is more interested in acting than stardom. “I am an introvert in a profession that makes actors behave in a very extrovert way,” he says. When he's not filming in exotic locations for the likes of Goldeneye, or his recent movie Pascali's Island, he lives quietly with his wife Jo, whom he met when they were both at art school, and their two children, Oliver, 14, and Rebecca, eight, either in his London home or their place in the Somerset countryside.

His co-star, Phyllis Logan, thinks Dance is ideal for the role of Fleming. “He looks so much like him it's uncanny and he has that enigmatic image that fits in with Fleming's,” she says. But she hastens to add that Dance is really nothing like the man he plays. “When he lived round the corner from me in north London I used to pop into his house and he's a normal man with a normal family, a wife and two kids – nothing toffee-nosed about him,” she says.

lan Fleming was certainly not a normal man with a normal family. Born into very privileged circles and brought up by his mother, he became a journalist and, almost certainly, a secret agent as well. Something of a black sheep, he told a friend at the age of 23: “From now on, I'm going to be quite bloody-minded about women. I'm just going to take what I want without any scruples at all.” And he proceeded to do just that. He was seeing his wife when she was married to another man and, when her first husband died and she married Lord Rothermere, the rumour was that they still continued to be lovers. Even after Fleming married Ann in 1952, they both continued to have affairs. Goldeneye deals, in part, with this period of their lives, when Fleming spent the winter months on his Jamaican estate of Goldeneye, tapping out James Bond novels at a rate of 2,000 words a day and hobnobbing with high society.

“I cannot make the Flemings out,” says Logan, herself happily married for the past 10 years to TV writer Paul Tender. “Within months of marrying, they were both having flings. Ann had a callous streak and her humour was based on tearing people to bits. But in her private correspondence, to people like Evelyn Waugh and Noel Coward, she revealed her inner sadness.”

Says Dance of his screen character: “It was widely held that James Bond was lan Fleming. Goldeneye delves into Fleming's exploits in MIS as well as his amorous liaisons with women in uniform in the Miss Moneypenny mould. I am no particular admirer of his personal habits. He was a womaniser who drank half a bottle of gin and smoked 80 cigarettes a day. He was a fantasist and a sexual adventurer who was riddled with guilt – not a happy man.”

A happy family man himself, there is nothing in Fleming's glamorous, exotic lifestyle for Dance to envy. “I admire his talent as a writer but it's not important to me as an actor to like him,” says Dance. “As long as I understand him.”

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