From Radio Times, December 1-7, 1984

I first glimpsed Charles Dance across a crowded foyer at London’s Waldorf Hotel. With its recent revival of the the dansant, that relic of a more gracious age, it had seemed the perfect place for a meeting with the actor who, earlier this year, had captivated the viewing nation twice weekly as romantic hero Sergeant Guy Perron in The Jewel in the Crown.

Alas, taped interviews and musical ensembles don’t mix too well, and we had to settle for a neighbouring, if less, exotic, venue. Not a note of music (or, mercifully, Muzak), just the clattering of cups, the discreet hum of voices.

Tea arrived, together with a glass of fresh orange juice for Dance – ‘no cakes, thanks’ – he’d had a heavy working lunch. He looked remarkable fit. There’s an urbane charm about Dance, an easy manner coupled with a certain detachment (shades of Guy Perron?) which is very engaging.

Eight months after The Jewel in the Crown, he is due to appear in a three-part spy thriller, The Secret Servant, adapted from the book by Gavin Lyall. He plays Harry Maxim, a major in the SAS who is seconded to security at 10 Downing Street …’Not before time,’ mutters Dance, darkly, recalling the horror of recent events in Brighton.

The part appealed to him for several reasons. It was modern, not a period piece (I’ve been stuck in the late 30s and 40s for some time’), it was well written and he liked the director – and Maxim isn’t ‘romantic’ (Dance fights shy of typecasting).

‘One of his jobs is t be a sort of minder for a nuclear physicist who comes over here to deliver a lecture. He hasn’t been used to the bureaucracy of Whitehall. Men trained in the SAS are known as "grey men", because they don’t look overtly tough, or go screaming around in fast cars, or thump people over the head at the slightest excuse: they quietly go about their business.

‘But his presence rubs MI5 up the wrong way, and they don’t take too kindly to an outsider being brought in…and I can’t tell you any more without blowing the plot.’ There is a lot of tension (car chases and the like), but no ‘unnecessary’ violence, he stresses.

Gavin Lyall, though pleased enough that his book has reached the small screen, is quick to see a certain irony in the situation. In the 70s he was asked to write a TV thriller, and set to work on the characterisation. The project came to nothing, and he wasn’t paid a penny. ‘By the end of it I’d got a bunch of characters clear in my mind with nothing to do, so I wrote a book…so it’s come full circle!’

Harry Maxim is different from Lyall’s previous, ‘independent’ types of hero – ‘he’s a man who is committed’. And he considers Dance to be the ideal choice for the part. Watching Jewel one evening, he’d said to his wife (Katherine Whitehorn): ‘That guy could play Maxim.’ He suggested Dance on the phone to director Alastair Reid, a few days later. Reid replied: ’I sent him the script three days ago!’

The Secret Servant marks a relatively new departure for Dance, whose previous experience of the thriller genre was ‘a cough and a spit in a Bond film’, plus an appearance in The Professionals. His most recent TV role was that of an army officer in a Play for Today called Rainy Day Women last April.

Guy Perron, I suggest, must have been an exceptionally hard act to follow. ‘In almost any job – unless it’s a job you hate – you get withdrawal symptoms. Jewel took nearly two years to make and we all got on terribly well. It was a smashing part to play and I enjoyed it enormously.’

As for India, where he spent four months filming he loved it. ‘Quite a few people hate it. It as a huge culture shock, an appetite shock. It sends your senses reeling.’

In terms of maximum exposure, Jewel was a turning point, both professionally (he was offered, and turned down, a great deal of work, mot of which he could do ‘standing on my head’), and personally: ‘My private life has been invaded a fair bit.’

He accepts this as the inevitable price of sudden celebrity: ‘We all, actors and others, have egos, and those egos like to be boosted. I don’t believe anybody who says they haven’t an ego and are not flattered by a certain amount of – attention.

‘Of course there are times when that attention isn’t particularly welcome and people can be aggressive and take liberties, because they feel they know me. To a certain extent they do, but they seem to forget that I don’t know them!’

Dance is, without doubt, a highly distinctive figure: toweringly tall, lean, elegantly handsome with sensitive features and (when he smiles, which is quite often) laughing eyes. Yet on this occasion he remains unrecognised. No one’s gaze lingers, no one seeks his autograph.

He remains gently dismissive of the image-hungry media. He’s been labelled everything from matinee idol to the thinking woman’s crumpet. Mention this fact and you can almost see him creep into his shell.

Because he’s been beavering away as an actor for so long (around 15 years), he’d like to think that all the accolades won’t turn his head. ‘You go through good phases and bad phases in this business, and this is a particularly good one at the moment. I’m under no illusions that next year could be a bad one.’

He’d had brief spells out of work and hates it, getting terribly frustrated, and mooning about…’I don’t think I can put up any more bookshelves.’ He dabbles around with music: ‘I play guitar, a little bit of piano, and that gives me great pleasure.’

Early in his career he worked as a dresser or stagehand while ‘resting’: never as a barman or waiter, ‘because you lose a sense of urgency and begin to get used to a regular wage. All that’s quite dangerous. It doesn’t do you any harm to be hungry for a bit!’

His training was fairly unorthodox. While studying graphic design he worked with a college drama group. He also knew of a couple of elderly troupers in Devon who had coached two friends of his. He spent about two years with them, and it cost him two pints of beer a lesson.

There followed that ultimate test of thespian stamina, weekly rep – 16 weeks of juvenile leads and ‘character’ roles at Colwyn Bay. It was all down to remembering the lines, avoiding the firuniture and claiming your pay packet at the end of the week.

The came the more ‘highbrow’ reps: Chichester and the Royal Shakespeare Company, where, Dance recalls, '‘you have the luxury of six, seven, or sometimes 12 weeks’ rehearsal. You learn to take a text to pieces.’

He hopes to return to the classics – ‘especially Shakespeare, because there isn’t a writer to compare…’ There are masses of parts that he burns to play. Some, like Coriolanus he has played before. Others, like Hamlet, are treats still to come.

His wife, Jo, is a keen critic, a rapid reader and absorber of scripts. He is a slow reader, not beginning to fully appreciate a play or film script until he starts work on it – ‘until then I listen to the vivrations that it makes’.

In addition to his TV role as Maxim in The Secret Servant, he has just finished filming the movie of David Hare’s successful stage play, Plenty (adapted by Hare for the big screen), in which he plays Meryl Streep’s husband (‘a character with all the inhibitions of a public-school-educated diplomat’). Streep, he enthuses, was ‘terrific to work with, a very gifted lady’.

Most of the filming took place in London, plus a week in Tunisia and a week in Brussels. ‘The more film I do the more I love the process of film-making: the whole ritual, the patching together. It’s a fascinating medium.

‘The director of Plenty is a man who likes to do take after take after take, and I’ve rarely had that luxury before. Meryl Streep and I had a scene of two-and-a-half pages of dialogue, and we did 27 takes. I felt like I’d played The Ring cycle after it!’

He tried to be as disciplined as he can. He rarely drinks, dislikes watching TV and goes to bed ‘bloody early’: 9.30-ish, to be fresh for a 5.30 am start during filming.

One of his hobbies is giving up smoking. ‘It’s a ridiculous, stupid habit, but I started when I was a choirboy of 13 behind the vestry and it’s very difficult to break. I try not to [smoke], because this is a very demanding profession. Our emotions, mentality, physique, are all we have to work with. Unlike a painter, who has brushes and paint, or a musician, who has his instrument and his music, this [expansive gesture towards chest] is all we’ve got.’

Dance believes that acting is – or should be – about taking risks, accepting challenges. It can never be just a job. It’s a way of life, and personal glory means selfishness, because finally you do have to look after Number One. ‘It’s you who’s up there, on the line, either making a great success of it or a total ass of yourself, and if people don’t like it, it’s you who suffers.’

His principal retreat is his North London home and his family (the Dances have two children: Oliver, 11, and Rebecca, four). His social life consists mainly of fellow actors…’We’re all racked with insecurity, and we tend to cling together. The turnover of people one meets in a year is phenomenal…One moves among a succession of "families" all the time.’

He says he’s a typical Libran: ’I go as high up as I do down.’ But you will never find him sitting waiting for the phone to ring: that’s not his style. ‘I never sit waiting for anything. I’ll always find something to do. There are millions of books to be read in this world. I go out and run a lot, play tennis, pound away…

‘One hopes the phone is going to be ringing, or a script is going to arrive – and invariably it does, usually when you think you can’t get any lower, or the overdraft can’t get any bigger.’