The flowers and the whisky were welcoming gifts from Plenty's director, Fred Schepsi (‘and much appreciated,’ Dance adds) and, together with the film company limousine, they were confirmation of Dance's newly acquired star status.

Not since the days of Richard Todd, Anthony Steel and Dirk Bogarde has Britain been rich in male film stars. Now that Jeremy Irons is established as this generation's Dirk Bogarde, passionate but sensitive (or vice versa), along comes Charles Dance, more in the Todd, Steel or even young Richard Burton mould.

He not only won the hearts of Britain's women as Guy Perron in The Jewel in the Crown but also came to the attention of Meryl Streep, who watched some of the series in a New York viewing theatre and proclaimed herself satisfied with what she saw. Dance became her Plenty co-star and the flowers, the limos and the interviews followed as the night follows the day.

Momentary bemusement apart, Dance regards it all with much the same mildly ironic detachment he brought to the character of Guy Perron.

‘I was full of trepidation when I started Plenty but not any more,’ he says three weeks into filming. ‘It is a much bigger league than anything I've done before. I'm working with people like Meryl and Fred who've been part of that league for some time.

‘I'd only ever done one film before – a Bond film which I hated – and there's a big difference between fronting a successful TV series and almost fronting a big film with world sales and huge amounts of money at stake. At the same time, I'm going into this one playing one of the principal roles which gives you more clout and more confidence.

‘My job as an actor remains the same but you can't just go in and do it without being aware of all the other things that surround it. It's a question of keeping one's eyes and ears open and watching how other people play the game. They're watching me too, to see what my attitude is like. A car to pick me up every day, a chair with my name on it, everybody being very polite. . .what can you do except sit back and watch it all, try to take it all in?’

Dance grins and gets up to lend a helping hand to three-year-old Rebecca as she toddles around the pocket garden. He has an easy physical confidence, combining a prop forward's physique with the good looks of a subaltern (in fact, his brother is a career naval officer). Both he and Joanna come from Plymouth and, if Dance wasn't an actor, it isn't hard to imagine them living the provincial life of dinner parties and yacht club socials. Dance once organised a hop at a sailing club in his capacity as Plymouth Art School's social secretary.

The future Mr and Mrs Dance went out for about 18 months together in Plymouth before Dance left for Leicester to study graphic design while Joanna went to Winchester to study painting and sculpture.

It's a safe bet that Mrs Dance noticed Mr Dance first rather than the other way around. Anticipating his later appeal, the teenage Charlie was a local heart-throb who hung out in a sin pit known as the El Sombrero coffee bar.

‘Being three years younger I was still at school,’ recalls Joanna Dance, ‘and I used to have junior art classes on Saturdays. I had friends who'd say “take off your beret and come to the El Sombrero” – where we were forbidden to go – and “Have you seen Charlie Dance and his clothes?” He was quite a snappy dresser. He had a herringbone tweed suit which was quite famous among our contemporaries.’

Despite his connection with the El Sombrero. Charles seemed set for an all too respectable career in graphic design. A psychological stammer (so he can't have been that confident) had kept him away from amateur acting for some years. When it vanished as suddenly as it had come, he threw himself into college drama.

‘The more time I spent reading plays, the less time I spent behind a drawing board. These days, I hate the smell of cow gum, the jargon, the talk about type sizes. In those days I wasn't bad at it, I just wasn't interested.’ At his diploma show, the assessor asked him what he wanted to be and he said an actor. ‘Out of the corner of my eye I saw my head of department sidling into his office, his hand over his face, moaning softly.’

So far, so average for many actors but it is what happened next which makes Dance's career so – well, so weird. Rather than finding his way to drama school he turned up two local Devon characters, Leonard Bennett and Martin Burkhardt, who taught acting on a basis more reminiscent of the 19th than the 20th century.

‘I phoned this number and said, “Please, sir, I want to be an actor,” and this voice boomed over the line, “Oh God! Do you know the Royal Oak? Be there next Wednesday 7pm sharp. Don't be late!”

’I went and there was this huge man in a battered suit with a couple of mangy dogs by his side and a pint of mild in his fist. I knew Leonard immediately although I'd never met him. He beckoned me over – “Buy me another drink, boy!” I did that and sat down. “Drop your jaw, boy!” “What?” “Open your bloody mouth!” So I opened it with all the inhibitions of adolescence and heard the locals around me whispering to one another “Oh yes, Leonard's got himself another young man.” He peered in my mouth and said, “You've got a closed throat! We'll have to do something about that!” ’

Bennett took Dance on, charging him two pints of mild per lesson which he held in an old printing works behind the pub. ‘He used to go outside and I'd hear the noise of his urine drumming against the galvanised iron walls and his voice booming out, “Go back to the first line, boy!” ’

Bennett hald been an actor (one of his claims to fame was having introduced the young Peter Finch to Laurence Olivier) and his friend Burkhardt was a man of the theatre who had worked with the Berliner Ensemble. Their cottage, filled with ‘five goats, two dogs, a cat and racks of commentaries on Shakespeare’ became Dance's antechamber to a new life.

After 18 months of tuition, Bennett took Dance to London and got him a job as a dresser in the West End. Joanna finished her studies as a sculptor and came too.

Weekly rep in Coiwyn Bay was the next step followed, at some remove, by stints with prestigious companies like Chichester, Robin Phillip's company at Greenwich and the RSC (for whom he made a memorable Coriolanus on tour). But it was The Jewel in the Crown which changed things for him and not solely his status as an actor.

‘You can't spend as long as we did in India without being overwhelmed. And changed. Something like that is so big and so full of contradictions. I tried to keep a diary but writing isn't one of my skills and also there was no way of presenting a true picture.

‘Your senses are reeling all the time. Finally you find something to write and the very next day you go out and see something else which totally contradicts what you've written and every conclusion you've come to. The experience did something to me, I think – I hope it did – I'm not totally aware of what it did but I know it happened.’

Following Jewel's run on Granada TV Dance was deluged with fan mail (‘Women wrote some extraordinary things,’ says Joanna with an edge to her voice) and scripts alike. He answered every letter himself and turned down most of the scripts. However he did get some advice from his Los Angeles agent who told him, ‘Charles, you're moving into a whole new ball-game where there are no rules.’

That may be true, he feels, but he's lucky enough to open the new innings on his home ground. Plenty is the film version of the hit play by David Hare. It's being shot on location in London, far from the razzmatazz of Hollywood and it has the kind of weight and serious commitment to the work Dance is used to from the RSC and British television. He plays Brock, the long-suffering diplomat-husband of the wayward and dissatisfied Susan (Meryl Streep).

Says Dance, ‘Brock is prep school, public school, possibly university, diplomatic service – the kind of character often written and played in a rather two-dimensional, stiff-upper-lip way – a stock character to be made fun of. But that's not the way David (Hare) has written Brock or the way I'm going to play him.’

Dance's mother died recently but she lived long enough to see her son succeeding in a job she ‘saw as glamorous in the way people who don't work in show business tend to see it.’ Dance himself has no such illusions but he seems happy to live and work without them.

He may find being a star strange but, apart from a tendency to startle stage and film designers with his knowledge of their business, he is not likely to let it go to his head.

‘You have to be selfish to be an actor,’ he feels, ‘but you have to attempt to be objective about yourself as well. If I talk about Charles Dance I am talking about something else, something I operate and wind up and have to make an impression with and use to transmit someone else's screenplay or stage play.’

Besides, if it should all fall apart tomorrow he knows he could succeed in other fields.

‘I was a window dresser for Burton's once. What really put me off was the area manager coming round and saying, “Charles, I think you're a natch at this.” ’

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