THE. WORLD -- and the world is Hollywood and America's favourite maiden aunt -- does so adore a haughty-looking Englishman. Up until the late 70s this predilection had been well catered for with the likes of the great George Sanders and Edward Fox. But suddenly, it seemed as if our picture industry was running out of such hoity-toity actors; the well of upper-crust thespian talent -- alas! alarum! -- was running dry. To the rescue then a triumvirate of noble and boyish-looking men, firm of lip and feature. English chaps able to feign that snooty English reserve, or whatever it is, effortlessly. Step forward Anthony Andrews, Jeremy Irons and Charles Dance. Now all in their fashionable forties and all affected, effete, somewhat annoying, perhaps, but British. Hurrah!

Anthony is the youngest of the three and yet he was first off the mark appearing, in the mid-70s, in a pair of splendid films that helped to make the British film industry the global force it is today. I am speaking, of course, of 'Take Me High', a Cliff Richard "musical" in which Anthony portrayed a snob (we'd call his character a "yuppie" nowadays) who looked down his long nose at Cliff's "swinging" ways, and of 'Percy's Progress', all about a penis transplant (what a hoot), in which Anthony had to raise an imperious eyebrow at the hilarious double-entendre-style antics of Elke Sommer, James Booth and Adrienne Posta et al. But it was on the telly, in 'Danger UXB', that Anthony really came into his own as a thoroughly and unavoidably English fellow. As a subaltern who kept thwacking a baton against his thigh, fiddling about with the timing devices of Jerry bombs in Blitz-torn London, and whizzing about in his sporty jalopy with Judy Geeson in tow, Anthony was plummy and plucky to the very marrow i.e. any old dolt with a well-heeled accent could have done it just as well. And then came.,.Brideshead Revisited in which Anthony Andrews was paired vith a relative newcomer i.e. Jeremy Irons. Anthony blubbed and fondled his teddy bear in typical doomed playboy style, Jeremy was wet as Charles Ryder, they both showed us their bottoms and were upstaged hugely by old timers Claire Bloom and dear, dear Larry (and an ancient pile called Castle Howard).

Brideshead, and the contemporaneous The French Lieutenant's Woman, in which Jeremy dithered about seemingly uncertain whether he was supposed to be seducing Meryl Streep or collecting fossils in Lyme Regis, made a rising star of the "smouldering" Irons, for some reason. It did not, unhappily, do the same for Tony, whose greatest artistic coups since have been falling off horses and being thoroughly British in a dreadful TV movie of Ivanhoe and acting the thoroughly British fop in a dreadful TV movie of The Scarlet Pimpernel. It's not really fair, While Jeremy and Charles have become Hollywood's resident Englishmen, Tony has become the young Roger Moore and, worse, is seemingly fated to appear as a guest on Wogan waffling on about how the the-at-uh is in his blood.

Jeremy, meanwhile, is the perfect striving professional. "I'm impossible," he has boasted, "Intolerant, impatient and impossible. I'm appalled by sloppy work and if I see something done badly -- props for example -- I say so. It's what I call professionalism." Jeremy could never be accused of being "sloppy", he's so intense, If only he could simmer down a little and take notice of something he himself once said; "I dislike acting with a capital A."

He is sometimes capable of this: as the bewildered Polish -- yes, not English -- building foreman in the Channel 4-backed Moonlighting he was excellently subdued . . . but more often it is nostrils akimbo and eyes focused dreamily in the middle distance to signify something.

In Betrayal, Harold Pinter's irksome and dreary middle-class "eternal triangle" "drama" (related backwards, from end to beginning, because Pinter, now he's lost his way with words, likes to tinker with time; yes, that's his gimmick -- q.v. The French Lieutenant's Woman), Irons was all but useless as the lover. Did he really hanker after Patricia Hodge? One wouldn't have imagined so, given that distracted look, those la-di-da sighs, the nuance of his living eyebrows. He was Acting. In Swann In Love, more Acting, Proustian spruce meaning and sodomy and a ghastly mistake. As Father Gabriel in the overblown The Mission, he evidently drew on his early stage experience playing John the Baptist in that toe-tapping "musical" Godspell to make himself all vapid-eyed and "mystical"; in Dead Ringers, yes, well, he was a little bit creepy as the twins but, though he said he had "acted his socks off", he wasn't doing anything that loopy-expert Herbert Lom hadn't done much better 41 years before in Dual Alibi (and let us not forget Bette Davis' bravura twin performance in, um, Dead Ringer, 1964). Largely thanks to Jeremy's socking Acting, Dead Ringers was David Cronenberg's least effective film since his student efforts, Stereo and Crimes Of The Future. Put a Jeremy Irons -- a thoroughly British chap -- in Shivers (upper class parasite lodges in English throat), he might contrive to ruin that, too . . .And with Danny The Champion Of The World, well, Jeremy confesses that he wasn't even trying. He was exhausted from Acting the twins for Cronenberg and Hollywood, and he considered the Danny's dad role "not exciting", so he "played it like a $30-a-day actor". Um, where is your "impossible" insistence on "professionalsm" here, Jerry? Jerry?

Look, reader! I am running out of space and I have scarcely mentioned little (six foot three) Charlie Dance, Johnny-come-lately to the toff throng. And Charlie is the most thoroughly British of all. He's the one they called "the thinking woman's crumpet" because he had those hooded eyelids and that imposing nose and that cut glass voice and the face of the archetypal Romantic Englishman in TV's The Jewel In The Crown (upstaged by old-timer Peggy Asheroft). How does Charlie's career glitter? Dustily. Please, a most unlikely reporter-hero in TV's The Last Day (written by reporter-hero John Pilger), devastatingly English and Acting to the hilt as Raymond Brock in Plenty (though this proves he must be a proper actor because Meryl Streep was in it), laughable as the biggest cad in the laughable White Mischief, a hopeless villain with a goatee beard in Eddie Murphy's execrable The Golden Child, over-the-top in fedora with cigar in a preposterous caricature of D.W. Griffith in Good Morning Babylon . . . No, it's not really working for Charles Dance. He looks like a parrot. They turned him down for James Bond, and he said, in sub-Etonic drawl, cutting off ample nose to spite the "aristocratic" face, "Well, Bond is pretty two-dimensional".

"I want to be in demand until I am Sir John Gielgud's age," Charlie Dance has said. God forbid. Jeremy Irons has directed a hapless video featuring Carly Simon. Anthony Andrews, bless him, has done neither. They've all got dashed silly names, these professional Englishmen (apart from Tony), so move over the lot, the shower of you. Here comes . . . Kenneth Brannagh!!!!!!

© 1986-ish Empire

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