Charles Dance: From builder’s labourer with a stammer to Tywin Lannister

0:02This is a Global Player original podcast.

0:12Hello and welcome to Full Disclosure, a podcast project conceived entirely to let me spend more time than I'd ever get on the radio with interesting people. And I hope you're not offended, Charles Dance, when I tell you that I didn't actually realise just how interesting you are. good lord um well i'm i hope you're not going to be disappointed but i'm definitely not going to be disappointed i was i mean i was familiar with the career of course um although perhaps not the full depth and breadth of it but but i i didn't um know anything at all about your journey into acting and and i i know i can tell from interviews that i've read with you in the past um you find it quite frustrating that people presume that your background matches some of of the most famous characters you've played.

0:55Well, it's not that it's frustrating. It's that, I mean, I just feel obliged to correct people who have an opinion of me based on something, on lies that they've read, you know. So it's this idea that you're the sort of love child of the Duke of Windsor and so on. Quite, yeah. Because it was humble beginnings. In Redditch, of all places, it was just up the road from where I grew up in Kidderminster. Well, actually, Red Knoll. Oh, OK. Well, that same neck of the woods, though. Yeah. Yes. Like between Red Knoll and Bromsgrove. Yes, I know it very well. Yeah. Near Chattersley Corbett. Really? Yes.

1:34Which is the name of, if I ever write a book about a fictional 19th century detective, he will be called Chattersley Corbett. Oh, OK. You should. Please write it. But you weren't there for long. Well, no, because my father died when I was three and a half, I think. And mum married the lodger. And moved down to just outside Plymouth, actually. I presume you can't remember your old man. I can't. I have a vague image of this man in a raincoat. He was bald, tall, bald-headed, with a raincoat, carrying some kind of briefcase. And I was playing beside the house. And there was an old Belfast sink leaning against a wall.

2:22and he came in, looked at the sink, just pulled it away from the wall and put it back. And I, as children tend to do, went and copied him and pulled this Belfast sink and it promptly fell and broke my ankle. And then there was a thing with plaster of Paris and a surgical boot, but that is my only memory. Now, I don't know whether it was my father or whether it was Edward who became my stepfather. the um the loss of your father was hardly surprising given i couldn't this is one of the things i mean about doing double takes as i research this meeting is that he fought in the war he did i didn't find that out until i did the television show who do you think you are yes somebody told me that this photograph this man in a military uniform my father suggested that he'd he'd fought in the first world war this is this uniform and this military advisor said actually no it's the boar war and i said oh my god then sorry then the ages are wrong here because my mother told me bless her that he was 59 or 60 when he died but he actually didn't have me until he was 73 gosh oh yes skeletons in closets james well and and i suppose generationally at that time your mother would have been very conscious of um what what the neighbors thought would she or that's quite a good point um yes possibly she would have been actually thinking back to various things in my time with my mother bless her and and how conscious of loss were you because that's very very young and it seems as if your stepfather stepped into the breach quite gamely indeed well my mother did say when your father died i had 10 bob left in the world dear it is so at odds with the patrician sort of misrepresentation of you isn't it it's eggwood stepped into the breach yes but i have no memory of being told my father had died no memory of a funeral i don't know whether he's buried or cremated really or no absolutely nothing and there's no sense i mean a therapist would ask if there was any sort of gap or absence inside you or any sense of well i've had therapy a couple of times um we haven't i mean that is an area that really i would quite like to dive into although and i don't want to digress too much but by my digress away oh okay when there was a wonderful researcher when i did who do you think yeah my brother and I don't share the same father he wasn't told that by my mother this is Michael until six months before she died and came home I've got something to tell you dear and he wrote to me and he was in the Navy at the time and like a lot of military people a lot of the writing was to do with military exercise and manly stuff.

5:37Not much to do with emotions. Do you know? As a postscript at the end of a letter. By the way, at the age of whatever it was, I've just found out I'm a bastard. And I thought, what was this? And I rang him up. And he said, yeah, mum came round. She had got something to tell you. And she told me. So I said, who is my father? and he said she either didn't know or couldn't remember. Oh, bless. Gosh. Quite a shock. Isn't it? Now, I then, after my program, I rang up the researcher and said, look, it's probably not possible. But it'd be great because my brother, and I called him my brother because he was.

6:22He was my boyhood hero. He's 10 years older than me. And it would be great if we could find out. who his father was um and so anyway by virtue of him having a dna test and that going into this dna bank you know it's vast in a very short time we came up with two very very likely suspects one i think we could eliminate but we couldn't take it any further because the prime suspect's son is the same age as my brother he's not well in hospital his son tried to persuade him to have a dna test i think the poor man might have left us by now i mean that's as far as we got but we think that this particular one is probably father but you know i mean i found out stuff purely by looking i said you ever got your birth certificate mike you know and there is an address of where he was born which is an 88 highgate hill or something yeah well that of course was a hospital it's a hospital right it was another hospital before that before that it was the workhouse and single women having children out of wedlock the details on the birth certificate it wouldn't be St Margaret's Hospital or whatever they just gave the address so I knew where he was born I knew where my mother was living at the time but you know all the stuff about who looked after her when she was pregnant, this is 1936 when a lot of women had the children taken away from them they were put into kind of asylums or something in some cases no but she was there and she had my brother and then met my father because she was a waitress at Lyons Cornhouse she was called in they were called nippies yeah because they nipped around between the tables with trays laden with food and that's where she met my father who was was a widower although later she told me that actually he was a divorcee but I mean a lot of things she said didn't really concur with what had actually happened however there you are she sounds remarkable i mean she sounds as if she sort of almost almost assembled security with through through yeah muscle she muscularly assembled security for herself and her son very good yeah it's a very good way of putting it she was the youngest of four children and her first job was as an underhouse parlor maid at the age of 13.

9:18That's the lowest of the low, you know. That's extraordinary. The poor girl who gets up before, well, the rest of the house is still asleep, to blacken the stove and empty the grates and everything. Because she didn't have very much by way of schooling. And did she talk to you about those days much? Did she, I mean... Hardly, hardly at all. No. No. Because she'd moved far. Well, she did say that Pop, as she referred to her father, he went off to the First World War in 1914. But he didn't come back till 1920 because he was shacked up with Madame Moselle from Armitere. So it's not so much a family tree as a family arboretum.

10:01Very good. Because you also discovered, I think on who do you think you are, that you had a sister that you'd know nothing about on your father's side. Yes. Yeah. That was Nora. Yes, indeed. And when I did that show, Nonine, who is my great, great niece, who I met in Pretoria, she pulled out this trunk and opened it. I mean, stuff in there, watercolour paintings that my father had done, photographs that I'd not seen of him, plus a biography written by Sister Nora, who died in 1992, I think. Neither of us knew the other existed. no but it was done on a typewriter you know and but beautifully written i have to say and and there were chunks in there about my father of course that i didn't know and her you know and her life with him and yeah so i was able to tell my children a lot more about me than anybody else told me about me gosh how extraordinary do you allow yourself slightly I don't know what you'd call them, soppy moments.

11:13Do you imagine Nora watching you on a scroll or think she almost certainly would have seen you in something and not known who you were? Yes, I have thought of that from time to time, yeah.

11:27No indications yet of the direction that your life would take. So what was primary school like? You've relocated by now. Your mum is running a small boarding house, I think, for sort of travelling salesman. Very good. There's about three film plots here already, isn't there? You're only six. Yeah. I can remember, I can't, St. Stephen's Primary School, Saltash, which is just over the River Tamer, into Cornwall. Right. It's probably part of Greater Plymouth now, I suspect. But I can remember, the only thing I remember about that was hearing voices saying, the king's dead, the king's dead. So that is when I was there.

12:10But, I mean, did he die in 1953, 54? I think so, yes. Well, no. But that's my first memory. There's no sort of scholastic memories. There's no sort of... No. You don't... Not until we... Then we moved... I don't know whether they... They probably didn't own the boarding house for commercial travellers. But we then moved... We then were living in Plymouth. and I went to Drake Primary School. I can remember being kicked either purposely or by accident in the nose by Malcolm Timmons. I can remember his name to this day. And a teacher at the school called Mr. Palethop. And do you know the expression, it's a singer, not the song?

12:59And I found I liked Mr. Palethop and I got the impression that he liked me and we got on well. I'm what's called a late developer. I failed the 11 plus and went to an overage school. But I was recruited by the church in the local naval base, Devonport Dockyard, to be in the naval church choir because I could sing quite well. So I was a choir boy for a bit but then asked to leave because I was rather badly behaved. Another choir boy and I, we used to giggle at what people in the congregation were wearing. What did you enjoy during this sort of childhood? Art and sport. Was it games and sport and art?

13:50Games, yes, games and sport and art. I was quite good at telling stories. Okay. And I can remember being asked, oh Charles will you come and tell us a story I don't know why but I don't remember any of the stories I told but I do remember arriving a point arriving at a point when I had begun to develop a stammer and I thought I can't tell stories anymore it was about 13 when that happened yeah 14 yeah and do we know why do we have any idea why because your mum was poorly wasn't your mum had a pretty bad breakdown before that she did maybe that has something to do with it i mean she she took me to a speech therapist right and physically there was nothing wrong but that's the way my adolescence manifested itself oh of course you know with some people it's acne or badly behaved you know and it's a difficult time for those of us going through it and those of us near people going through it.

14:57And it means you can't I mean you certainly can't interact as much as you would have liked to do. No, I used to make up the most complicated sentences to get round words I couldn't manage. Oh, how interesting. I didn't want to be seen to be a stammerer. I know one or two people. One was an accountant who I don't think is with us anymore and another is a very good actor who has a stammer when he's not acting and they kind of get through it. You develop things like stamping of foot when you arrive at a word that you you know you're going to stammer on but no i used to make up these long long sentences and i've met a young actor recently a kid i worked with really talented and i thought there's something something going on here and i realized he was doing what i did then i met his father because i'd kind of put him in the direction of one or two people how I could help him and I said to his father I said so I said how long has Eddie stammered he said oh you know that I said yes I do yeah and I told him that I'm the same thing I said but I said hopefully the same thing will happen to him has happened to me that gradually by about 18 words that I had had problems with suddenly I could say I could then also perhaps talk to a girl well that's got to be a big big development hasn't it that's got to be but but so it disappeared as suddenly as it arrived almost okay well it disappeared slowly oh okay yeah yeah that must be quite torturous though because you're terrified constantly that it's going to come back oh yes oh yes and very very rarely but there are occasions when i don't know what it is but i was doing the last time it happened i was doing shadowlands sobbing my guts up eight shows a week for six months no and there was one of those nights and the thing about working in the theater if you get five nights out of eight that are good yes that's pretty good going.

17:14The three that are not so good, hopefully, probably the audience won't notice, but we notice it. Whether there's timing, it just goes off slightly. And there was one night and I started to say a sentence and there was a sound coming up and I just had to stop and I just breathed for a bit and then it was fine, but the terror, yes, I thought, oh my god. i mean it is a terrible affliction yes did you see the footage of joe biden with the little boy who had a stammer no i never did no it was a magical thing where he just really because he was a stammerer himself right biden and he did the boy's father had sort of tracked him down and almost staked out a public appearance in the hope that biden would offer some words of encouragement to his stammering son right it was a thing of it was a thing of genuine beauty it was an incredible moment okay um and and it makes acting probably the daftest possible ambition you could have developed very strange um but when i i guess i had fun at at primary school yes um there's something very poignant about kids who have a wonderful time at primary school and then get to secondary school and it's all a bit too much for them or something happens and they can't the cogs don't quite mesh in the way that they did do at primary school yeah you're conscious of that even as a youngster and then a stammer comes in and makes everything yeah yes indeed because the the the fun that i'd had yes um disappeared no and and the other thing about my my mother bless her um she she would i remember her saying sometimes stop showing off child stop showing off it's the worst thing you can say to a child it's very victoria i think you know go on show off show off more be more self-conscious she's saying be less free but very strange because she was she was so proud of my father what little she said about him was always in very glowing terms she referred to him as wd and one of the things that i have that was found in the trunk that noreen brought out was a gold medal for elocution that my father had had gosh yes and i know that he he used to do kind of apparently um humorous recitations the boys who were on the burning deck that kind of thing so he liked a bit of spotlight your mother liked that he liked it but she probably just didn't want you to be sticking your head too far above the parapet in case someone took a pop at you yeah so when did the voice appear when did your fondness for humorous recitations first well because as the stammer went the confidence came back and I was at Leicester School of Art doing graphic design and photography and there was a college theater group that I became part of because I found I was able to speak and we took we took a production to a student drama festival in Zagreb where I got the most terrible case of the shit so I remember that there but so you know I'm beginning to explore and then towards the end of my three years of a dip AD as it was called then I thought I don't want to do this I want to be an actor and I'd had a friend who I spent around about when I was 16 or 17 back in Plymouth he went to RADA he was terribly grand actually a tall very good looking guy and i can remember saying to him in my strange accent which is a cross between midlands accent and and plymouth gosh awful sound and i remember saying to him you know what are you going to do when you leave school he said i'm going to rada i didn't know what rada was i didn't know a drama school existed I said, what's that?

21:43He said, the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. I said, oh, okay. No. And then as I was leaving Leicester, when I decided I didn't want to do, I rang him up. He was spear carrying at Stratford. And said, because I knew he'd been coached by two rather extraordinary old men. Back in Plymouth? Back in Plymouth. and I said, can you give me the telephone number of the man you were coached by? So he gave me this number and I rang this number and this voice, Lottie's World 249. I said, hello, is that Mr. Bennett? Yes, who's that? I said, my name's Charles Dance, I want to go into the theatre. He said, oh God.

22:35and gave me the name and address of a pub and told me to meet him there next Wednesday. And I did. I went into, I knew where this pub was. And I'd heard about this man from Stephen. That was the name of my friend. And I walked into this pub. And I mean, this is a typical country Devon pub with spittoons on the floor and smoke. Do you remember those days? Smoke in pubs. and there sitting in the middle of the pub surrounded by a little group of young men was this chap who looked like Samuel Beckett and he peered at me over his glasses and said Charlie Dance I said yes he said give me a pint of mild boy handed me an empty glass and then dismissed these young men and then as I was filling up his glass a pint of mild I could hear Leonard got himself another young man and he got me to sit down and I sat down opposite him and he said drop your jaw boy I didn't know what he meant he said open your bloody mouth so I sat like this with him looking in my mouth and he said oh you've got a closed throat boy it's going to be a long job no he said and get your hair cut my hair then was quite long and he explained that the forehead is a third of your face so a great deal of your expression can be seen is illustrated by what happens in your forehead and he said as it is i can hardly hear you boy if i can't see you then there's no bloody point is there so get your hair cut no and i was working as a builder's laborer at the time and i did get some of it so he took you seriously immediately yeah he did actually why i i don't know i don't know maybe i gave the impression that i was really i really wanted to learn something when you rang steven i thought you were going to be asking him for advice on getting into drama school no because i knew perfectly well that there was no way that i could get into i couldn't afford i'd had a grant for three years for less you've used up your educational yeah so to speak and i thought maybe there's another way in to this what was leonard's story leonard he was an extraordinary man he lived with martin who was martin look martin was half german and Martin looked like Bertolt Brecht.

25:16What a pair. Samuel Beckett and Bertolt Brecht. Sounds like the worst musical act in history, doesn't it? They had met at York Rep about 200 years before I met Leonard. And Leonard had TB. Right. And they got out of whether they were living in London or I don't know. but they replied to an ad in the Telegraph for a gypsy caravan that was for sale. And they moved down to Devon, and there was this gypsy caravan in a field. And over a few years, they built this funny little shack of a cottage. It was like something like in deepest Provence or somewhere. It was more French than English. You'd have to have an ordnance survey map to be able to find it.

26:08and Leonard had had a he was fiercely bright he had a double first in modern languages right and he had trained with a very famous drama acting coach in Paris called Coppo and he'd gone to front wanting to learn and Coppo had said come back in six months time speaking fluent French and I'll teach you. Well, one of his degrees, so he could speak French. Anyway, this is what Leonard told me. Yes. I suspect a percentage of it is not strictly true. A bit of dramatic license. Strictly true. Yes. But, so I spent two years with both of them. Doing menial jobs. And meeting them in the pub in the evenings.

26:57Yeah, I did about two evenings a week with Leonard and I would dig the garden for Martin on Sundays. and Martin Leonard had this wonderful, wonderful voice. He'd take his teeth out because the voice was just as grand as it was. And he used to smoke jetons cigarettes. Martin didn't smoke. Martin didn't go out because he was of that generation of gay men who lived in fear of a dawn raid. And guarded their privacy. And you were aware of this. yeah a few years later Leonard did say to me you do realise that Martin and I are homosexual boy I said of course I do Leonard he said we're not gay oh that's quite oh yeah but Martin so I would get all this sort of acting stuff from Leonard and voice work because he said we've got to do something about your voice boy dreadful and Martin would I would dig the garden for him I can remember Martin sitting on an old log watching me, digging with a cigarette hanging out of my mouth.

28:08He would say, Charlie, Charlie, come and sit down, boy, sit down. He said, enjoy your cigarette, because at the moment you're not digging very well and you're not really enjoying the cigarette. He said, so smoke the cigarette and then go back to the digging. Little gems imparted. Oh, yes. Yeah. Could you feel yourself improving? Did you feel vistas opening up in front of you? Because it sounds implausible, doesn't it? Well, certainly. I was beginning to think, and I adored both of them. Yes. No. And I was, I'd never really looked at Shakespeare before. And I think one of my jobs is a plumber's mate for the Plymouth Water Board.

28:53It's a rather glamorous title, a plumber's mate. You're laboring. You dig the hole. the plumber does the skilled work and you fill the hole back up again and um and on on wet days despite the fact we had all been issued with foul weather gear most of the plumbers mate didn't want to wear that we just get sit in the van until it stopped raining and i would get out my complete works of shakespeare and sit in the corner while they were reading either the equivalent of the sun sporting life or something saying, what are you reading Charlie? What you got here? Are you reading a book boy? You know, and one grabbed the book and said, oh fucking hell, bloody Shakespeare I don't know and yeah, so I would be ribbed quite a bit But it touched you, it reached you I mean these weren't just words dancing around on a page in front of you No Because you had such good tutors you connected with the text Yeah, yeah, yeah.

29:55And it was to do with technique. One of the first things we worked on with Julius Caesar, and he'd said to me, I said, I want you to learn Mark Antony, boy. I said, which bit? He said, all of it.

30:09So by next week, I'd learned a fair bit. And we were working on a speech of Mark Antony's. When did you start thinking, or perhaps they decided, Leonard decided that it was time to actually roll the dice well we got to a point over about two years this is a mad apprenticeship isn't it, absolutely bonkers fantastic but you knew in your bones it was working well the first job I got I was a dresser on Fiddler on the Roof I dressed all the chorus boys on that what theatre was that at? Her Majesty's in the bottom of the hay market. So how did you get that? Was that an advert in the stage? He put me in touch with the production manager that he knew in the West End.

31:01So I got this young man to sort him out, give him a job or something. So I was a dresser, I think for 16 pounds a week then or something, you know. But I was in a theatre. And that was it? He said to me, he said, when you're out of work, boy, don't drive a cab or work as a barber. and do something inside a theatre. Again, very good advice. Be in there. Be with, watch other actors, you know. Yeah. So there's no, I'm not sensing that you had any, because that's good advice, but at the same time, you might not want to be not acting in a theatre. You might not want the other actors to see you not acting in a theatre, to see you doing a job that's not acting.

31:40You didn't have any, you were just really hungry for experiences. You weren't second-guessing anything or just so grateful to be there that you weren't? Sure, yeah. I bought a copy of The Stage, which is a trade newspaper. As you say about The Stage, nobody confesses to buying it, but all will admit to reading it. And there are the back painters, you know. There'd be all sorts of people from variety artists to, you know, magicians, conjurers, It was a lot of unexpectedly vacant till 1986 or something, you know. And there was an ad for a provincial theatre, yes. The Prince of Wales Theatre, Colwyn Bay, looking for actors for a season, a repertory season.

32:31And it was weekly rep. What year was this? This is the early 70s now, is it? Or there or thereabouts? Late 60s? Late 60s. and there's no sense yet Charles of you thinking that it's a world that's impossible to get into there's a there's a sort of rather neat progression here a perfectly plausible ambition which is not true it's not a plausible ambition for someone who's just left art college and moved back to Plymouth it's one of the or someone who had a stammer and then is knocking about with two old boys who um are offering a very unconventional tutelage and yet there's no sense at all of you being overawed by it or thinking oh this is never going to happen it's quite a natural progression no i i i was i was i was determined yes that's all and i had confidence they had they gave me confidence when i lacked in experience they gave me confidence and i knew that they had taught me stuff about the technique as no coward is well worn phrase of no cowards learn the lines and avoid the furniture yes you know i made the mistake of saying to leonard and one week talking about something we were working on and i said you know what's my motivation he said your pay packet at the end of the week boy you know and it was to do with technique and also knowing when you're bad it was one week when i thought i've been pretty bloody good you know and i ran leonard back from the back room of a pub yeah to their little cottage and he got out of my minivan and said um you don't realize how bad you are do you boy see you next week and bang shut the door on christ yes but very important because you know we are surrounded by people who say wonderful yes yes yes i'm going to jump forward a bit because i just want to know and i don't want the interview to end before i've asked you did did he witness much of your success um he well kind of leonard came to see a production of three sisters in which i played solioni um at the greenwich theater he came to see that that's the only time he saw me doing something on the stage they didn't have a television so they didn't know see me in the jewel in the crown which was my break but they He certainly read about it.

34:57But when he... So he knew. He knew that he'd set you on a path to stardom. Yes. Well, what they said, I mean, the most lavish praise they ever gave me was not bad. Not bad, boy. Not bad. And how did your mum process it all? Oh, she was very proud. Of course she was. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But, you know, I mean, it wasn't... And they also, Leonard said, you know, the thing about you, Charlie, is that you work. You're a hard worker. Yes. No. Because this is what I wanted to do. Yes. And when I got my first job in a theatre, I felt I'd come home. I was with people who had the same drive or the same, I don't know, I'm struggling, not necessarily ambition and ambition wasn't in my head no i sensed that i wasn't thinking just wanted to be at the party didn't you didn't really i was just i was having a ball you found your tribe as well yes yeah very good yes thank you you found your people yes

36:08let's back up a bit from from colwyn bay is it is it is it a gradual rise you've you've jumped ahead to jewel in the crown which changed everything I think but without ambition except I think you had ambition for work but not for fame or glory you just wanted better jobs I presume yeah yes I knew I had to get an agent I can't remember the name of the first agent I had but he was in the small office at the top of a very steep staircase it's always a small office at the top of a very steep staircase in a back street just off the Strand yes an amazing He had an old basset hand that smelt. I remember that.

36:51But then I did a tour of a play called It's a Two Foot Six Inches Above the Ground World. The title alludes to the height of the average person's genitalia from the ground. Okay. Every day is a school day. Indeed. I was an acting ASM, and then they promoted me to acting DSM, Deputy State's Pundit, because I had an old car. I could drive around and get props and things like that. And I had a few lines. Then I think I was back. I was a stagehand on Canterbury Tales for a while in The Flies. So you really would take the jobs, even when you weren't acting? Yes, yeah, absolutely. That was rare, wasn't it?

37:32There weren't many people who were quite as unproud, I suppose. I don't know. I just think they weren't as well advised as I was. No, I agree. I agree with you. It clearly worked. And when did you start getting the kind of parts that meant you didn't have to be the stage manager anymore or the deputy stage manager? Well, I did a pantomime. I was the principal boy. It does happen sometimes. Yes, of course. The principal boy was played by a male in Sleeping Beauty, I think. And that was decent money. And that was reasonably good money. But, you know, I mean, twice a day. Yes. seven days a week my god you learn and and did you form did you i mean this relationship between the work and the reward did you think i need to be on the telly or or because that is the next chapter in my story that's the next stage on this trajectory no no i never thought like that actually and I don't know how my first television job came up.

38:39I don't know how that happened. And it was Edward VII. And that, up until then, period drama was the prerogative of the BBC. And this was ITV, and with Timothy West as Edward VII. And I played the Duke of Clarence, who was one of the likely suspects, or unlikely suspect of the identity of Jack the Ripper. Yes, I remember. Which did prompt me I went down to the East End and I went to all the sites and I thought I'd do a bit of research. That was my first experience of getting a part. I thought, well, I can find out about this man. But that was my first television. And I did enjoy that. I liked the business of being on a set.

39:33right you know and now but i was never driven unlike because i'm now at the age i'm either playing fathers or grandfathers and i'm working with actors in their 20s of either sex yes my god the ambition and you know and getting something that's going to give them a lot of exposure take that exposure get on a play go off to la or wherever and be a movie star yes i was i never I had that cardinal ambition. And yet it happened, didn't it? Yeah, kind of, James. Well, come on. I'm a working actor. I know you are. I'm not a movie star, you know. No, but you have, no, okay, but you know, Eddie Murphy, Arnold Schwarzenegger, I mean, during that period of your life, you were making films with the biggest stars on the planet.

40:25Yeah. And then, of course, there's the sort of second wind that comes with Game of Thrones. A whole new generation are exposed to it. begins with jewel in the crown when when you were 37 already this next it says here right okay um and and and by by now and i know you find this mildly annoying but you understand why people are curious about it had you accepted now that you were more likely to be cast as someone from several rungs up the social ladder than you actually came from it's just that something about your face or your because i know you've played all sorts of parts yes but some of the biggest ones have been borderline aristocratic, haven't they?

41:06Yeah, yeah. I remember saying to Robert Altman when we did Gosford Park, I said Bob, I should be downstairs. He said no. Did you tell me my mum used to be downstairs? Not with that face, Charles. Yeah, yeah. Okay, you know. Yes, I have more or less accepted it. Or occasionally, you know. I get the opportunity to be a bit gallblimey. Yeah. you know but and and the parts i mean oh there was the period in stratford wasn't there with the trevor actors and the terry actors and yes you were a terry actor not very much so yeah that was the difference between the toffs and the non-toffs yeah yeah um that must have been you know we in those days the rsc you were part of a family it was rather wonderful actually and I learned a phenomenal amount and I understudied Alan Howard who was a fantastic actor, Alan and I used to listen to him playing with his voice hitting another note pushing it and learning Shakespeare so fast he would cram it in and because I was his understudy I would help him with his lines but he'd just get it into his head and then once it's in your head then you can play with it whereas if you don't do that and you're the kind of actor who likes to learn during rehearsals then you spend a lot of time trying to remember a line rather than working out what to do with it yes you know i could hear leonard then yes indeed you could hear echoes oh yes echoes of the plymouth pub um and and you you you smash it i mean you You play Henry V, I think, in 1975.

42:49You're on an RST tour that goes to New York. You are, you've earned your spurs long before you become a household name in normal households. You're known to theatre audiences. I guess so. I mean, I don't know whether we can ever earn our spurs, but yeah, I suppose so. You're playing big, big parts in big productions. Yes, okay. With big companies. All right, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, okay. And was that satisfying? Oh, yes, of course. Oh, yeah. Yeah. But did you ever form because ambition fascinates me because it comes and goes. Some people have loads. Some people don't have any, as you've touched on with younger actors.

43:25Did you have parts that you wanted? Do you think I'd love to have a go at Coriolanus one day? Oh, yes. Oh, yeah. And I got to the point where I was I felt a bit like I was banging on the stable door. Yeah. You know, I can run now. and I was the first I did I did Coriolanus the play twice and played a Phidias which is Coriolanus' adversary when Alan was doing Coriolanus and I was understudying Alan and playing a Phidias and then I went back to the RSC in 1988-89 to play Coriolanus myself which was fantastic it's my favourite play it's one of mine actually because there's there's hardly any subtext yeah there it is and it's it's all there it's all there yeah yeah and I love the political plays I like Meninius as well in that oh fantastic dear old Graham Crowden bless him he's no longer with us he's the most wonderful Meninius yeah speaking of of fellow cast members we should mention that the production you're in at the moment sees you on stage with two of your Jewel in the Crown co-stars for the first time in a very long time Geraldine James and Nicholas Farrell indeed are in um the Strindberg that's tribe again isn't it that's nice people who you'd like working with and coming back round again years decades later Geraldine and I had worked together after the jewel in the crown but not in a very substantial way and we talked and said you know we'd have lunch and time to time and said great if we could find something to do together and I I don't know whether it's my agent or Tom Littler, who runs the wonderful Orange Street Theatre in Richmond, whether it was his idea.

45:13But he said, do you know this play? It's a Strindberg play called Creditors. I didn't know it. And I read it and thought, my God, this is an extraordinary play. And then found out a bit about Strindberg. And then agreed to do it with Geraldine. And Geraldine had done it before, many, many years ago, but I actually couldn't remember anything about it. And it was a different adaptation. This was adapted by Howard Brenton. And brilliant. And we thought, well, how about Nick Farrell playing the younger man? So, yes, we came together. But Nick and I both independently had decided that we were going to learn this before we started rehearsals.

45:53Because I was terrified. It's 15 years since I'd done a play. And I think, you know, when I'm 79 now, I think, you know, how's the brain working? So I packed the lines in like Alan Howard used to do, crammed them in. How do you pick a job now at this stage? Because I presume you get offered quite... Because people say to me, you've made some interesting choices. Very, very rarely am I given a choice. Should I do this job, that job or that job? The choice is either to work or not work. Is it? Absolutely, yeah. I'm very envious of actors who say, oh, I don't know what to do. I've had four offers.