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?
A handful of older, romantic leading men, like Sean Connery, Jack Nicholson, and Robert Redford are still landing parts.
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.
I phoned this number and said, Please, sir, I want to be an actor.
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.
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.
I was full of trepidation when I started filming Plenty. It is much bigger-league than anything I've done before. I'm working with Meryl and Fred, who've been part of that league for some time.
I'd had a career playing mostly romantic leading men and there is an optimum age for those characters-around 40, tops.
I'm playing one of the principal roles, which gives you more clout and more confidence.
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.
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.
Most films are written and made with a hero around 35, or even 25.
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.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw my head of department sidling into his office, his hand over his face, moaning softly.
The more time I spent reading plays, the less time I spent behind a drawing board.
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.
We had five goats, two dogs, a cat and racks of commentaries on Shakespeare.
When you get to a certain age, the work begins to thin out.
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.
You have to attempt to be objective about yourself.
You have to be selfish to be an actor.
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.
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