Dance steps behind the camera

It was a starry, starry night in Sicily. The film was being shown outdoors in an amphitheatre seating 3,000 people on a screen the size of the House of Commons, with Mount Etna glowing away in the distance.

"It was heady stuff and the audience loved it," recalls actor Charles Dance, talking about the Taormino Film Festival screening of Ladies In Lavender, which marks his debut as a writer and director.

"And at the Toronto Film Festival, the response was overwhelming and picked up the kind of reviews I could have written myself, or at least paid someone else to write for me."

Heady stuff indeed, but as he knows only too well, the movie world isn't all glitz and glamour. Sometimes it's a faded hotel in Manchester, his latest stopover on a tour of key cities to promote the film which stars a pair of Dames, Judi Dench and Maggie Smith.

His directorial debut moved from page to screen relatively quickly, despite the financial hassles that dog most British movies. Unlike an actor, a director's work is never done, what with editing, dubbing and publicising the product long after the actors have gone home.

"It would be foolish of me not to do it," says Dance of his regional tour. Especially, you should add, because the reasons the story attracted him are the same things that don't make it any easy sell to audiences.

Set in a Cornish fishing village in the 1930s, the story has the lives of spinster sisters (Dench and Smith) upset after finding a Polish man washed up on the beach below their house.

A fairy tale quality was one of the attractions of the original short story. "It's character-driven, not plot-driven and set in a part of England that I know very well. It also deals with feelings and emotions that mainstream cinema would have us believe are only experienced in 15 to 21-year-olds," explains Dance.

"People haven't seen anything like it for some time. There's a market out there that's not being catered for very much. Lots of films are being churned out with the elements to be marketed relatively easily without making too much noise," he says.

The profile of his Ladies In Lavender will get a boost by being chosen as this year's Royal Film. The Queen is going to see it on Monday and Dance says: "I have a sneaking feeling that she will like it."

He first came across William J Locke's short story in a book being used to dress the set of a film he was making in Prague. Between takes, he read the story and later began adapting it. Directing was always in his mind. "I'd been thinking about it for a while, almost every job I do I think, 'Would I shoot it like that?'," he says.

"I'd written a couple of things before, none of which I thought were good enough. When I found this funny little story, I thought that would work really well. I got through about four drafts before I talked to my producer partner, Nick Brown."

He'd already mentioned it to Judi Dench, who said she liked the sound of it. Later, Maggie Smith signed up too. Without them, he doubts if the project would have got off the ground.

The film has been sold around the world, except to the biggest market, North America. Distributors there are waiting to see the reception over here. Dance has a vested interest in seeing these Ladies go abroad - he deferred 80 per cent of his salary until a US sale is made.

His formidable list of stage credits includes leading roles at the Royal Shakespeare Company, but he hasn't thought about directing for the theatre. "I don't know that I'm bright enough. The most successful theatre directors are really very intelligent people. They have a far better intellect and are better read than I am," he says.

"I didn't have to do very much in the way of directing with the great Dames, other than to create the right environment where they could give of their formidable best. I know the kind of directors I like to work with and what I respond to best, and that's what I tried to emulate."

In the past, he's played two of cinema's great directors - Sergei Eisenstein and D W Griffith - but for him "Robert Altman is a kind of god as far as I'm concerned because he loves actors and anyone that loves actors is on my Christmas card list".

He found it odd going on the set without spending time in make-up, but didn't miss acting. The whole business of being a director was energising and better than he anticipated. "I though I'd be so completely knackered at the end of the day that I wouldn't stay the course, but the days sped by," he says.

He resisted emulating Hitchcock by appearing in his own film. The only suitable role was the village doctor but once David Warner - "the Hamlet of his generation" - was cast, there was nothing left for Dance apart from being the voice reading the weather forecast on the wireless at the start of the movie.

Lack of good acting roles in general was one reason for moving to directing. "You can't sit around and wait for the work to come," he says, "The older you get, the work begins to thin out because the prime time for screen acting is 20 to 35, perhaps even younger. These days I tend to get offered telly cameos and, every now and again, something of substance comes along."

His credits range from acclaimed TV dramas, such as The Jewel In The Crown and First Born, to Hollywood blockbusters Last Action Hero and Golden Child, as well as British movies such as Gosforth Park and Pascali's Island.

One recent screen role was in Ali G Indahouse. He raises his eyes when the title is mentioned. He and Michael Gambon agreed to do the film on an "I will, if you will" basis, although he's not dismissive of the movie because it was a comedy, which he doesn't get offered much. A pity, he feels, because he thinks he's quite good at it.

He got to show his comic side on stage as one of the surprise guests in performances of the Morecambe and Wise-inspired hit The Play What I Wrote. "That was enormous fun," he says. So much so that he, Jerry Hall and Roger Moore toured with the production. "I hadn't been on the road for a while. It wasn't exactly hard work but enormously rewarding."

Since completing Ladies In Lavender, he's returned to acting with roles in two BBC dramas, William Golding's At The Ends Of The Earth, shot in South Africa, and Fingersmith, adapted from the novel by Tipping The Velvet author Sarah Waters. Other acting roles are lined up - playing the Prime Minister in a C4 political thriller and a film directed by another actor-turned-director Dennis Hopper.

Dance isn't tempted to abandon acting altogether for writing and directing, although he has a couple of ideas "buzzing around in my head".

Being an actor has taken him all over the world, seeing more in 35 years than his brother in the Navy. But he chose not to do what other British actors might have done and go to America after Jewel In The Crown. He made US films with Shirley MacLaine and Eddie Murphy in the wake of the success of the TV series but returned home afterwards. "I was there for about six months. I guess the opportunity was there after Jewel but I was not sufficiently ambitious. And at the time I had quite young children and didn't want to disrupt their education."

He hasn't worked in the US for about ten years, since playing the bad guy opposite Arnold Schwarzenegger in Last Action Hero. A good experience? "It was all right. Arnie's a nice guy, although I'm not sure about him being President."

* Ladies In Lavender (PG) opens in cinemas on Friday.