“I suspect the end result is going to be special,” he says.He thanks you all for his recent birthday present – a first-edition copy of Long Day’s Journey Into Night plus an original, Broadway programme! Bloody hell, you’re not stingy, cheapskate, Ferrero Rocher people, are you? “Fantastic gift,” he says.Kimberly, he says his house in Somerset (which as you know, he shares with his wife, Jo, whom he met yonks ago at art school, and their two children) survived the floods, thanks for asking. “We are used to a great deal of rain there anyway.”So, what is he like? In the flesh? To actually meet? Well, he is quite offish at first, and almost as hard to win over as Gretty, but then we bond over our mutual addiction to Coronation Street. I put it to him that, what with Jim McDonald being made a paraplegic, then being done for murder, and Steve McDonald being almost beaten to death by Jez, and Liz McDonald leaving Jim for Jim’s physiotherapist, you’d think Andy McDonald, Jim and Liz’s other son, and Steve’s twin brother, would have popped home from college at least once in the last five years “Yes, where is Andy?” cries Charles He laughs. And then we’re OK.He has quite a quick, dry sense of humour, actually.

For some reason, we get on to Madame Tussaud’s, which he thinks he is in, “unless they’ve melted me down” Chris, I did ask him what his favourite word is. And? He thought about it, then said: “Sunday.” The rehearsals have been very exhausting, obviously.Handsome? I should say so. And very tall and commanding and blue-eyed although, Carol, I’m not quite sure he is “the sexiest man alive” He might be a bit too gingery for some. He might be a bit too Paddy Ashdown although, obviously, without having gone quite so hideously wrong. Thank you, Gretty, for pointing out that “his glance is magnetic” and he “has a presence that may be compared to something as mundane as sex-appeal, but it is much more than that. It’s like a perfume that is above the senses.”Still, in a strange, and perhaps ironic way, the looks and the presence that have so enslaved you all have also, possibly, rather enslaved him.

I do sense that, deep down, there is a kind of disappointment within him. That he feels he should have lived up to the “British Robert Redford” sobriquet conferred on him after playing the dashing Guy Perron in Jewel In The Crown, but somehow didn’t.”You once said: ‘I’m not as successful as I want to be…’”"I am reasonably successful.”"I know I know You are very successful. But as successful as you want to be?”"I would like to be in a position where I decide what I am suitable for. With the success of an Oscar, say, you are suddenly deemed to be suitable for everything.”He was once turned down for the film version of Alan Ayckbourn’s Chorus of Disapproval because, apparently, Ayckbourn said: “Charles Dance? He’s just a bloody matinée idol!” Total rubbish, I know, but don’t blame me, girls, I’m just repeating what Ayckbourn said. I know, Margie, that he is a “a superlative representative of the Britisch (sic) acting profession at its highest peak” (We must forgive Margie. She’s Dutsch.)Still, Charles would dearly love to work with, say, Alan Bennett one day “I think he’s wonderful.

Love him.” He once sent a postcard to Bennett, when Bennett was refusing to let Hollywood put Sylvester Stallone into The Madness of King George instead of Nigel Hawthorne “I thought it was admirable I thought he showed great integrity. I got this card back, and it was like a little paragraph from one of his plays. He said: ‘Thank you for your card, although I wasn’t offered £50m to have Stallone and 50p for Nigel as you might think P.S. We nearly met at the dental hygienist’s two weeks ago.’”I think it is touching that Charles now knows it by heart No, he hasn’t failed. He’s done a lot of films – Plenty, White Mischief, Pascali’s Island, Star Truckers (Star Truckers?). It’s just that he’s never quite earned the right to be that choosy Why? I don’t know. Perhaps, as someone once remarked, he is just too effortlessly dashing Perhaps that’s his career problem.