Charles Dance loved being reunited with Kate Beckinsale in ‘The Widow’ – because he first met her when she was just 10 years old.
The 72-year-old actor stars alongside Kate, now 45, in the new ITV drama and was delighted to work with the "extraordinarily beautiful" star because he can remember first meeting her when he worked with her actress mother Judy Loe 35 years ago.
In an interview on ‘This Morning’ on Tuesday (09.04.19), Charles said: "I first met Kate when she was about 10. Because I did my first television with her mother, Judy. Kate was there with her mum one day, this pretty little girl and she’s grown up to be this extraordinarily beautiful and very youthful star."
The ‘Gosford Park’ actor has one of the most distinctive voices in the business but he has confessed he didn’t always speak the Queen’s English as he used to have a strange twang that was a mix of a Plymouth and Birmingham twang.
He revealed: "I grew up in Plymouth but I was born in the midlands. Through my teens and into my very earlier twenties I had a combination of a Plymouth accent and a Birmingham accent.
"And if you think of the two neither of them are particularly attractive. If you join them together … I used to make the most awful noise.
"I had these wonderful gurus who taught me what I would had learnt had I gone to drama school and the first thing we worked on was to get this voice sorted out."
Explaining his previous voice has helped him master certain accents for the screen and stage, he added: "It’s a bit like a painter having the remains of paint in brushes. Rather than cleaning the brush up before picking up another paint. Every colour you used is likely to be painted with the colour that was stuck in the brush before.
"I know quite a lot of people who have strong Belfast or they come from Scotland or somewhere and they manage to lose it. Well maybe I could have done that and I took their advice and went on this route."
Charles Dance first met Widow co-star Kate Beckinsale when she was 10
