Charles in Long Day's journey in 2000 with Jessica Lange

Cast : James Tyrone - Charles Dance/ Mary Tyrone - Jessica Lange/ (Jamie) - Paul Rudd /Edmund Tyrone - Paul Nicholls Cathleen - Olivia Colman

Long Day's Journey into Night is a drama in four acts Eugene O'Neil...The action covers a single day from around 8:30 am to midnight, in August 1912 at the seaside home of the Tyrones....
All three males are alcoholics and Mary is addicted to morphine. In the play the characters conceal, blame, resent, regret, accuse and deny in an escalating cycle of conflict with occasional desperate and sincere attempts at affection...
Charles was James Tyrone, Sr.(65 yrs) Looks ten years younger and is about five feet height but appears taller due to his military-like posture and bearing. He is broad shouldered and deep chested and remarkably good looking for his age with light brown eyes

Correspondingly, Charles Dance suggests that James Tyrone's parsimony stems from childhood poverty and his Dickensian sweatshop experience, and he brings out superbly the man's muted despair and quiet love.
The Guardian, nov 2000

Surprisingly, it is the father you feel most for in this production. Charles Dance has none of the residual Irishness or actorish flamboyance Olivier brought to the role...but he has an extraordinary quality of muted despair. When he explains his stinginess by saying that as a boy he worked 12 hours a day in a machine-shop, you feel it is the simple truth. Dance also brings out the protective love Tyrone still feels for his unreachable wife: at one point he lightly caresses her breasts in the gathering dusk with a rueful tenderness.
Country lfe, Nov 2000

There’s something decidedly stolid and — at first, anyway — underpowered about Dance’s robust, silver-haired Tyrone, no matter how much he paws his rattled wife in a liaison that, rather startlingly, still has a clear sexual component.
Dance catches the bitter comedy of a line like, "It’s you who are leaving us," as he derides the doped-up Mary’s desire to keep her brood forever by her side. But his heavy-lidded demeanor flares into life only in the last of the play’s three acts, during which Mary is heard solely as a foot-heavy phantasm prior to her reappearance at the end. Acknowledging Tyrone’s ruin by the very play that made him (the part, of course, is a thinly veiled sketch of O’Neill’s own actor-father and his career treading the boards in "The Count of Monte Cristo"), Dance eventually reaches the depths of the self-acknowledged hack. "It’s a late day for regrets," says Tyrone, but Dance does in the end arrive there while nonetheless leaving one in mind of a male lead less prone to the slow burn.
December 3, 2000 Variety

 

The elegant Charles Dance lends his role the charm necessary to believe the character once stole the limelight as a gifted young actor.

But there"s nothing sentimental in Dance's performance, who turns imperceptibly from fading heart-throb into the shrivelled Scrooge his family says he is.
28 Nov 2000 BBC News

As Dance plays it, James Tyrone is still powerfully attracted to his wife. At one point, he grabs her and caresses her chest, as though she were a memory of her former self. Dance himself is pretty muted, playing Tyrone less like a fading ham than like an aging literature professor.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2000/12/06/theater-review-long-day-s-journey-into-night.html