Part of his fascination for the media as a whole, is the undeniably appetising fact that Timothy, at the age of thirty-eight and still single, can claim to have played three of the greatest lovers in English literature. In his twenties he made a convincing Romeo; later, he played Heathcliff in the film of Wuthering Heights, and, most recently, the devastating Mr. Rochester.

And soon he will be seen on our TV screens doing what producers clearly believe he does best - making love, this time to Stefanie Powers, in the seven-hour mini-series of Judith Krantz's novel, Mistrals Daughter. It was a week after his return from Paris, the location of the series, that we met to talk about this and that but mainly about the life and times of Mr. Timothy Dalton - the first interview he has agreed to give in more then 10 years.

"Do you believe everything you read in the newspapers?" Timothy asks over a glass of German ale in a London bar, as he responds to the rumours linking his name with Stefanie Powers. His dimple-cheeked face is half-quizzical, half-teasing.

"But of course!" I answer, responding in kind with a half-quizzical, half -teasing demeanor to match (I hope) his own. "Do you believe everything you see in the movies?" I then ask. We talk about Mistrals Daughter, in which Timothy is married to Lee Remick, and Stacy Keach is engaged to Stefanie Powers. For once another actor - Stacy Keach - plays the type of role which customarily has been entrusted to Timothy. He says "Stacy, as Mistral, represents that temperamental, artistic, dour, self-indulgent side of man that woman find attractive. I play the flip-side of the coin: a kind, gentle, sensitive man."

He laughs, "Of course, that was quite a change for me, particularly after doing Rochester in Jane Eyre.

Playing the moody hero of Charlotte Bronte's novel, that poignant study of selfless love, has proved to be one of the great successes of an already eventful and distinguished career. One critic likened his portrayal to a "demented bull," adding: "You could see how Rochester's first wife ended up a loony in the attic."

Timothy as Mr Rochester with Pilot.

The public and critical acclaim that his performance received surprised and delighted him, and he does little to hide the fact. He received more fan mail for this then for anything else with which he has been associated, ninety-nine per cent of the letters coming from (not surprisingly) the female sex - and they are still pouring in, months after the serial ended.

"It really seemed to have quite a powerful effect on people. That's so pleasing, to know that you've been in something that people have made a point of watching and have loved watching. That's why we do it, after all.

"I normally enjoy trying to get something back to everybody who has written to me, but you can't sit down and write long letters, giving your own personal history, which a lot of people want, because then they start writing back again. It's just impossible to deal with that sort of correspondence."

He muses, "I think why it worked so well was because, in truth, it's such a good part. What a blow to the image! Rochester is tough and hard, short-tempered and curt on the one hand, and concealing a soul that's been hurt and made sensitive. So you have a lot of the qualities that really appeal to women in Rochester, and I was simply lucky enough to be playing him.

"When I play another kind of character that is not so pleasant I get just a trickle of letters. Some women who've seen several things I've done write in to tell me when I've done something right, and when I've done something wrong, along the lines of 'I wish you wouldn't do this kind of thing. I much preferred you as Heathcliff. Why don't you do more things like that?'

The fact is we've all got to work; we have all got to do the parts that are offered to us, whether they turn out ultimately to be good or bad. In America they would largely agree with my correspondents: if you find an image that works, then stick with it. So there's some sense in that; maybe I should play Rochester for the rest of my life!"

Timothy, in fact, is not stuffy when it comes to the craft of acting. He is a classical stage actor of repute, with a list of Shakespearean credits a yard long, including the title-roles in Henry IV and Henry V with the Prospect Theatre Company, and, earlier this year in Cleopatra; and when he rejoined the Royal Shakespeare Company two years ago to star in Henry IV, a distinguished critic was moved to declare, Timothy Dalton is one of the best Hotspurs I have ever seen, making him not only an athletic, courageous warrior but an impetuous, argumentative extrovert who would have lost most battles because he could never agree with anybody."

Yet he has never shunned the American system of acting in Hollywood. which some British actors regard as beneath contempt because of its highly stylised, "unreal" quality.

He first flew to Hollywood eight years ago, just before his thirtieth birthday, to become the leading-man of an eighty-five year-old Mae West in her last film. In this ultimately not-very-remarkable movie, Sextette, with a cast that included Tony Curtis, Ringo Starr, George Hamilton, Walter Pidgeon and George Raft, Timothy even ended up marrying the cinema legend whose sexual suggestiveness was as amorously artful as it was so essentially innocent. He will never ever forget the experience.

"I'll never forget meeting her for the first time. We went in to see Mae West in a room where everything was white with gold trim on it. It was quite small, I thought, for somebody as fabulously rich as she was. It was only later that I realised that she owned the entire apartment block, though I doubt that she ever spent a penny on herself in her life: everybody was too busy buying her presents and asking her out.

"She then came in. She was wearing a white suit and a large bouffant hairstyle and these long nails...there was a great lady. I was very curious, very fascinated by her. Not to put too fine a point on it, we were all wondering, knowing how old she was, if we were going to be able to work with her.

"As it happened, she was delightful. I think the most extraordinary thing about knowing her was the realisation that she was a brilliant lady. When somebody is that famous you're never quite sure whether her fame stems largely from the publicity hokum, but she could always come up with a line that was funnier then anybody else's.

"Of course, "adds Timothy with a smile that conceals more then reveals, "she was a bit of a flirt. But she tried it only once with me! She had a nice twinkle in her eye, a nice sparkle. Oh, it was definitely an experience I wouldn't have missed for the world."

A year later he was back in Hollywood to appear in the mammoth ten-part TV adaption of James Michener's Centennial; he played the wheeling-dealing English land-owner Oliver Seccombe. And then four years ago, just before starting work on the movie Flash Gordon, he flew out to Hollywood to appear in one of the episodes of Charlie's Angels with Farrah Fawcett-Majors, who was making a guest appearance in the TV series she had left.

Timothy as his character of Damien Roth in Charlie's Angels.

"It was a rather nice job in terms of the piece," he recalls now. "I was a robber, the sort of debonair, sophisticated, charming thing at which David Niven or Cary Grant were so good. It was great fun to do, and I liked Farrah very much. She was very fresh and didn't have any illusions about her fame: she knew that it was all due to Charlie's Angels and she was very happy and grateful that was the case."

Timothy Dalton, the son of an advertising man from the Welsh seaside resort of Colwyn Bay, has long been famous for an outspokenness and a refreshing honesty towards the whole drum-banging affair that is show business. His grandfather was a vaudevillian who appeared on the same bill as Charlie Chaplin and later ran a chain of theatres right across England. Timothy's grandmother also played the music-halls, as did her parents.

The young actor-to-be and his family later moved to the Midlands, Derbyshire, and Manchester, where Timothy's father still runs his own advertising company. His earliest memory being at the seaside and seeing fish in buckets by the rock pools. He has been an avid fisherman for as long as he can remember.

"I think you could say I was a reasonably healthy individualist," he explains of his early days. "Like most kids I used to come home dirty, used to love playing football, going out and getting into trouble. Just a normal lad."

His awareness of acting began when he started going to Saturday morning picture shows at the local cinema. "It's a natural inclination to identify and want to be part of the extraordinariness of whatever it is you're seeing on the screen," he says. "Of course, you don't know as a kid - certainly not as a kid from the provinces - how all that excitement can be transformed into reality.

"What happened as far as I was concerned was seeing my first play when I was at school; that did it. One realised that one was actually not only excited by it, but actually was sitting in the same room with real human beings who stood on the stage in front of you. It could be done. I was fifteen."

After appearing in a couple of school plays, and becoming a leading member of the National Youth Theatre, he trained for two years at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. "I was this strange contradiction of being very cocky and humble," he recalls. They do exist together. Without self-belief you aren't going to get very far and, if one doesn't have it, one does have to pretend."

His early experience was gained in England's major regional theatres, playing leading roles that encompassed The Merchant of Venice, Richard II, The Doctor's Dilemma and Saint Joan. There was also a great deal of television, and further films; and, more recently, he starred in the opening productions of Sir Bernard Mills' New Mermaid Theatre (Mark Anthony in The Romans) and of the Royal Shakespeare Company's new London home at the Barbican (Hotspur and Henry IV).

He is that rarity, an actor who has known very few out-of-work periods. "I don't know if it's luck or what, but all I've ever done is work as an actor," he says. "I tell a lie; I once waited at tables in a Butlins holiday camp when I was learning to fly. I was always fascinated by biology and chemistry - that's what I would have studied at university - but my major plan was to fly which I succeeded in doing."

With his third film, Wuthering Heights, he also succeeded in living up to all the predictions proclaiming him a major new star - though both he and his leading lady, Anna Calder-Marshall, had to suffer the inevitable comparisons with the original 1939 Hollywood protagonists, Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon. But the actor from Colwyn Bay was well up to it.

"What is all boils down to in the end is that you want to do the best work that you're capable of doing as best as you can in the time available to do it in."

Timothy as Col. Francis Burke in The Master of Ballentrae.

This was how he approached his role as the soldier of fortune in The Master of Ballantrae. It was a fairly new departure for him. For once he was neither dying of love, smoldering with passion, nor sweeping woman into his arms. This time he left co-stars Michael York and Richard Thomas to fight over the pretty girl, played by Finola Hughes.

"It was one of the few roles I've done where there was no romantic involvement," he asserts. "It was quite a relief! It was much closer, in fact, to the sort of character I would really like to be playing.

"I can remember as a kid going to the Saturday-morning flicks and seeing people on pirate ships and riding horses, and thinking 'Gosh, wouldn't I love to do that!' And The Master of Ballentrae had it all. We went on real square-riggers in the English Channel, fighting sea battles, and we played Cowboys and Indians through the North American wilderness - which was actually filmed in the Wye Valley in South Wales. Great fun!"

When playing dark, brooding, romantic characters on the screen, like Rochester and Heathcliff, how much of himself does Timothy Dalton recognise when he sees his portrayals? He reflects momentarily before answering.

"There's got to be a bit of yourself in it," he explains. "I don't think you can be a good actor unless you reveal something of yourself. You're revealing a character through the knowledge you have of yourself and the life around you. Yes, I can see certain elements of myself in Rochester."

He proffers that easy smile for which he is renowned. "Of course, Rochester was no fisherman, while fishing is my obsession. I remember my first-ever fishing line, which I made from a whole bunch of string and a bent pin; I was about four. My granddad took me down to the pier at Colwyn Bay."

He was given his first line when he was five, and in the past fifteen years his obsession has taken him to the world's best fishing waters, from Alaska to California and Mexico, as well as trout and salmon fishing in Scotland and Ireland. And he frequently fishes in the waters around his south London home. He is an inveterate fisherman for all seasons.

"The real pleasure of fishing for me is that it is just completely and wonderfully different from the world that I work and live in," says Timothy. "And I suppose there's an element of the natural hunting instinct. The skill is in 'reading' a stream and learning to understand where the fish are; but it's not the peaceful hobby that so many people imagine, because you're working all the time."

And that about sums up the man with the rod.

About Town with Timothy Dalton(c) Copyright Woman's Weekly - 18th August 1984. All Rights Reserved.

The Doctor and the Devils - Production Information From Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation - 1985

Timothy as Dr Rock in The Doctor and the Devils.

Based on a screenplay by the poet Dylan Thomas, adapted by the Academy Award-nominated writer of 'The Dresser,' Ronald Harwood, Brooksfilms' The Doctor and the Devils is a Gothic thriller inspired by the real-life exploits of the famed 19th Century grave-robbers Burke and Hare.

The Brooksfilms Presentation The Doctor and the Devils stars Timothy Dalton, Jonathan Pryce and Twiggy. Filmed at London's Shepperton Studio's, the Twentieth Century Fox release is produced by Jonathan Sanger and directed by noted cinematographer Freddie Francis, from Ronald Harwood's adaption of Dylan Thomas's original screenplay.

The story Dylan Thomas told in his richly imagistic screenplay for The Doctor and the Devils is an often shocking meditation on life and death, on poverty and privilege, and on the perennial question of whether the end justifies the means. Timothy Dalton stars as Dr. Thomas Rock, an unorthodox anatomist who refuses to obey the rules of the Victorian medical establishment. In his quest for scientific truth, Dr. Rock unwittingly falls in league with a team of 'resurrectionists,' Fallon (Jonathan Pryce) and Broom (Stephen Rea), who are more then willing to supply him with dead bodies - fresh ones.

Besides being a renowned cinematographer, Freddie Francis also directed several classic British horror films, including Tales From the Crypt.

Along with his considerable accomplishments as a producer/writer/director/actor, Mel Brooks, through his production company, Brooksfilms, has been responsible for several very highly acclaimed and unusual motion pictures, including 'The Elephant Man' (which garnered eight Oscar nominations.)

Dylan Thomas and The Doctor and the Devils

The outbreak of World War II found Dylan Thomas excluded from active military service because of asthma, and burdened by the money worries that beset him throughout much of his adult life. His solution to both problems was to write film-scripts: Hired at a beginning salary of £8 a week by Donald Taylor's Strand Films, a company then engaged in making films for the Ministry of Information, Thomas spent the war years writing morale-boosting documentaries, some of which featured the poet's extraordinary voice on the soundtrack as well. Films like 'They Are The Men' and the ambitious 'Our Country' taught Thomas the craft of screen writing and enabled him to address a popular audience for the first time in his life. The Doctor and the Devils is by common consent the best of the screenplays Thomas wrote for Donald Taylor; like 'Under Milkwood,' the radio play which was actually begun the same year.

Taylor, who believed that a good script needed "a background of idea which is the driving force of the plot," had hit on the Burke and Hare case as a way to dramatize the question of "the end justifying the means." William Burke, a cobbler, and William Hare, a ruffian who ran a rooming house for the poor in Edinburgh, are among the most famous villains in the annals of crime. Between November, 1827, and their arrest in October, 1828, they murdered 33 people and sold their bodies to Dr. Robert Knox, a brilliant independent professor of anatomy who refused to let his research be hampered by existing laws limiting medical research to the cadavers of executed criminals. Their exploits had inspired 'The Body Snatcher,' a Val Lewton horror film starring Boris Karloff which was only loosely based on the Robert Louis Stevenson story of the same name; and Knox had been the subject of a play by James Bridie, 'The Anatomist.' Excited by the subject, Taylor researched and wrote a story in which historical fact was observed, although the names were altered, and assigned Dylan Thomas to turn it into a screenplay.

Dr Rock (Timothy) lecturing at the Academy in The Doctor and the Devils

Thomas seems to have found Taylor's approach to screen writing, with its emphasis on a single unifying idea, particularly congenial. Borrowing structural ideas as well as imagery from the death-obsessed Jacobeans, he dramatized Taylor's 'master idea' by creating starkly contrasted worlds of poverty and privilege, the Market-Place and the Academy, between which all sorts of echoes, exchanges and insidious contaminations could occur.

The most striking thing about The Doctor and the Devils is Thomas's use of language - in the colorful and sometimes lyrical dialogue passages, but especially in the descriptions and stage directions, where his strongly visual imagination ran wild. While some of Thomas's descriptions - for instance, a Halloween vision of leaves and scraps of paper blowing like ghosts in the deserted Market-Place - would have required the Disney studios to bring them to life, the highly-colored descriptive writing was not the poet's self-indulgence; Thomas understood that film was a visual medium, and in this script he found a way to dramatize an abstract idea through imagery, although his gift for dialogue served him well. Ironically Dr. Rock is the only upper-class character who acknowledges the existence of the Market-Place and shows a humanitarian interest in its inhabitants, but Thomas also portrays him as a man blinded by intellectual pride, who refuses to see the web of complicity that has bound him to his 'instruments,' Fallon and Broom, until he has been destroyed by them.

For reasons that history does not record, The Doctor and the Devils was never produced, although Thomas cared enough about it to approach his friend Graham Greene in 1947 for help getting it made. After Thomas's death in 1953, Donald Taylor published the screenplay with the technical directions taken out - the first screenplay ever to be published before being produced, he observed "due to the literary quality, unusual in this medium."

After it's publication The Doctor and the Devils was performed a few times on the stage, and during the sixties the American director Nicholas Ray planned to bring it, at long last, to the screen. But all efforts to mount a film production failed.

Filming The Doctor and the Devils

Director Freddie Francis first read The Doctor and the Devils in 1975 while directing a horror film with Peter Cushing. One of the world's leading cinematographers, Francis had left his first profession to direct, but found himself 'pigeonholed' as a horror specialist; when his producer showed him the Thomas script, he was very interested. "Most of the films I have made as a director," he recalls, "I'm only proud of that because they surpassed the script, and I get satisfaction out of that. But with The Doctor and the Devils I would be starting with words written by Dylan Thomas, whom I greatly admired. I like the moral premise of the story for a film, and I thought the period - early 19th Century - was a good one for a film; it's a period filled with atmosphere and opportunities for visual stylization."

But the film never got made, the rights were eventually acquired by Dr Barrington Cooper, who contacted Francis, several years later about directing a project. Cooper subsequently presented the project with no director attached, to a number of production entities, including Brooksfilms, where Mel Brooks expressed interest in producing the Thomas script. Cooper at this point was unaware of Francis's prior involvement with Brooksfilms, and Brooks was unaware of Francis's long-standing interest in directing The Doctor and the Devils until he learned of it from Jonathan Sanger (Producer/Director) "I had read the script before Mel," Sanger recalls, "and recommended we get involved with it: My first impression was that it was a very, very dramatic story, with great emotional lights and darks. I also loved the evocative language of the stage directions; it was clear Thomas had a sensational visual sense. "Then when I was in London talking to Freddie Francis about shooting my first film as a director, 'Emerald,' he mentioned to me that there was a project he was in love with and had been trying to get off the ground for a long time. By strange coincidence, it turned out be The Doctor and the Devils. When I told Mel this and added that if Freddie directed I would want to produce the film, Mel liked the idea of getting the 'Elephant Man' team together again, and he agreed."

After decades of waiting, Dylan Thomas's screenplay was put into production rapidly. "Freddie and I went off to Paris to make 'Emerald,'" says Sanger, "and during the course of production, on week-ends, we would be talking about The Doctor and the Devils. We hired a production manager and started pre-production while we were still making the other picture." In the meantime, Mel Brooks had brought in Ronald Harwood, to revise the Thomas screenplay.

"I have always adored Dylan Thomas," says Harwood, "I nearly met him once, just before he died. And I had read The Doctor and the Devils in the sixties when I was a dresser and business manager for Donald Wolfitt; a film company offered him the part of one of the grave robbers.

"I remember thinking at the time how powerful it was, but I also saw things I would want to change, which we have changed in this version, I think for the better. My main function was to sharpen the original by cutting what was not dramatic - the overly discursive or argumentative passages - and bringing it down to the drama. This was particularly important with Doctor Rock's character: We wanted to dramatize his dilemma rather then talk about it, and make that side of the story more interesting. Because of course Fallon and Broom are always going to be fascinating.

"I didn't always feel that I was collaborating with Dylan Thomas, but I felt that thing you feel when you work on something of quality - you feel a certain respect for the author. And I felt it was kind of a nice justice to have the film finally made, after all these years."

For director Freddie Francis the project was a fulfillment of a ten-year dream. "When I first read a script, he says "I form a mental picture of the film I'd like to make, and when I first read The Doctor and the Devils ten years ago, I saw it as a conflict between two ways of life. I love photographing and directing films with lots of atmosphere, and I thought the contrast of these two atmospheres, the Market-Place and Rock's Academy, would be quite striking.

"I was particularly interested in showing the relationship between Rock and Fallon - they're very similar characters, in a way, because they're both single-minded. Once Fallon realizes how easy it is to get these bodies and sell them, that is his career, and he's as single-minded about it, in an animal sort of way, as Rock is about the benefit of mankind.

"We have made two important changes: We changed the time period to the Victorian era, a little later then the events portrayed in the screenplay, and we have made it an English city, although we don't specify which one. Theoretically we could have shot it in London on various locations we did on 'Elephant Man,' but there's very little left of the old London I wanted to show. So we built everything on sound stages at Shepperton: We created a huge area to film in, which you couldn't get a tenth of in London or even in Edinburgh today. Also it's easier to stylize the sets without spending lots of money if you do it on a sound stage."

This is a photograph of some old houses in Cloth Fair, London. Circa 1877.

For nine weeks during production two sound stages at Shepperton were joined and converted into an 1840's city square, complete with cobbled lanes and alleys, a drainage system, molded arches and columns, and lofty flats representing broken down tenements. The whorehouse, tavern and cockpit, down to the minutest detail, were authentic to the period, including the accessories that dressed the set and stalls within.

As sources Francis gave production designer Robert Laing books by French illustrator Gustave Doré, who had drawn numerous English city scenes during the period portrayed in the film. "We are not trying to create beautiful sets," says Laing. "We wanted to create the squalor, and put the actors right in the muck and mire. Visitors to the set would cringe when they came in. We had to joke that no one should go down one of our alleys unless accompanied by a second person."

For the scenes in Rock's home and Academy, interiors of existing 18th Century buildings in Lincoln's Inn Field and Temple were duplicated on sound stages as well. Rock's lecture hall, whose circular form echoes the cockpit built for the Market-Place scenes, were copied exactly from a hall in a London museum where conditions would have made filming impossible.

Finally, all the director's efforts at a heightened portrayal of a period were at the service of Thomas's darkly poetic tale and themoral dilemma it pose. "What I have tried to do with the low-life's in this film," says Francis, "is to depict how little life was worth in those days. Is Dr. Rock right? Does the end justify the means? Before you can really judge that, you have to show the audience the value of life and death in that particular era. Otherwise they can't really make up their minds whether they find Rock guilty or not."

The Doctor and the Devils is a Brooksfilms Presentation produced by Jonathan Sanger. Freddie Francis directs from a screenplay by Ronald Harwood based on an original screenplay by Dylan Thomas. Mel Brooks is the executive producer. The music is by John Morris. The Doctor and the Devils was released October 1985. Domestic release by Twentieth Century Fox. Brooksfilms distributed the film internationally.

The Production Information for The Doctor and the Devils (c) Copyright Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation 1985 All Rights Reserved.

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The Rocketeer - Interview with Timothy Dalton.

The Courier-Journal Louisville KY USA - June 30th 1991.

Timothy as Neville Sinclair again in The Rocketeer.

In The Rocketeer, Dalton plays bad guy Neville Sinclair, an Errol Flynn send up who just happens to be starring in a movie-within-the-movie that looks a lot like Flynn's 1938 'The Adventures of Robin Hood.'

"We called ours 'The Laughing Bandit,' didn't we," Dalton said, with a chuckle. "It would have been nice to have called it 'Robin Hood' and come out a week earlier, wouldn't it? - To be the first one seen." As it turned out, The Rocketeer opened after 'Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves,' but Dalton is certainly no laggard in the critics' corner with a show-stealing performance that pays homage to everyone's favourite swashbuckler and generates more then its fair share of laughs.

"You've got to enjoy a villain, I think," Dalton said, still brimming with enthusiasm at the midpoint of a day long series of interviews at a West Hollywood hotel. "I mean, in a certain kind of movie, a bad guy can be just a really hateful kind of guy, but in this kind of movie, you know - it's entertainment, it's a wonderful sort of show...you've got to like the villain. "The difficult thing for me was how to create a situation where you don't like him too much....You essentially should love the performance and not the guy, not the man. Because, after all, he is a Nazi. You shouldn't miss him when he goes; you should miss the performance."

Dalton said he turned down The Rocketeer when one of the early drafts of the screenplay was first presented to him over a year ago. "I loved the story, but it just seemed to me that the script was too one-dimensional," he said. "And then I was asked to do it again, and I said I don't think so, no, the script needs a lot of work. And the studio (executives) actually were wonderful. (Touchstone and Walt Disney Pictures president) David Hoberman said 'Yeah, we know - we're developing it with the writers, we're going to embark on a creative process, we've got a good story,' and he invited me to join in that - sit with the director and the writers once a week or once a fortnight. "So I said, OK. And we had a great time. We had a wonderful time. There's nothing more exciting then sitting down with a bunch of talented, creative people and just batting ideas around...You have a lot of fun and you actually get somewhere."

For all his big-screen credits, Dalton says The Rocketeer was a thrill because it was his first big-studio U.S. movie. He particularly enjoyed filming the scene where he and Jennifer Connelly walk into the entrance of a posh nightclub - even though it ended up mostly on the cutting-room floor. "That was filmed on the back lot at Warner Bros,. and it was kind of like being in an old theatre, and old stage theatre, when you suddenly get all these kinds of echoes and reverberations of history, of the past, of the great actors that have been there."

The Rocketeer - Interview with Timothy Dalton (c) Copyright The Courier-Journal Louisville KY USA - June 30th 1991. All Rights Reserved.

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A Dash Of Dalton - Interview With Timothy.

by John-Michael Howson Australian Woman's Day February 1992.

Timothy as Neville Sinclair in The Rocketeer.

Searching for one word to describe Timothy Dalton you would have to come up with "charming." The last time we met he was James Bond in Licence to Kill. This time he is equally suave, in Disney's action-packed The Rocketeer, although now he's a villain.

Timothy's baddie, however, is no ordinary crook. He is a swashbuckling '30's movie star called Neville Sinclair, who runs a Nazi spy ring from his luxurious mansion in Hollywood. A film star who is a Nazi spy? Could it be that Timothy's character is based on Errol Flynn, who is said to have been an undercover Nazi?

"I don't think that it's actually Errol. Sinclair is a 'Flynn-type' film star in the style that was typical of the period. The writers thought it would be fun to have a swashbuckling heart-throb hero who was a Nazi agent," Timothy says. Whether the Flynn theory is true or false, Timothy loved playing the larger-than-life Neville Sinclair, a man who is so insincere that he woos women with lines from his movies. "It's a great role. There's a mix of the actor who pretends for a living and the spy who pretends for a living, and you get a world of illusion and reality, truth and lies, acting and real life," he says.

The Rocketeer has 'Dynasty' star Bill Campbell playing a test pilot who comes into possession of a rocket projectile that allows him to fly. Invented by aviation whiz Howard Hughes, it is sought after by Nazi spies, the FBI and Hughes, who believes it is too dangerous to use. The Rocketeer uses it to beat the baddies and save the day. The kids love it.

"I think you have to enjoy playing a villain. I didn't want to make the character merely hateful. I wanted to make the character somebody whom you didn't like, but at the same time somebody who was interesting to watch," Timothy explains. The film boasts some spectacular effects, which bring to mind Timothy's two outings as 007. I ask him if there is another Bond film in the works. "Eventually," he replies, "but at the moment there are some problems with the studio. And I'm going to be tied up crossing the Atlantic and discovering America." He is referring to the plum role of Christopher Columbus in a film which celebrates the 500th anniversary of the navigator's epic voyage.

The star has houses in Los Angeles and in London, but is "never anywhere for long." This has kept Timothy, 45, free from the entanglements of marriage. He "passed" on questions of romance. But he is not all charm and discretion. Timothy would like to give James Bond a rougher edge.

"I think he's a bit too bland now. I'd like to see them toughen him up. He's still seen as a well-manicured, well-mannered gentleman. I prefer the Bogart-type tough guy."

A Dash Of Dalton (c) Copyright Australian Woman's Day - February 1992. All Rights Reserved.

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A Very Warm Welcome To Our New Member Of The Group For June 2008.

• Alicia from the States who joined us on June 1st. It is wonderful to have you with us!

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Timothy's Project Question of the Month for July 2008.

Each month we have a Timothy question of the month, just for a bit of fun. It could be a quote from one of Timothy's films or projects, a picture, or some other information to test you on. I do of course understand that not all of you have seen everything that Timothy has done, so I will be going through all his work, to make it fair, but it is fun to guess though. I will give you the answer on this page at the beginning of each month, and set the next question at that time too.

The question and answer to the June Timothy question was:-

Question: What project is Timothy in pictured above and which Prince did he play?

Answer: Oliver Cromwell and Timothy played Prince Rupert in it.

I would like to congratulate Louay, Dennise, Susan and Sheila along with everyone else who also got the above question correct.

Here is the Timothy Question of the Month for July 2008:-

Timothy Dalton.

Question: What project is Timothy in pictured above and which part did he play?

Here is this months clue for you this was a television movie where Timothy played a powerful, sinister but charismatic character who very cleverly persuades the Sergeant assigned to look after him to his ways.

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Timothy Dalton Chat Group Birthdays for July 2008.

• Marie Rose who lives in Toronto Canada has a birthday on July 1st.

• Marie Ellen who lives in the States also has a birthday on July 1st.

All of us in The Timothy Dalton Chat Group send you lots of love and hope you both have a very happy birthday!

With very warm wishes,

Deb
Coordinator, The Timothy Dalton Chat Group.

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