Tywin Lannister's real family tree: Charles Dance's father and daughter were born 138 years apart
Tywin Lannister has turned 80. His own family tree runs from the year Winston Churchill was born to the year Blue Ivy Carter was, a span even House Lannister would struggle to arrange. Charles
Tywin Lannister has turned 80. His own family tree runs from the year Winston Churchill was born to the year Blue Ivy Carter was, a span even House Lannister would struggle to arrange.
Charles Dance turned 80 on 10 October 2026, and the internet did what it does with a birthday: it went digging. A birthday post on r/movies passed 5,900 upvotes in under a day, and the most-liked comment wasn't about Tywin, Bond or Alien 3. It was seven words and four exclamation marks: "and his father was born in 1874!!!!"
It's true, and it gets better. Walter Dance was born in 1874, the same year as Churchill. Charles's youngest child, Rose, was born in March 2012, the same year as Beyoncé's eldest. Grandfather to granddaughter: 138 years. One commenter did the maths so the rest of us wouldn't have to: imagine being Blue Ivy's age "and having a grandfather who was born in the same year as Winston Churchill".
The father who lost 25 years
Walter was 72 when his son was born in Redditch, Worcestershire, in October 1946, and for most of his life Charles had no idea. The family version had his dad dying in his early fifties. When Dance went on the BBC's Who Do You Think You Are? in 2017, the death record said otherwise: Walter died in 1949, aged about 75, when his son was three. Roughly a quarter of a century had quietly gone missing.
So had an entire family. The programme turned up:
- A different war: the photo of Walter in uniform, which Dance had assumed was from the First World War, dated from the Boer War, when his father signed up and shipped out to South Africa.
- A first marriage: to Louie Rowley Morris, in London in 1897.
- Two half-sisters: Norah, born in 1898, and Mary, born in 1903, who died aged five after an accident near a building site.
Norah married a South African in 1921, emigrated, and lived until 1993. She was alive when her half-brother became a star in The Jewel in the Crown, and neither knew the other existed. Dance said afterwards it would have been nice to have met her. Fair enough: he only missed by 24 years.
His half-sister was born 48 years before him. He became a father again at 65.
From Bond henchman to Tywin
The career has its own long loops. One of Dance's first film roles was Claus, a henchman in For Your Eyes Only (1981), a Bond film whose villain, Kristatos, was played by Julian Glover. Thirty years later they met again in King's Landing: Glover as Grand Maester Pycelle, Dance as the man Pycelle was terrified of.
In between came the villains fans still quote word for word: Sardo Numspa opposite Eddie Murphy in The Golden Child (1986), Clemens in Alien 3 (1992), and Benedict in Last Action Hero (1993), who summed up the whole CV in one line: "If God was a villain, he'd be me." Gamers know him as Emperor Emhyr in The Witcher 3 (2015).
Tywin is still the one that stuck. His first scene in 2011 has him skinning a stag while lecturing Jaime on the family name, and nearly 400 redditors upvoted the claim that it's the greatest character introduction ever filmed. Another fondly remembered Charlie Brooker reportedly writing that Dance "could win a staring contest against a jar full of eyeballs". Nobody has yet found the jar willing to try.
Tywin spent four series of Game of Thrones obsessing over legacy. Dance's own goes back to 1874, and his youngest won't sit her GCSEs until 2028.
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