She credits her success in theatre to good luck and her success in film to Harvey Weinstein. She had ‘carpe diem’ tattooed on her wrist for her 81st birthday, and her ideal next role would be something “daft! Nothing imperious.” The veteran British actress Judi Dench has played many queens, but she is more the anarchist than the authoritarian.
SNAIL
Born in Yorkshire in 1934 to an Irish mother and English father, Dench’s very first role was playing a snail in a school play at five years old – interrupting the performance to wave at her parents! Later on in life, while originally interested in set design, Dench abandoned her studies after seeing an innovative staging of the Shakespeare play King Lear. It was not the acting that impressed her, she later confessed, but the set, which she believed she could never have the imagination to create.
STAGE
Judi followed in the footsteps of her brother Jeffrey, who had always wanted to be an actor. She attended the Central School of Speech and Drama in London and played the role of Ophelia in Hamlet for the final show of the course. It was her first professional stage appearance with the Old Vic Company at the Royal Court Theatre in Liverpool. It began a decades long collaboration with the Old Vic and with the Royal Shakespeare Company.
SPIRIT OF ADVENTURE
Theatre is Dench’s passion but it is the people she met and the adventures she had that she appreciates the most. She credits the British director Peter Hall with teaching her how to read and act out Shakespeare’s lines. In 1958 Dench went on a six month tour to the US with the play Henry V, directed and designed by Franco Zeffirelli, crossing the country on a remarkable three-day train journey.
EXPERIMENTAL
Other key moments in her career have been those when she tried something different. In 1968, she was offered the lead in the musical Cabaret – thinking that they were joking at first, as she had insisted on auditioning the songs from the wings! One musical she was happy not to have done though was Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats; after accepting a part and then getting injured, she confessed to being relieved as the show looked so exhausting.
CINEMA
Early on in her career, Dench was told in a screen test that her face wasn’t “properly arranged” for film. Yet when she played Queen Victoria for the first time in the 1997 film Mrs. Brown, directed by John Madden, Harvey Weinstein backed it and it went on to extraordinary box office success. Dench has, of course, expressed her horror at Weinstein’s offenses since, which she was not aware of. “I offer my sympathy to those who have suffered, and whole-hearted support to those who have spoken out,” she said.
THE ‘M’ IN BOND
Dench played M for the first time in the James Bond film GoldenEye (1995), delivering a classic on-screen dismissal of Bond – at the time played by Pierce Brosnan– as a “sexist, misogynist dinosaur, a relic of the Cold War.” She played M until Spectre (2015), with Daniel Craig in the role. One of her favorite parts was as a scheming history teacher in Notes on a Scandal (2006) opposite Cate Blanchett and she joined an all star cast in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2011), another career highpoint, as she loved filming in India.
ANOTHER CHANCE
Dench has played many queens and has great respect for the real royal family, sympathizing with the life of obligation, restriction and responsibility they lead. As an actress she values freedom over power, even finding directing isolating as “the actors gang up on you!” Similarly, she prefers the flexibility of theatre to the finality of film; while each stage performance is different, she says, when a film’s final cut is made, there is no going back.