Judi Dench: ‘There’s something healthy about being a bit insecure’
The show has always gone on for Dame Judi Dench, who even in COVID lockdown created TikTok videos with her grandson. Now, she’s back on the silver screen in a role that reminded her of her wartime childhood.
Five years ago, Dame Judi Dench succumbed to her first tattoo. Etched on her wrist are the words ‘Carpe Diem’, a birthday gift and a reminder perhaps of a credo that has shaped both her career and her life.
The multi-award-winning actor has been ‘seizing the day’ since she first played Shakespeare’s Ophelia at age 22 at Liverpool’s Royal Court Theatre. Now she’s 86, and despite being one of the finest and most feted actors in the world, Judi has never rested on her gleaming laurels; in fact, she still crosses her fingers, hoping she will be hired again. “You worry about the next work, which is why I never turn anything down. But I wouldn’t change that because there’s something about being a bit insecure about the job you do that I think is quite healthy,” she declared in a recent interview.
The idea that the brilliant Dame Judi Dench worries about her job prospects may sound ridiculous, and yet in the past year of the UK’s lockdowns, with theatres and film sets largely closed and most of the population isolated at home, Judi, like everyone in her industry, has been observing an enforced hiatus, wondering if life will ever be the same again.
It hasn’t been easy for the self-confessed workaholic, but her 23-year-old grandson, Sam Williams (daughter Finty’s son), has made good use of his grandma’s untapped talents on a stage she’s never before graced – TikTok!
Judi’s performances, produced by and often co-starring Sam, include highly entertaining dance moves and joke sketches, and quickly went viral. “[TikTok] saved my life” during a time when “every day is so uncharted,” Judi told UK’s Channel 4 News, one of the many media outlets clamouring to interview social media’s newest star. “You wake up and you wonder what day it is, and you wonder what date it is, and sometimes what month,” she said. Sam, she added, was very “strict” and “made me do it. I had to rehearse all those moves. Don’t just think they come naturally!”
Judi is no stranger to venturing out of her comfort zone and some of her most acclaimed performances have been in roles she never thought would come her way. She certainly hadn’t expected to star in musical theatre, but it all started when the late legendary musical director Hal Prince saw her in a play and called her agent to ask her to audition for the role of Sally Bowles in Cabaret in 1968.
Judi was flabbergasted; singing was certainly not among her most bankable talents … or so she thought. “I’d never done a musical before,” she said. But she swallowed hard, leapt into the unknown and won the role. “I was sent to [soprano] Gwen Catley, who was a great singer, and I always remember after a couple of sessions, she said, ‘Now look, I can’t teach you to sing, but I can teach you to put over a song’ and somehow that took the fear of not being able to sing away from me,” Judi told a BBC radio interviewer.
Despite opening-night nerves, Judi says she “enjoyed every minute” of her first musical, and many more singing roles followed. Almost three decades later, I was lucky enough to be in the London audience for Judi’s heart-wrenching rendition of Send In the Clowns in Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music. It was sublime, filled with pathos, and fittingly she won an Olivier Award.
Another role Judi nailed against the odds was Shakespeare’s Cleopatra in 1987. “People used to laugh openly when I said I was going to play the part, but I overcame all the fears and I had a glorious time doing it at the National [Theatre in London] with Tony Hopkins,” she recalled. When director Peter Hall first asked Judi to consider the role, she was the one who was laughing, famously replying: “Are you sure you want a menopausal dwarf to play this part?” But the beguiling results had critics in raptures.
“Dench gave us a Cleopatra whose sexuality stemmed from her volatility, intelligence and wit: a woman of infinite variety who was enthralling company and an irresistible magnetic force,” wrote The Guardian’s theatre critic Michael Billington.
Silver screen
After that, Judi captivated in a long run of theatre hits, but she didn’t score her first big screen role until she was 62, playing Queen Victoria in Mrs Brown.
While it seems baffling now, early in her career, any idea of a future in film was dashed by a film director who she has since refused to name – to save his blushes! He brazenly declared she would never make it in films. “He said I had the wrong face … He said, ‘Thank you very much [for coming], I don’t think you should consider films’. I got up and put the chair back against the wall … and because I wasn’t very interested in film, it didn’t concern me, but had it been in the theatre, I don’t know what I would have done,” she says. “Mrs Brown really changed my career.”
Judi won a BAFTA and a Golden Globe for the film. She won an Oscar for her very brief role in Shakespeare in Love (1998) and to date has been nominated for six Oscars.
“There’s something about being a bit insecure that I think is quite healthy.”
Nevertheless, when Judi was asked to play M in the James Bond films, she says she was “really taken aback”. It was her late husband – British actor Michael Williams – who encouraged her to take the part. He said, “I long to live with a Bond woman.”
In Judi’s latest role, filmed pre-pandemic but in cinemas now, she plays a school governess in the intriguing wartime drama Six Minutes to Midnight. It’s set in the summer of 1939, with Hitler’s power growing and tensions between the UK and Germany at boiling point. Judi is in charge of a group of extraordinary girls in the Augusta Victoria College, a finishing school for daughters and goddaughters of the Nazi elite on the south coast of England.
When their teacher mysteriously disappears, a replacement – played by UK actor and comedian Eddie Izzard – arrives and a tense spy story unfolds.
The period thriller is inspired by the real Augusta Victoria College, a school for German girls in the 1930s which only closed at the outbreak of World War II, and it was when she visited the school that Judi was captivated. “I was doing a film called Victoria & Abdul, and Eddie Izzard was playing the Prince of Wales, and he happened to say ‘Would you like to see the house, the actual school?’, and so we went and saw it, which was fascinating because all these pictures of the girls were on the walls. My imagination was caught.”
“When Judi came on board, it really was a game-changer for the film in terms of how it was perceived,” says director Andy Goddard. “She brings this prestige with her. Even now, I’m still pinching myself that I got to work with Judi Dench.”
“It’s beautifully cast because the girls are a mixture of German actors and English, but they actually look like a proper school of young people.
All the English girls have learnt German and I don’t speak any of it, but I look like I do,” Judi chuckles. “I nod a bit now and again.”
To have this hub of Hitler’s youth who were genuinely nestled on Britain’s shores takes your breath away, and filming the scenes took Judi back to her own childhood.
“I do remember quite a lot of things about the war,” she says. “I remember it very well. I was five. All the broadcasts of Hitler, which we heard during filming in a scene with all of us sitting there [in front of the radio broadcast], that was quite a shock, quite chilling actually.”
Family matters
Judi Dench was born in 1934 in the northern English city of York. Her father was a doctor – actually the GP for York’s theatre – and her mother a wardrobe mistress, so theatre was a family passion. Her father was involved in amateur dramatics, and she and her two older brothers, Jeffery and Peter, loved going to the theatre. “We were taken to everything as children and we had a great dressing-up box, which was full of all sorts of wonderful things,” Judi recalled in a recent radio interview. “Of course, then there was no television, and I think I was nearly always dressed up on roller skates somewhere.”
The three siblings were often in amateur productions at school or in the community, and Shakespeare was a family habit. “I’d seen my brothers at school in Shakespeare and
Jeff was always quoting Shakespeare,” she says. “The actual language was very much in the family. I think I must have seen my first production of Shakespeare when I was about nine and that has been my passion ever since.”
Judi originally didn’t want to perform herself – she planned to be a theatre designer – but when brother Jeff won a place at the prestigious Central School of Speech and Drama, she changed her mind. “I kind of caught it from him and I thought, ‘Oh, I’d like a go at that’, and I did and I’ve never regretted it,” she says.
Judi feels she’s been very lucky, but since that first professional acting role in 1957, she has barely been out of work and the list of awards is eye-watering.
She has been asked many times what advice she would give to that young girl treading the boards, to which she cryptically replies: “Try not to fall in love so many times.”
Michael proposed in Australia, but Judi didn’t want the sunny weather to influence her.
Judi rarely discusses her private life, and was 36 when she and actor Michael Williams married. He had first proposed when they were on tour in Australia, but she didn’t want the sunny weather to influence her decision, so waited for his second proposal in grey London when she agreed. The couple famously starred together as romantic partners in the 1980s hit TV sitcom A Fine Romance. “Working with Mike, we had the most wonderful time,” she revealed in Tea With The Dames, the 2018 documentary she made with three of her best mates – Dames Maggie Smith, Joan Plowright and Eileen Atkins.
Judi is famous for corpsing (giggling) on set, but she says Michael was worse. When he died in 2001, it was the end of a beautiful love match, leaving Judi, their daughter Finty, also an actress, and grandson Sam with a big hole in the family. “If you take my mother’s fame out of it, our family was like a triangle,” Finty later said in an interview with The Times. “It was Mummy and me, and Daddy at the top, and when he went we didn’t know where we were because we didn’t have a structure to our family. We were both floundering and we grieved in very different ways. She started working and I just became a nightmare.”
In 2010, Judi met conservationist David Mills and the pair started quietly dating. “I wasn’t even prepared to be ready for it. It was very, very gradual and grown up ...
It’s just wonderful,” she has said.
The other big change in Judi’s life is the ongoing deterioration in her sight due to age-related macular degeneration. “I can’t drive anymore and in some lights it’s better, and in some lights it’s not. When you’re filming, everyone is terrific at telling you: ‘There’s a cable here, step over that’,” she explains. “You find a way of just getting about and getting over the things that you find very difficult.” Judi relies on friends to assist her and her grandson often helps her learn her lines.
“The most difficult thing is I cut people dead all the time because I can’t see them. I don’t know who it is and that, for me, is terribly distressing because I can just walk straight past someone I know very well indeed and I simply haven’t been able to see who they are,” she says.
But Judi is determined to carry on working, and while plays are no longer possible, film offers are still flooding in. She says her favourite movie role was opposite “the wonderful” Cate Blanchett in the 2006 thriller Notes on A Scandal. Judi “adored” playing the scheming schoolteacher Barbara Covett, who betrays Blanchett’s beguiling Sheba. “Barbara was a real villainess and that’s the sort of part I would love to come along again … but who knows.”