At 88, Britain’s greatest actress is as mischievous as ever. She talks to Jonathan Dean about Shakespeare, love, loss and the afternoon she saw a ghost.
In 1971 Judi Dench was Portia in The Merchant of Venice — or, as Dench puts it, “The Merchant of f***ing Venice”. She is not a fan. Still, her memories are fond because Michael Williams, her late husband, also had a role. When Dench botched Portia’s line “To stay you from election” and gasped “erection” by mistake, Williams — “Mikey” — had to pace around the stage to stop himself laughing.
Today Dench is at her home out in the sticks with a welcome mat from her James Bond days that says “I’ve Been Expecting You ... ”. She sits snug on a sofa in a big cosy cottage with low ceilings surrounded by cabinets cluttered with photos of family and friends.
We settle for tea and the anecdotes flow. She has just finished a book, Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent, that is the closest the 88-year-old dame will come to an autobiography. (The title is what she and Williams used to call Shakespeare because most of their income came from performing his work.) It is co-written by her friend the actor Brendan O’Hea and structured around the Shakespeare Dench has been in since her debut in Hamlet in 1957. She tells stories from the productions and the pair discuss key scenes. “How lucky I am,” she says and refers to her failing eyesight. “I can’t see, but I have a book coming out, thanks to Brendan’s eyes and idea.”
The book is slowly, sweetly revealing as Dench unravels her memories. Once, as Juliet, she took the potion, fell and cracked her ribs. Racked by pain, she had to lie completely still until the end of the scene. Another time, as Juliet in Ghana, her corset was tied so tightly she passed out in the heat. And in London, she dropped a note into the lap of a man in the audience who she thought was a friend. It read “I suppose a f***’s out the question?” The man was not her friend.
This job, I say, seems to have gifted her more fun than most people wrangle out of their work. “Well, I imagine so, Jonathan,” she says. “But I’ve never done anything else.”
Sometimes, though, her eyes glisten, and it seems she has to stop herself from talking in case tears follow. She stares somewhere only she knows, thinking of the people she has known. I mention how much she loved playing Juliet at the Old Vic because she was able to watch Romeo from the balcony every night. “And that actor,” she begins, “was John Stride. And out there is his tree ... ” She looks over to her flourishing garden outside. “Oh,” she says with a sigh. Dench plants trees for the people that she has lost, from her brothers to John Gielgud and most recently Stephen Sondheim. One of the tallest is for Williams, who died almost 23 years ago, aged 65. A label on a sapling reads “Helen McCrory”.
Dench flits between fortitude and fear. Recently she was asked whether she had a carer and wanted to retort: “I’ve just done eight weeks performing at the bloody Garrick!” But when we speak about Shakespeare’s sonnets, she says Sonnet 60 makes her feel uncomfortable. She recites: “Like as the waves make towards the pebbl’d shore/ So do our minutes hasten to their end.” She grins. “No thanks. Not if it’s all the same to you.”
O’Hea, 56, is a Shakespearean of repute who has acted and directed at Shakespeare’s Globe. He is garrulous, with an obvious rapport with Dench that is gossipy, even a little catty. “I’ll tell you exactly how it came about,” Dench says confidently when asked for the origins of their book. Then she stops. “Dementia’s a terrible thing!” O’Hea chips in. (They started talking about plays for fun before Dench’s grandson suggested their conversations be made public). Later O’Hea pays compliments about how Dench always embodies her characters. “When you talk about Macbeth your hands are like talons. For Cleopatra you are louche.” Dench’s retort? “Oh stop it.”
The pair are Shakespeare-obsessed. They enjoy playing Bardle — like Wordle, but for Shakespearean terms — and have a habit of quizzing each other. “What are the only two Shakespeare plays that start with a female character?” (* Answer at the end).
Dench grew up with the playwright in the ether. She was born in York in 1934 and Shakespeare was regularly quoted around the house. Her brother, Jeffery, who was also an actor, used to greet visitors with a quote from Julius Caesar. “For once, upon a raw and gusty day ... ” Dench recalls. By the time she saw Michael Redgrave as King Lear in 1953 there was no going back. Her first role, as Ophelia, came four years later.
Dench is her own worst, hilarious critic. “I don’t like The Merchant of Venice at all, I was such crap as Portia,” she says, laughing. “There are things I understand now about the plays that I didn’t when I did them. I think, ‘Oh God, I’d like another shot!’ But, of course, it’s too late. Does anyone want a really old Ophelia?”
Shakespeare today, though, is in peril. For maybe the first time his place in our culture feels under threat. Next month it will be 400 years since his First Folio collection of plays was posthumously published. But look at TikTok, the social media platform, and the top Shakespeare content from young people is “Why are we learning this?” The way people absorb art, information and entertainment has changed and the idea of settling down with a play feels like something from a bygone era.
“Is it teachers that put people off or bad productions?” O’Hea ponders. He says that the youngsters he teaches Shakespeare to are “sophisticated” but it is hard to get through.
Dench is worried too. “Golly!” she says on hearing that some people question whether the Bard should still be on the national curriculum. She adds with outrage that somebody about to see their first Shakespeare play recently asked her: “Will it be in that funny language?”
“It’s so terrible to be put off because you think that it’s foreign,” Dench says. “That’s the last thing Shakespeare is. But people are on phones and devices all the time and that doesn’t help someone asked to watch a play. People worry they are not going to understand, but if you want to know more about love or being jealous or resentful, it’s all in Shakespeare’s plays. They are about the human condition. You don’t have to understand the language, but you have to understand the emotion.”
Has her emotional reaction to Shakespeare changed over the years? “Oh, absolutely, acutely,” Dench says. She found performing was a way of coping with grief after her husband’s death. She tells a tale about the actor Charlie Thomas, who killed himself in Australia in 1970 while on a Twelfth Night tour with Dench. The tour went on. “Charlie. Charlie Thomas,” she says with a lump in her throat. “Sometimes you have to do a play and it is really painful. That said, I’ve also found it unbelievably cathartic. You fortify yourself and use what you are going through as energy. Like petrol. It has helped me cope with the pain.”
There is an exchange in The Man Who Pays the Rent that takes your breath away. O’Hea is talking about The Comedy of Errors, which Dench performed in Newcastle decades ago, and was filmed. When she watches it back she sees Williams, who co-starred, and Richard Griffiths and others in their prime. “Where are all those people?” Dench asks. “They were so alive — so present, so vital.”
I ask about ghosts. She says she saw one at a memorial service for the actor Michael Denison at the Haymarket Theatre in London. “It was in the afternoon! I saw somebody wearing top hat and tails running down the stairs and I thought, ‘What a funny get-up!’” O’Hea backs her up and says he knows someone who has also seen the “Haymarket Ghost”. An actress told him about a man who kept on coming through a theatre door. “Then someone said, ‘There is no door’.”
“It may not have been a ghost,” Dench continues about her apparition. “But I like the thought of them. Why on earth shouldn’t it happen?” She tells another story about spirits that she insists is not for publication and I listen enraptured. Essentially, she welcomes the idea of ghosts. “You think, ‘Oh, that’s very nice,’” she explains, before trailing off with a smile and a quiet mention of feeling comforted.
We finish at the start, when Dench was a teenager and “Ma and Pa” took her to Florence to see Primavera by Botticelli. It was her passion and she knew every detail; she felt so overawed to see it that “I was sick in the street!”
Has anything else had that physical effect on her? “Play me Brahms and I’m wiped out,” she says. “Gielgud as Prospero, Peggy Ashcroft as Cleopatra.” Then there was the time Dench was on Countryfile and saw a golden eagle. “Well, who sees a golden eagle?” she says. “Two appeared and somebody handed me binoculars, because they knew my eyesight was terrible. I saw them hurtling out of the sky. And then I was given a feather!” She has gone almost squeaky with delight. Of all of the pleasures she finds in life, this is one of her greatest memories.
“It’s time for champagne,” she announces. So off we go into the kitchen for fizz and pizza, where we settle next to her talking grey parrot and while away another hour as she asks questions about me, and I just think, but there is still so much to know about you.
* Macbeth and All’s Well That Ends Well
- Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent, by Judi Dench (Penguin)
Written by: Jonathan Dean
© The Times of London