Last year Dame Judi Dench discovered something extraordinary about her family; one of life's connections that can throw a person. It was during her turn on the BBC ancestry show Who Do You Think You Are? As the episode glides along, it delves into detail about a war injury Dench's father had in his knee, which explains a limp his daughter never fully understood. It also explores her mother's family in Ireland. Dench is delighted throughout the filming. "Well, who wouldn't be?" Then she goes to Denmark. And things get weird.
"The BBC do not tell you anything," she explains breathlessly. She remains thrilled by the show months on. "You don't even know if you need your passport. You give them a bit of information. I told them about my father's war history. I told them Ma was born in Dublin. Then, suddenly, I'm flown to Denmark."
She pauses. Her eyes are wide. She is a terrific storyteller. "Denmark! And not only to Denmark, but I was put in a car and taken to Elsinore." Which is, of course, the English name for Kronborg Castle in the town of Helsingor, where Shakespeare set Hamlet. "Elsinore!" gasps Dench.
"And then it turns out my 10 times great aunt was the lady in waiting to the Queen of Elsinore, when [the actor] Will Kemp brought Shakespeare's plays there." She looks giddy thinking about all this. Kemp and his company visited Elsinore in the late 1500s, which means they may have reported details of the castle, and country, back to Shakespeare, which in turn led to Hamlet. And what was Dench's first professional role? Ophelia. In Hamlet.
"The days were very long when filming," she continues. "At the end I was exhausted. Yet when I went to bed, I couldn't sleep." She says that it felt like her head was full of wool. She was, quite simply, too excited at the possibility that one of her ancestors indirectly may have inspired the play that launched her own career.
So we are off; story after story from a near seven-decade career that started in 1957 when Dench played Ophelia at Liverpool's Royal Court and was still going strong this January, thanks to her Oscar-nominated role as dear old Granny in Kenneth Branagh's autobiographical Belfast. And do not ask if she is going to retire. When I suggest that she does not seem to be slowing down but that, well, she is 87, I get a dressing down. Her eyes glare playfully. "Slowing down?" she scolds. "How dare you, Jonathan. How dare you. I'm slowing down only in that I can't see to read." Dench has age-related macular degeneration in both eyes, which means she needs to have her scripts read to her. "But I will find a way."
We are meeting at the Cheltenham International Film Festival, where I am also interviewing her on stage, in the hall of the town's grand spa house, Pittville Pump Room. Billed as An Afternoon with Dame Judi, it feels more like a long, lush lunch. Before going on stage we wait behind the curtain as a packed room takes in a highlights reel of her film career. In a black jacket and trousers, with glistening white shirt, Dench listens to her own voice — in Notes on a Scandal, those James Bond films in which she starred as M, Shakespeare in Love. She jokes that she does not recognise any of them, but she is like this: a hoot. Yet she is also an octogenarian with a lot of memories and some concern about how many of them she has clung onto. She suggests that I might remember her life better than she does and I am not sure how much she is joking.
Dench was born in York in 1934, daughter to Reginald, a local doctor who had fought in the First World War, and Eleonora, who did wardrobe for the local theatre. It was a vibrant house full of culture. Reginald could recite the whole of The Song of Hiawatha, the epic 19th-century poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. ("And he used to," says his daughter. "Often.") She had two older brothers, Peter, also a doctor, and Jeffery, who have both died in the past decade. Jeffery was an actor, but Judi started out training to be a set designer after attending Mount School, an independent Quaker school in York. Her ambitions changed when her parents took her to see a production of King Lear.
"It was like an enormous poppadom," she says of that King Lear stage. It blew her mind. "And I realised that I would never be the designer I wanted to be and so, because Jeff was an actor, I just thought I would have a go at getting into Central [School of Speech of Drama]. And I did. And I do not regret it for a minute."
One early review said that she had "talent which will be shown to better advantage when she acquires some technique to go with it". But her ascent was rapid and she joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1961. As daft as this may sound, when did she realise she could act? That she was rather good at this job? "Oh," she cackles. "I've not got to that stage yet."
Even when she racked up the awards? One Tony. Ten Baftas. Seven Oliviers. An Oscar for only eight minutes of screen time as Queen Elizabeth I in Shakespeare in Love, plus seven Oscar nominations? Surely such praise gets one used to the idea you know what you are doing? "No, no," Dench says, appalled. "You can do something that is a success and then for the next thing you could go arse over tit. You can't ever take it for granted and it's right that we shouldn't."
She is not joking. There is a genuine insecurity to Dench, despite all the accolades. In the 1960s, for instance, she was turned down for a film by a director who, for the sake of dignity, she will keep anonymous. She was mostly known as a theatre actress at the time, with a bit of TV. But her agent had found her an audition for a film, so off she went to Piccadilly, more out of duty than any burning desire to make it in the movies.
"He was perfectly nice," she remembers of the director. "But at the end he said, 'You'll never make a film. You have the wrong face.' And I said that is fine, I don't like film anyway. I want to go back to the theatre." It would be another three decades, at the age of 63, when she would play her first lead role in a film, as Queen Victoria alongside Billy Connolly in Mrs Brown.
She rose up in the industry at a time when men in powerful positions could say the sort of thing that director in the 1960s said (and do far worse) with impunity. She is, like many, trying to come to terms with what the new Hollywood, post #MeToo, means. Over a decade ago she said, "No, I wouldn't call myself a feminist … I don't know what a feminist is. I believe in women having a say." And of course that caught her some flak. But she is of a different era.
A few years ago, for instance, on the subject of her old friend Kevin Spacey, Dench did not defend him, but did say she "can't approve" of how he was being removed from films after accusations of sexual assault. (They both starred in The Shipping News in 2001.) Also, when I ask her why it might have been important for her to be the first woman to take on the role of M in Bond, she just says, "Oh, it must have been discussed a lot beforehand," without adding to the debate. She is entirely interested in the work — the acting — not in her or other actors' views.
Her self-doubt stems also from perfectionism. On stage, she explains, there is another chance the next night to make a line land better. She mentions her 1987 production of Antony and Cleopatra with Anthony Hopkins, in which they tried hard to perfect a certain line to get a bigger laugh. That is one reason theatre is her favourite.
"And the thing about film," she adds, "is you do not get another go at it. There are a lot of films of mine that I have never seen and I don't want to because I would just be irritated." Because she would feel she could have done it better? "But you can't make it better!" Any examples? "It's that line, 'I … wrote?' " she says. She means a key line in Iris, for which she was Oscar-nominated in the title role as the novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch, when the Alzheimer's has set in and Iris's husband, John (Jim Broadbent), reads books to remind his beloved of the work she did. "I … wrote," whispers Iris, as she stares into the middle distance and the audience weeps. "I could do that line much better now," Dench scoffs. "But you see? Too late. Hopeless."
Is there anything she enjoys watching again? "Mrs Brown," she says. "Because we had such a fun time doing it." Dench and Connolly would stay up late in a bar on the Ardverikie Estate in Scotland, as he regaled her with stories and she wondered whether she could get by on three hours sleep. "He was brilliant, Billy," she says. She pauses. "Well, he is brilliant. I could watch Mrs Brown again. But there are a lot of my films I haven't seen. Maybe I will one day, when I've forgotten a bit more about them."
The Oscars ceremony comes up during a chat about her being nominated so many times. "We went this year," she says — she was nominated in the best supporting actress category for her performance in Belfast but Ariana DeBose won. Remembering the moment Will Smith leapt on stage to slap Chris Rock after the comedian made a comment about his wife's hair, Dench raises her eyebrows and sighs heavily. "We thought that it was a joke." She says, laughing. "Everybody did."
Then … "Oh, it's not a joke." She shakes her head. "It was just endless this year — that was the good bit actually." Also, she says "Tony Hopkins" was in the room and she had not seen him for a bit, while her plus one for the night, her 25-year-old grandson Sam, who looks a lot like Ed Sheeran, met the one-time Spider-Man Andrew Garfield. "He loved that," she says with a smile, and it is clear that those smaller moments, really, were the actual highlights of her evening.
Dench married her husband and fellow actor Michael Williams in 1971, the same year the couple appeared together in a production of The Duchess of Malfi. They met in a pub on Drury Lane in London and shared a stage a few times. In the 1980s they were an on-screen couple in A Fine Romance on ITV. In 2001 he died of lung cancer. "I suspect I shall never get over Mikey," she said on David Tennant's podcast in 2020. "Sometimes the door in this house just opens and I think he's just wandered in."
His name comes up from time to time during our conversation. About Mrs Brown, she says it was Williams who persuaded her to take the role. He was also keen for her to accept the part of M when she was first cast in the Bond franchise for GoldenEye. "My husband said, 'Oh, you've got to do that — I would be living with a Bond woman!' "
Their daughter, Tara — better known as Finty — was born in 1972, with Dench's grandson, Sam, coming along in 1997. The remaining family members are close. With work paused, they spent a lot of lockdown together, messing about on social media. I say I liked something that Dench said during one video on Twitter: "Just keep laughing. That's all we can do." It was rather profound and … "Twitter?" she interrupts. "That was on TikTok." Often, she seems 87 in age alone. For her 81st birthday, Finty got her a first tattoo — on her wrist, it reads "Carpe Diem" — while in 2017 she was taught how to rap by Lethal Bizzle.
Family is everything to Dench. You can see that in her best roles. She fills her parts with the warmth and quiet reflection that is found in a good home and cannot be learnt, but rather experienced. If you had to typecast her, she is at her best playing a no-nonsense, if tender, matriarch and Dench understands certain roles can help people.
In Iris she plays Murdoch as her mind drifts away. Both the director, Richard Eyre, and her co-star Broadbent had experience of Alzheimer's through their mothers and shared their stories of the disease so Dench could get the role right. She thinks the film was important.
Suddenly, she remembers something. A BBC TV film called On Giant's Shoulders (1979) about the thalidomide victim Terry Wiles. He starred as himself and Dench played the boy's mother, Hazel. Hazel and her husband, Len, had adopted Terry when his birth mother could not cope with his severe disabilities. "A frightening thing happened to me on the first day," Dench says as her voice gets softer, almost turning into a whisper. "They called me to set and I came face to face with Terry's mother. That was …" She stops.
"That was … I don't know quite what to say …" She is holding back tears. "Actually meeting the real person? I had lots of questions to ask her. But you think, 'I do not come up to the standard of this person.' " She pauses. She remembers dancing with Wiles on set. It is another memory she clings to. "Adorable. Just adorable."
I want to end on Notes on a Scandal, in which she portrayed a vindictive teacher out to wreck a younger colleague (played by Cate Blanchett) when she catches her having sex with a student. It was not very Dench and so I sense she enjoyed it immensely.
"I did. Every minute." Why? "Because she's hideous!" She says the part was a gift. In one scene Blanchett smashes her against a bookcase. "We had such a good time," Dench beams. After that scene Blanchett produced a huge bottle of champagne and Dench proudly says that they drank it all.
Somehow she still has a curiosity to try new things. Sure, this curiosity killed Cats — she played Old Deuteronomy in the mocked Tom Hooper film version of the musical. But largely it served her well.
What is her ideal next role? "I always say to my agent, 'Can I not play an Afghan woman who learns to walk the tightrope and, at the end, turns into a dragon?' " Her nineties are going to be riveting.
Asked what her most memorable costume was, the answer comes quickly. "Elizabeth I in Shakespeare in Love. It was unbelievably heavy. It took a couple of people to get me dressed and I couldn't get out of it for lunch. People had to feed me with a spoon." Five years after her own diamond jubilee, she is the queen of our screens: one of our last remaining irreplaceables. And how is she best summed up? By a question from the audience, perhaps: what advice would she give her younger self? She smiles and says, "Do it better."
Written by: Jonathan Dean
© The Times of London