Judi Dench has got the "it" factor--the magnetism that draws the audience to her and to her characters, the quality that makes everyone who speaks of her say she's their favorite actor. But ask her to explain what "it" is and how to get it, and she seems as mystified as the rest of us. It's luck, she insists--getting into a good drama school in England, working with respected directors, coming to film and television "late" in life rather than being a skyrocketing starlet who burns out early.
She came to the notice of Americans in A Room With a View (1985), playing the flamboyant novelist Eleanor Lavish so expansively that it took the likes of Maggie Smith playing opposite her to keep Dench from stealing the film with the tiniest of roles. Another brief portrayal caught the attention of Academy voters and won Dench a best actress in a supporting role Oscar: that of the trenchant Queen Elizabeth in Shakespeare in Love. Oscar noms followed for her work in Chocolat; as the sensual Queen Victoria in Mrs. Brown; and as the adult Iris Murdoch in Iris, the story of the novelist who developed Alzheimer's disease. Last year she again worked with Smith; they starred in Ladies in Lavender as elderly sisters who take a shipwrecked young man into their home, Dench's character developing a fascinating love for the stranger.
Currently she is onscreen in Mrs. Henderson Presents. "Inspired by true events," it recounts the founding of London's Windmill Theatre, which entertained wartime London all through the night with vaudevillian acts and tableaux of naked girls. Dench plays Mrs. Laura Henderson--newly widowed, upper class, fulgent with ideas and energy. In some ways it's her best work yet, combining the qualities that we admired most in her previous portrayals--sturdiness, humor, wit--but adding new sadness at the recent loss of Laura's husband, old wistfulness at the loss of her son, a deluded confidence, and a large measure of feminism.
First Her Fear
Dench has an impeccably classic pedigree. She attended London's Central School of Speech and Drama. Immediately before graduation she earned acceptance at The Old Vic theatre, where its then--head Michael Benthall cast the unknown young Dench as Ophelia. Since, she has performed Chekhov, Ibsen, and the entire Shakespeare canon, onstage and onscreen, under the direction of Peter Hall, Trevor Nunn, and John Barton, among many others. She created the role of Amy in David Hare's Amy's View, which played the West End and Broadway. She has had two long-running television series: A Fine Romance and, currently in reruns on PBS, As Time Goes By.
So it's unimaginable but true that she dares not teach, that she relies heavily on her directors, and that she suffers mild stage fright--which she says is essential to a performance. As for teaching, she says, "I would simply die of fright." But, she adds, "I don't think anybody can be told how to act. I think you can give advice. But you have to find your own way through it."
Dench says she learned from watching other people. Names that pop quickly to her mind when asked how she learned film acting are Jim Broadbent, with whom she starred in Iris, and Kevin Spacey, with whom she starred in The Shipping News. "Really classy actors," she says.
She also says her directors are vital to her performances. Notes from them are "life blood" to her. "I need a director terribly badly," she says. "I wade about in mud until I get somebody to give me a hand through it." She tells her directors, "Tell me to go on until I get it to what you call right. Nag me to get it right." And still she'd offer her ideas to her director, "Because that's the way we work now. It's a process."
And then she lets it happen. "And if the director says, 'More of this,' or 'More of that,'--it's like making a cake without a recipe," she explains. "Some things you know about, you know what the ingredients are--maybe not all of them. But it's up to you to put in the amount. It's up to the director to nag you until you get it right."
As part of the process, she likes to incorporate design in developing her characters. "I trained as a designer, so I'm always terribly keen about what I'm going to look like," she says. "I work out the other bits, too, but I need to know what I look like, very early on. And then it's like a template; I'll fill that person out. If I get that out of the way, then I'm all right."
But somehow fear creeps in. "Always," she says. "The more I do, the more frightened I get. But that is essential. Otherwise why would I go on doing it?" The fear may come from her own belief that she doesn't know how to play the part, that her performance is not quite ready, that she wants a particular night to go well because someone special to her is in the audience. And of course she's "gone up" onstage. "Oh, ya!" she exclaims. "First night in [Eduardo de Filippo's] Filumena, with Michael Pennington, I had a whole list of Italian towns to say. And I completely dried on them and came out with a lot of Italian food. And he also went completely awry. One night in The Importance of Being Earnest I cut all the bits about the handbag, and a woman wrote to me and said, 'You've ruined my Christmas.' But mostly I see the absurdity of it, and I laugh uncontrollably. I've got myself into such trouble."
She refuses to conquer her stage fright. At least it's not debilitating. "Not yet," she quips. "But, oh, God, I have the fear. I wouldn't be without it. It makes me laugh. The fear tips over, and I become hysterical. And you get on because you have other actors who are in the same position."
Then Her Courtesy
While she was in school she saw "every single play in London." That way, she suggests, actors can see what works and what doesn't. She tells young actors, if they're going to appear at a theatre, to see the production playing before yours. "You get the measure of the theatre that way, you get the amount you have to project," she says. "Just before I opened in Cabaret, I was taken to The Desert Song, at the Palace Theatre. And the night before I had my audition at The Old Vic, I went to see Two Gentlemen of Verona. I saw Barbara Jefford there. And the next day I knew exactly the kind of right amount to project." As for that audition, Dench remembers it in vivid detail--down to the yellow dress she wore. She expected to earn a walk-on role. She did Miranda's monologue from The Tempest; but Benthall immediately asked her to learn Ophelia's speech, "O, what a noble mind is here o'erthrown!" for the following day. She returned, did the scene, and remembers being asked to let her upswept hair fall. "You were called 'Miss' or 'Mister' then," she recalls. "'Miss Dench,' he said. 'How tall are you?' I said, '5-foot-2.' He said, 'I'm going to take a huge risk. I'm going to cast you as Ophelia, but you are not to tell anybody.' I told my parents, that's all. And that was my first job. I nearly died of fright. And I'd gone [on the audition] with an actor friend of mine who'd been at Central before me and was in The Vic. He said, 'Did you get in? Are you going to walk on?' And I had to say, 'Yes.'" She indeed had walk-on roles in other productions in rep that season, as well as Maria in Twelfth Night and Juliet in Measure for Measure.
Dench recalls getting terrible reviews, called notices in Britain. "I don't care," she says. "I learned a huge amount. It was very good to get notices like that." She admits to no longer reading them. But early on she cried over them. "It was good to learn so early. They're not going to be kind to you. You have to do it and get on, and then gulp down and get better."
So we're back to that "it" factor, that watchability. "What is it?" she wonders. "If we knew that we could say straightaway to young people, 'Don't you do it [act]. You do it. Not you. You.' But we can't do that, because we don't know. That's what's so exciting. And then you can get somebody who hasn't made much of an impression who suddenly does a part, and you jump out and think, 'Where's that person been?' What's it to do with? I don't know. Luck. Luck finding the right part, the right director, being in the right place at the right time."
As actors of her generation have said, the young generation hasn't had the extensive early experience in theatre as preparation for a career. "We had reps to go and make blunders in," she says. "But, my goodness, there's talent around. Crikey. I was bewitched by Keira Knightley." The young actor stars with Dench in the current remake of Pride & Prejudice. Dench won't predict who will take her place in the next generation. "And they won't take our place; they'll be their own people," she says gently.
This article appeared in a Backstage.com Online Article on January 09, 2006. The photo was taken from the back cover of Judi's new book, Scenes from My Life.