After nearly half a century at the top, Judi Dench explains to Alan Franks how acting still fills her with fear - and laughter.
Of course, Judi Dench could be acting when she says this, but she insists she
is anxious pretty much all the time that no one will ever again ask her to
work. It is convincing; what she says is always convincing, which is why
writers, directors and audiences can't get enough of her. But it is also hard
to believe, since she is just a couple of years off completing half a century
in her profession without a single spell of enforced resting.
Actors are always telling you they'll never work again, but this particular instance does sound like a triumph of fear over experience.
In fact, fear keeps making the most unexpected appearances in this exceptional woman's life. Unexpected, because some of the regal composure of her great roles has clung to her off-duty person, and, as Shakespeare said, "true nobility is exempt from fear". This is as misleading as it is inevitable. In the course of talking about great fame, serious loss and the relationship between her work and her life, Dame Judi describes vividly the effects of this fear. Sometimes it has flitted in and out like a walk-on.
On other occasions, it has settled on her so heavily that it has threatened to disable her. The surprising thing, at least to the laity, is that it has not got lighter with the passing of time and the coming of age. She doesn't seem to have got her hands on tricks and devices of the sort that professionals in every field can evolve. On the contrary, the height of her reputation, and therefore of the expectations of her, simply mean the view is giddier and the fall further.
As if the real Queen had decided to gild the nation's counterfeit lily, Dame Judi has, at 70, just become a Companion of Honour, at present the only actress in the Order founded in 1917 by George V to acknowledge outstanding contributors to the arts and public life. The full cast - never more than 66, including the Sovereign - is a terrific read. It includes, at random, the former Australian premier Malcolm Fraser (1976), Denis Healey (1979), Stephen Hawking (1989), Lucian Freud (1993), David Hockney (1997), John Major (1998) and Harrison Birtwhistle (2001). The only other members of her profession here are the unknighted figures of Paul Scofield, now long into stage retirement, and the Nobel laureate Harold Pinter.
All in all, meeting her should be more daunting than it is. She is little and smiley, even if there is the suggestion of steel within the diplomacy.
Her voice has a sob-like catch in the heart of it, and when she reminisces she seems forever on the edge of misting over. Friends say she has a temper that is well concealed from her public; it can be sharp, though generally short-lived, and is apparently inherited from her mother. "People ask me when I am going to retire and slow down," she says, "and I say, 'Slow down? What for? Tell me that. What is it exactly that I should be slowing down for?' But they go on asking me all the time."
The last time I had met her was nearly four years ago. On that occasion she was, as she is now, immersed in work. But the traffic between that work and this life was fairly scary; her husband, the actor Michael Williams, had died not long before, and she was playing the title role in Richard Eyre's film Iris. As such, she was deep into the cruel childhood of Alzheimer's and about to "widow" Jim Broadbent's John Bailey, Iris Murdoch's husband.
Then there were the remote locations for the filming of The Shipping News, during which Kevin Spacey became a crucial friend and confidant. Then the more familiar outlines of the English theatrical establishment in the shapes of the Theatre Royal Haymarket, in a play called The Royal Family, with Peter Bowles, directed by her eternal contemporary, Peter Hall.
Once again there are two films and a play in the offing. The films are Mrs Henderson Presents, about the posh eccentric who opened the Windmill Theatre in Soho during the war and got round the Lord Chamberlain by making her nude girls stand motionless, so passing them off as artsy tableaux; and the adaptation of Notes on a Scandal, Zoe Heller's powerful novel about a woman (Dench) monitoring the affair between a teacher (Cate Blanchett) and her pupil with obsessive interest. The play, next year, is No l Coward's Hay Fever - at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, with Peter Bowles, directed by Peter Hall.
Outside, in the world beyond professional pretence, people are going down like the end of Hamlet. Good people, old ones, but not that old. On the day we meet, the papers carry the obituaries of character actress Ursula Howells. The previous day it was Mary Wimbush, who played Julia Pargetter-Carmichael in The Archers.
"I truly believe that as time goes by, you are increasingly lucky to be doing the things that you love," says Dench, rather like someone who's been expecting the party invitations to stop.
How important has work been in these years since Williams's death? He was, after all, not just her husband but her co-star in the hit Eighties TV series A Fine Romance, as well as being her first opinion on the parts she should be considering. They met and fell in love during their early RSC years. "Important?" she replies. "It's been imperative. They have been jobs that I have loved doing. If it had been a one-woman show, that would have been different. I wouldn't have seen any comfort in that. I would rather do a radio play. What is important is being with friends, having something to sort out which takes up the daylight."
Is there a sense of pushing something away - a grief and loneliness that might come and invade the spaces opened by relaxation? "No, I don't think so. I don't think I'm on the run from anything. I think it's good luck to carry on, and to be asked to do something."
To whom does she now turn for advice? "Well, I ask Finty (her daughter).
And friends. I don't quite know. I do it on instinct. And by not reading it. I mean, I take something because I'm asked, and because of who has asked me and who is in it. And the fun. I don't want to go through a day without a good laugh.
"I was got through that time (following Michael's death) by Kevin and Jim and Richard. If you allow yourself, you are lifted through things like that by your friends. That is, if you are lucky enough to have friends like that. If you are on your own, well, I keep thinking of that woman who smothered her disabled son, and whose husband died earlier this year. I find myself wondering how she coped for all those years."
Unlike her direct contemporary and sole peer Maggie Smith, Dench's success in
films has come quite late: the Bond films in which she plays M, Mrs Brown
(Queen Victoria), Shakespeare in Love (Queen Elizabeth I), Iris, Tea with
Mussolini, Ladies in Lavender have all been in the past ten years. Her stage
ascent, by contrast, was rapid and early. Barely out of the Central School of
Speech and Drama, where she won a first-class degree and four acting prizes,
she was playing Mary in the medieval mystery plays at the town of their - and
her - origin, York. Her parents were major presences in the amateur drama scene
there, and her doctor father numbered the members of the Theatre Royal among
his patients. Later that year, 1957, she was Ophelia in Hamlet at the Old Vic,
and the press were ecstatic about her arrival. Her parents came down for every
show and when, three years later, as Juliet, she called out: "Where are my
father and my mother, Nurse?" her father was so affected that he replied, "Row
11, darling." Like many in her generation, she regrets the passing of a system
that nurtured versatility.
"When I started, there were still reps. Students went there and made mistakes, and watched people who were better than them. That doesn't happen any more. Now students want to make an instant impression by going on a TV series or getting a lucky break in a film. Fewer of them want to go into the theatre." Still, when it comes to working for the screen, big or small, "you just have to keep at it because there are a million people at your shoulder shouting at you to move over".
One year after Juliet, she was Anya in The Cherry Orchard. Again she was a sensation, and the director, a 30-year-old Peter Hall, rejoiced in the emergence of a boundless talent with unlimited self-belief. However, this is not how she sees it. Given her reputation as a consummate professional, it is surprising that she does not. Yet the fact is that two years ago she suffered a bout of stage fright that nearly forced her out of an RSC production before it had opened. She had not performed with the company for 25 years, and everything about the occasion engulfed her in doubts: the part, the play, the town (Stratford). In tears, she rang Peter Hall, who is no stranger to virtual breakdown and who has rung her on comparable occasions many times over the years. This time his advice was not much more elaborate than "pull yourself together", which she duly did; in the end the play, All's Well That Ends Well, was an apt one.
But something similar had happened before, at the Barbican in 1984 when she had been playing the lead in Brecht's Mother Courage and found herself, to borrow Shakespeare again, "distilled almost to jelly with the act of fear".
It was not, she says, quite like the ordeal which had famously driven another contemporary, Ian Holm, from the stage for years in 1976. But it was unsettling enough. "I remember coming forward to get on to the cart in the dark on the first night. It was at that moment that I knew the meaning of the expression 'her knees turned to jelly', because they completely gave way, and I was thinking, no, I can't do this. Well, two of the actors simply lifted me up and a few minutes later the lights were up and we had to start in on the scene."
So what was going on? She begins to talk of "all sorts of very small lights and windows and openings, and if you let that happenI..." but then she tails off with a shrug as if to say it is all beyond her. When she starts up again it is to say that it (acting) is a weird business. "I often think, what are we, as grown-ups, doing dressed up as other people?"
And what is the answer? "I don't know." Something to do with compulsion, maybe? Having to do it because not doing it is unacceptable? "I don't know.
I think absurdity and laughter are important." Is this amused laughter or the hysterical kind? "Oh, it has to do with hysteria, I think. I know I am highly at risk. I mean, on the stage. At risk from seeing how absurd it all is. Gambon is a hazard, you know. And I suppose I am a hazard to him. In Ghosts on TV he was merciless. Quite merciless and irresponsible. Mind you, Gielgud was bad enough.
"You see, when you are frightened but have to get up and do something, everything comes to the surface, or just below the surface. You make yourself vulnerable because that is the level on which you have to work.
Now, unless you can be self-deprecating about it, and see the absurdity of it, you cannot hope to represent the seriousness. It's a strange thing, but if you are doing tragedy you laugh more and if you are doing comedy you laugh less."
None of her analysis, nor anyone else's, explains how she does what she does, which is to animate the characters of others with a breadth and truthfulness that has never been surpassed by a British actress. This is a performer who can bring pathos to Lady Macbeth, humanity to empresses and heroism to drunks. She can also convey an individual's growing absence from the world and from herself with such poignancy as to reduce the crew (of Iris) to tears. In the view of her biographer John Miller, she has the ability to change mood in an instant, and not just in the course of a performance. "The moment the director cries, 'Action!', she switches into a concentrated intensity that takes your breath away." When the comedian Billy Connolly was starring with her in Mrs Brown, he noted "how tiresome she finds the doily-and-serviette crowd. You know, those English twittering f***ing women - they think she's one of them, and she isn't."
Not long after her husband died, their daughter Finty, who lives with her at her house in rural Surrey, detected "a sort of liberation" in her mother. What is beyond doubt today is that her appetite for the big stage roles is undimmed. But where are they? This is the familiar question that reinforces the conviction about never working again. It's what you might call the Mrs Lear Question (there isn't one). No use pointing out to her that there is Coriolanus's mother, Volumnia, or Lady Bracknell, or the Countess in All's Well; she's already done them. So what sort of thing would she fancy?
"I'd like to be upstage in a very comfortable bed while everyone else talks about me. Then someone wakes me up with a cup of tea and I walk down stage in a Jean Muir dress and make a speech that brings the house down."
She spends a lot of time hanging out with her younger (by 19 days) friend, Maggie Smith, the other great Dame of this vintage. Smith lost her husband, the playwright Beverley Cross, a couple of years before Dench was widowed.
That too had been a long, close marriage to a man who had become a mentor as much as a partner. "I don't know what the right word is," says Dench, "but I think the word is thankful. Yes, I was thankful to Mags for being there, thankful that she had trodden the path and knew the way well. There have been times in our lives when we have known the same language, and been aware of what the other is feeling."
They worked together early in their careers but then not for decades. In 1995 they appeared in Franco Zeffirelli's Tea with Mussolini. So too did a third distinguished widow, Joan Plowright, whose husband was Laurence Olivier. After the day's filming the three would repair to the terrace of their Italian hotel and fall into what can only be described as hysterics.
It happens that just before meeting Judi Dench I met Maggie Smith, also in a London hotel, also to ask her about her life and work. Each has come to love and revere the other, but also to laugh when the name of the other comes up, as if it is the gate into a private garden of the wildest hilarity. Smith insisted that Dench was more famous than her and got all the attention if the two were together in a restaurant. Dench rebuts this and says the only reason anyone has any idea who she is because of "a couple of TV series".
She smiles again, the smile turns into a laugh, she shakes her head and says, "Dear Mags. You know, she was in this play (Edward Albee's Three Tall Women) where her first line was, 'I am 93.' She'll never have to say that again because she's sort of going back in the other direction." More laughter. "Soon she'll have to say 'I'm 43.'" Maggie Smith has many reciprocal observations to make, but for these you will have to wait until next week's issue.