On Thursday, Dame Judi Dench turned up for the Critics Circle Awards to receive yet another prize: this time for "Best Actress" for her performance in David Hare's new play. Amy's View. She looked gorgeous, her hair cropped short, eyes twinkling. gushing apologies for being late. After hugging her co-winner Ian Holm she made a simple and direct speech.

Although she has just received an Oscar nomination for her role as Queen Victoria in Mrs Brown, she told her audience that she has never quite got the hang of film acting. She was happier sticking with what she knew best - the stage, which has been her professional home for 40 years. "There is simply no substitute for the theatre," she said. 'What I really love is that in a play, unlike a film, every night you have the chance to get a little better."

It was typically self-deprecating and true. Though film offers must be pouring through her letterbox, she has already committed herself to a part in a risky West End revival of De Filippo's play Filumena for Peter Hall later this year.

Dame Judi seems to have matured as an actress with amazing grace. At 63 she is starting to look more bankable than her mighty rivals Vanessa Redgrave and Maggie Smith. To my mind she is the only one not to have acquired a wardrobe of annoying mannerisms and -importantly-to have had a stab at doing television, including the sitcom A Fine Romance, in which she starred with her husband Michael Williams. The public affection for her has been returned in a generosity of spirit that you can sense in all her work. Her Queen Victoria in Mrs Brown may have been a sadly repressed soul, but Dame Judi brought out a humanity in her love for the Scottish ghillie that other actresses would barely have hinted at.

And her performance as actress Esme Allen in Amy's View is not only damn funny but also a truly tragic portrayal of what it's like to lose absolutely everything.

The fact that the play has her in it has helped ensure its massive box office success. Dame Judi Dench is a major star and, for all its occasional naffness and its endless financial crises, the theatre has given her a life. She, in return, continues to lend it her own deep-down talent which has blossomed into something miraculous.

Thanks to Mary Lynn Travers for sending this article to me. It appeared in the Sunday Express (UK) on February 15, 1998.

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