The opening next month of Judi Dench's latest film The Importance of Being Earnest follows a year of activity remarkable even for her. After Iris, The Shipping News and Chocolate, to say nothing of her upcoming appearance as "M" to Pierce Brosnan's Bond in Die Another Day, this is her fourth major film release in 18 months. In addition, she's appeared on TV and in a West End play, won her fourth Oscar nomination and received a Bafta Fellowship -- all the while mourning the death from lung cancer last year of her fellow actor and husband of 30 years, Michael Williams.
Here, she speaks candidly to award-winning broadcaster and drama critic Sheridan Morley.
Talking to Judi Dench backstage at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, where she was starring in the comedy The Royal Family, I wondered whether all this work was in some way connected. Has she been working ceaselessly as a way of overcoming her grief?
"I suppose you could put it like that, though what really happened was that because of a threatened actors' strike in California last year, my agent told me to take everything I could before there was a Hollywood shutdown, so I really have been working non-stop."
Then she reflects: "Also, I find since Mikey died that I'm very bad at being alone; he could sit by himself in a room for hours, but I really need people around me all the time, and film sets are very good for that. As one gets older it gets harder and harder to be alone.
"But now I am having a bit of a rest and coming face to face with it all. Grieving isn't something that just starts and stops, especially after so long and happy a marriage as ours."
As always with Judi, "having a bit of a rest" is relative. The word is that she will be back in the West End before Christmas.
The character of Lady Bracknell in Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest is one she first played at the National Theatre back in 1982 for Peter Hall. He realised that she alone could reclaim the role from Dame Edith Evans, whos swooping inflections ("a handbag?") defined the part for 30 years. "There is", Hall explained, "no reason why Lady Bracknell should not be cunning, sexy, witty, charming."
For Oliver Parker's new film version, Judi is joined by a starry cast including Rupert Everett and Reese Witherspoon. "We shot it on location, almost like a play," Judi says, "and because I'd already played the part at the National I was long over all my fears about Edith Evans and that bloody handbag!"
Secure in the ranks of British theatrical royalty, Judi has also triumphed in Hollywood, winning an Oscar for her six-minute (sic) appearance as Queen Elizabeth in Shakespeare in Love.
Indeed the love in which Judi is held by her profession is so strong that, at her recent Bafta life-achievement ceremony, Jim Broadbent, her co-star in Iris, felt the time was ripe for a little genle mockery: "The Judi Dench that the public never gets to see", he announced to some surprise, "is well over six feet tall and massively built."
What Broadbent had noticed was that almost anything is believable about the diminutive Judi -- because she has kept her private life curiously private over nearly half a century, she really can disappear into roles as varied as those of Cleopatra, played at the age of 52, and the Alzheimer-crippled Iris Murdoch.
Yet Dench's life has not been a prolonged procession through applauding audiences. She has known more tragedy than most. In 1993 her home in Hampstead burnt to the ground, taking with it a lifetime of theatrical memorabilia. Then in 1997, her beloved only daughter Finty -- seen recently in Gosford Park -- finally told her that she was eight months pregnant, a secret she had kept from her parents because she thought Michael, a staunch Catholic, would be appalled by a grandchild born out of wedlock.
He was reportedly not amused, but when his illness was diagnosed in 1999 the family pulled together, putting on a united cheerful front although they knew from the start that his cancer was terminal.
Even though their marriage was one of the most enduring in show business -- Judi called him "my spoony old thing"; he sent her a red rose every Friday; they starred in the TV sitcom A Fine Romance -- it stemmed from a curious kind of tragedy. Judi had been in several long but discreet relationships with actors such as Leonard Rossiter and John Neville when, in 1969 on a Royal Shakespeare Company tour of Australia, she was closely linked with Charlie Thomas, a talented young actor with a severe drinking problem who died on the tour in mysterious circumstances.
Knowing how distraught she would be, Michael, who had been a close friend for nine years, flew out to be with her and eventually proposed marriage. "No," said Judi, "it's too romantic out here with all that sun and sand and sea. Ask me on a rainy night in Battersea." So, in 1970, on a rainy night in Battersea, Michael asked again and she accepted.
By then she had already been on the stage for more than 20 years. The daughter of a York doctor--she has two brothers -- who was resident physician at a local theartre, she started in the city's age-old Mystery Plays in 1957, having spend three years at the Central School of Speech and Drama -- where fellow student Vanessa Redgrave remembers "she skipped and hopped around with pleasure and excitement".
Director Franco Zeffirelli, whose friendship has lasted across four decades since he cast her in Romeo and Juliet, noted of her: "To understand Judi, look closely at her house in the country. The front is very neat and proper, but the back is a rambling thicket of brambles and nettles and wild orchids. That is the real Judi: she puts up a facade, but for herself she reserves a private garden where there are secret treasures that don't show from the front."
Trevor Nunn, another director who has worked with her almost from the very start, adds: "She is the perfect Shakespearean, because all his great characters have this fantastic speed of thought. You always live dangerously with Judi. You live in the moment and there is never any sense that what she's doing is a recitation or a repeat."
Her choice of roles is famously haphazard. Amazingly, she never reads a script in advance, relying always on a two-line synopsis from her agent and then deciding whether or not to do it based entirely upon the other people involved. She is also notorious for not reading play scripts prior to rehearsals. "I don't really believe in homework. I like to be as improvisational as possible," she says, "though I did read lots of Iris Murdoch's novels before filming Iris."
In rehearsal, Judi Dench becomes, in energy and anecdote, the heart of the company; on the film set, the Mother Courage of the cast.
Only now, in her sixties -- she's 67 -- has she begun to understand and enjoy filming: "Stage actresses are always banging on about how the great roles dry up when you're between 50 and 80. But for movies they always seem to need some old bat shuffling about in a wheelchair, and I'm perfectly happy with the thought of that. I suppose because I've only come round to film lately and had such wonderful roles, I'm in love with the idea of Hollywood."
Judi is in danger of being revered as our greatest living actress. What saves her is her childish glee in elaborate onstage practical jokes and, above all, her determination to take risks.
A Quaker, she has never tried to work with anything other than what God gave her. When she was the first London Sally Bowles in the musical Cabaret, she suggested that a sign be put in the box office announcing: "Miss Dench does not have a cold, this is her normal speaking voice."
If you want to find the real Dame, look at the very last scene that playwright David Hare wrote for Judi Dench in Amy's View, the story of a failing actress. Her last lines come as, within the play, she is about to face yet another audience, and is told that the director has gone off in search of another job: "Fair enough then. So we are alone."
Like all great actresses, in the end Dench is alone. Except of course for the audience, out there in the dark, waiting and watching.
Judi's last words to her fellow actors as they are about to go on to the stage are always: "See you on the ice". Ice cracks; it even melts. Judi does neither, but the possibility is always there, and that is precisely the danger that makes her performances so mesmerising.
Thanks to Kevin McHugh for sending this article, which appeared in Readers Digest (UK) August, 2002 edition.