Playing Queen Victoria brought her to the Oscars,
but Dame Judi Dench has always ruled the West End
"I don’t want to be the only woman in Los Angeles without
a facelift” cries Dame Judi Dench as she contemplates the prospect of going to the Oscars. "I keep wonderfing if I can rush out and get something done very quickly. Anything to pull my face back like this..." She grabs her
cheeks with both hands and pulls them back until her skin is unnaturally taut.
Dench, known to her friends simply as Jude, is both thrilled and terrified by the Academy Awards, mainly because she never expected to be there. She’s been nominated for best actress for her portrayal of Queen Victoria in the film Her Majesty, Mrs. Brown, which started out as a British television project and sprouted into a surprise hit movie, Along the-way it won her a Golden Globe as best actress.
“Never, never, never, I promise you," she says emphatically when asked whether the possibility of an Oscar occurred to her during the filming. “It just caught people’s imaginations. No one in America knew who John Brown was.”
Brown, in fact, was Queen Victoria’s hunting servant at Balmoral summoned to Windsor in 1864 after the death of her husband, Princ Albert. He was to look after her horses, but also to encourage her to stop grieving for her dead husband and take part in public life once again. But he grew very close to the queen, and their relationship led to a public scandal: Gossips nicknamed the queen “Mrs. Brown.” His influence subsequently waned, and he died in 1883, Victoria was buried with a photograph of him in her hand when she died 18 years later.
While Dench has plenty of films on her résumé -- ranging from A Room With a View to the last two James Bond movies, in which she played M -- the focus of her 40-year career has always been the stage. “I prefer theater to flim, because you can go on working at it all the time,” says the actress, who’s starred as everyone from Mother Courage to Sally Bowles and who is currently appearing in London in the David Hare play Amy's View. “You work and work, and there suddenly comes a moment when everything clicks. Of course, you never get it perfect, because you’re always discovering something new about the character.”
One of three children of a doctor in York, Dench initially wanted to be a dancer, and later, a set designer. But while at a Quaker boarding school, she decided to become an actor like her older brother Geoffrey [sic]. She studied at the Central School of Drama in London, but her debut in 1957 -- as Ophelia in Hamlet -- was hardly auspicious: Critics panned her performance and blasted the producers or taking on such a young actress. One wrote, "She stepped out into the limelight, tripped over her advance publicity and fell flat on her pretty face.”
Perhaps to avoid repeating that debacle, Dench has become an avid researcher in every role she takes on, striving to discover an emotional connection with the charactcr (although she claims, oddly enough, that she never reads a script before deciding whether to accept a part). Her audience connects, too: Once, while playing Juliet on stage, she recited the line, “Where are my mother and father?” only to hear her own father shout out through tears, “We’re here in Row H, darling!”
For Mrs. Brown, Dench found inspiration in Queen Victoria’s Highland Journal as well as in the costumes for the film, “Once you have the clothes on, with all the right things underneath, you can’t help but stand like her,” she says, expressing sympathy for the horse she rode in the film because of the outfits’ weight. “he’d literally sigh with relief every time I’d get off,”
She also has a habit of drawing -- literally -- each character as she works on it, doodling on a page of the script until it’s fully formed. “The drawings build up as I rehearse,” she says, “I draw it as someone else is talking, adding a bit here and there until I get it. But I always leave the face out, always.”
Dench has become famous for the authoritative brusqueness she brings to her roles, but the actress herself is good-natured enough to put up with taxi drivers snapping pictures of her on the street or fans leaning out of windows to whistle and wave “She’s incredibly accessible,” says John Madden, the director of Mrs. Brown as well as her next film, Shakespeare in Love, co-starring Joseph Fiennes (Ralph’s brother) and Gwyneth Paltrow. “She has this unique ability to control energy in the way she withholds it and then releases it. It’s why she’s so electrifying as an actress.’
And so busy. In addition to Amy's View and Shakespeare in Love (in which she stars as Queen Elizabeth I), Dench is currently shooting a series for British television. Later this spring, she’ll start work on the movie Last of the Blonde Bombshells opposite Ian Holm. A play with Sir Peter Hall follows in the fall. She’ll also play M again in the next Bond movie, which is slated for release in November 1999.
In the meantime, she has to figure out what to do about the Academy Awards. It was only in early March that she learned she’d be able to take two days off from the play to go, which meant she’d be juggling the schedules of her husband, Michael Williams, and daughter, Finty, both actors appearing on the London stage at that time. And she still hasn’t decided what she would wear. “Oh, that’s such a nightmare,” she says before admitting that she’s met with Hare’s wife, the designer Nicole Farhi, about making something for her.
Still, the thought of walking the carpet continues to plague her. “All those people!” she wails. “I’m the worst one at those events anyway. Everybody would expect me to be this reserved person of the theater and there I’d be, screaming and pointing at all those stars,”.
This article ran in the April, 1998 edition of W Magazine