CELEBRITY INTERVIEW
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50 PLUS MAGAZINE
OUR VERY SPECIAL DAME FEW actors or actresses at 86 enjoy the public acclaim and sheer affection in this country that Dame Judi Dench does. Yet, every new film - including her latest Six Minutes to Midnight - stage appearance or TV role is greeted with an outpouring of genuine interest and expectation from her thousands of fans Perhaps that’s not so surprising when you consider her variety of roles runs from Sally Bowles to Queen Victoria. Nor that she has won a record-breaking number of awards and nominations which continue today. But not everything always ran so smoothly for the young Miss Dench. Born in York and a doctor’s daughter, Judi made her “acting debut” as a snail in a play at her Quaker junior school and later played an angel in one of the York Mystery Plays. However, she wanted to study theatre design so went to art school but switched to a course at London’s Central School of
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Speech and Drama when she realised that, actually, she preferred to be on stage rather than designing stage sets. Here, she was in the same class as Vanessa Redgrave. She made her professional debut in Liverpool before going on to the Old Vic in 1957.
Hall persisted and she won rave reviews from both theatre critics and TV audiences. Interestingly, since then she has played virtually all of Shakespeare’s leading ladies and won an Oscar for her brief, although pivotal, role in the 1998 film Shakespeare in Love.
At her first film audition, she was told “Miss Dench, you have every single thing wrong with your face.” This unusual perception, though, did not either harm her future film career nor stop her from becoming a favourite of Director Peter Hall at the Royal Shakespeare Company.
She has also won many plaudits over the years for her Shakespearian roles. In 2004, an opinion poll of the Royal Shakespeare Company voted Dench’s performance as Lady Macbeth in Trevor Nunn’s 1976 production of Macbeth as the second greatest Shakespearean performance of all time. Only Paul Schofield’s masterful King Lear was ranked higher.
He asked Judi to play the title role in a staged, and then later televised, production of Cleopatra. The self-effacing, 5’ 1” Dench refused, insisting that her Cleopatra would be a “menopausal dwarf.”
Although known internationally for her acting, early in her career she starred in musical theatre. She created the role of Sally Bowles in the London premiers of
