A naturally private woman who is often content to let her characters do the talking, she speaks movingly of love and loss, and the continuing influence of such people after they have made their last exit. She does so in the Haymarket Theatre's number one dressing room, a little five-star haven in a professional world still full of dire quarters.  This was Gielgud's favourite dressing room, and he wanted to take it everywhere with him. Ralph Richardson was here, and Jack Lemmon and Margaret Rutherford and countless other late greats. Wilde and Shaw were also in the building. There are two fine suites just down the stairs, but the management have got them. Dame Judi is here to play Fanny Cavendish, the American theatrical matriarch in a resurrection of The Royal Family, the 1927 George S. Kaufman / Edna Ferber comedy based on the Barrymore dynasty. Yet another part where she too must revive herself for the curtain call.  

Take the Iris problem first, before the tragedy of her own widowing. Lady Macbeth or Cleopatra you can play in the reasonable hope that none of the relatives will turn up and say you got it wrong. The two big drama queens, Elizabeth I and Victoria, do have their retinues of experts and style sticklers. But when the subject is a contemporary heroine with a widower at large (albeit repartnered), and a huge circle of admirers, friends and former lovers, the challenge becomes a moral as well as an artistic one, as Murdoch herself would have acknowledged.   

It is largely a matter of ownership. For much of her life, particularly her young womanhood, Iris Murdoch shared herself profligately. Sometimes this sharing was sexual, sometimes social, sometimes intellectual.  It could be generous and self-denying, as with her ailing lover Franz Steiner, or passionately masochistic, as with the author Elias Canetti. Being both emotionally promiscuous and an object of obsession, she left a considerable number of people holding on to their experiences of her. And because those very qualities seem to have made her peculiarly unknowable in her entirety to a single individual - even to John Bayley, her husband of 40 years and fellow Oxford academic - the people in question hang on all the more proprietorially to the bits they did know.

Given all this, it is no wonder that Judi Dench approached the part with great anxiety.  Even after the film was finished, she could only watch it sideways, on a video, through an obscuring hand, at her Surrey home on a small TV.   She likens her subject to a glitterball, catching you with a full and powerful ray, affecting you with the brightness of it, and then moving on; perhaps even coming round again. But with a certain danger always, because the coming round will be followed by another moving on.  

"Because I am asked so many questions about her, I really don't want to short change her," she says. "I can't answer on her behalf; only on what I perceived, and tried to distil - which is this brilliantly intellectual woman who had a waywardness, a shocking one, about her. This, yes, shocking bohemian quality while she was so fantastically... I don't know if this is quite right, but spiritually whole and good. Something
amazingly ... what is the word; the word isn't good, the word is right. I feel terribly responsible. I'm going to go to New York and do a couple of days talking about her.  I'm very nervous about it, answering 
questions on someone who is so recent.  And the glitterball thing; they see it and think they know her, and then it goes wheesshh on to someone else and the squares are different." 

All this is delivered in the husky voice with the involuntary breaks and slight sob that can charge spoken lines with the poignancy of a blues. She looks small and vulnerable without all her grande dame stuff on, very much as she does as the equally unadorned Murdoch. 

In describing the glitterball effect, she has also described something of her own craft, for she too focuses on a person with everything she's got - look no further than Iris - and then moves on to the next one.  She 
doesn't really know how it happens, and perhaps it would be strange if she did.  Somehow she manages to find an almost infinite variety of nuances and inflections in her innumerable parts. If she, rather than Murdoch, were the revolving ball, she would never refract light the same way twice.

Not long before her husband's death, she was starring in the David Hare play Amy's View on Broadway -  at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre - and the last five years have seen her stock rise enormously as a film actress with Mrs. Brown, Tea with Mussolini, Chocolat, and now Iris, The Shipping News and The Importance of Being Earnest.  She is 67 and has been getting the best parts virtually without pause for well over 40 years, from Ophelia and Juliet at the Old Vic of the late Fifties through to the major heroines at the National Theatres of Peter Hall and Richard Eyre.  Twenty years ago, to the chagrin of their successor Trevor Nunn, then in charge of the Royal Shakespeare Company, she embarked on the popular TV sitcom A Fine Romance, with her husband. Unrepentant, she then co-starred with Geoffrey Palmer - subsequently
a courtier to her Queen Victoria - in As Time Goes By.  Like Iris Murdoch, she wasn't going to let a little
thing like greatness spoil her fun.  

The most recent flurry of work had a therapeutic effect, she doesn't deny it. It came in the spring and summer, just weeks after death called a halt to Michael's two-year battle with cancer. Three films were
compressed into an impossible schedule in order to wrap before the Hollywood strike which was then looming. It meant that for several weeks she was commuting between the projects: Nova Scotia for Lasse
Hallstrom's Shipping News, then Southwold for Richard Eyre's Iris, then back to Nova Scotia, then a couple of days break before the Wilde movie.

Michael, she recalls, never once complained about his illness. Nor for that matter did Iris, though the behaviour of an Alzheimer's sufferer must sometimes strike the partner as one long howl of outrage.
That is certainly one of many impressions given by John Bayley's extraordinary account of his time with Iris, on which Richard Eyre's and Charles Wood's script is partly based. Another. more enduring impression is how love, provided it is the genuine article, can accommodate the most immense shifts in dependency, up to and including madness, infantilism and death. (Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds" Shakespeare, Sonnet 116.)  Both the Murdoch/Bayley and Williams/Dench partnerships had the  unconditional stamp on them - all four people said as much in their own ways at some time. So it must have been the strangest thing, so freshly bereft, to be playing, as it were, the other half of the other couple, and with John Bayley still so very much around. 

"Yes. No. I thought it was going to be much more extraordinary than it was. There were bits that I thought would be dreadfully upsetting. Well, the whole thing. I know that with Alzheimer's there's a worry at the
beginning, when your conscious mind thinks, 'What is that word?  Oh, what is that word?' Then after that you go through a barrier where nothing matters. You understand that the person might be upset, but you sail through.  You are able to say to them, 'It's absolutely fine.'  So it's his concern. Yes, I did think that bit
would be upsetting. But I didn't find it so, not once. That was because of the crew, and Richard [Eyre] and Robert [Fox,  producer]. They are very clever people. Not that they did anything consciously, and I
would have resented it if they had done."  

There were members of the Iris crew who were so affected by Dench's animal outburst of grief at the burial of Murdoch's best friend Janet Stone - almost clawing at the coffin to get her back - that they came away from the shooting feeling as if they had spent the day at a real and unusually traumatic funeral. She is not interested in pursuing this line of analysis, and she can hardly be blamed; the logical implication would be that she couldn't turn in such a performance without the energy of her own grief  "No, I did not relate it to what I had been through. Maybe that's because I am an immensely private person. A bit like Iris, and yet not at all."

However, she agrees that grief can create astonishing levels of adrenalin. "It's like a lorry with a long journey and about three times the amount of petrol it needs to get there. ..inside you is some tremendously pent-up thing, and it feels like a bucket overflowing. I don't mean that to be an analogy with tears. I just mean it's something that comes over you and you can barely breathe. And if you can somehow put that to use, it will help you."  

Yet there must have been moments of despair. She and Williams were famously supportive of each other, like Bayley and Murdoch, whether they were working together or not. She says that their partnership, like the other, was the object of some misconceptions. For example it was generally assumed, perhaps because of all those dominant roles, that she wore the trousers.  Not so, she maintains:  Michael was extremely assertive, while kind, and was capable of fierce and astute criticism.

"When I was in Can You Hear Me Thinking? on TV,  I really wanted to know what he thought.  After it was finished, he said. 'you know. I've just got to ring Brian Pringle and tell him that was the greatest acting on TV I've ever seen.' Indeed he was absolutely right.  At the same time I felt a knife go through me 
because I wanted to hear him say that to me."  

I ask if she still feels his influence and she says she senses it in retrospect even though she has lost the immediate benefit. It is the small things that throw her, like a fuse going in the house, or the question of what to do with the garden.

"This [ missing him ] will go on for ages, I expect. I do feel he would have wanted me to do all this work. But yes, when I went to Nova Scotia I was very unhappy for the first two weeks. Then the divine Kevin Spacey arrived. We got on terribly well. We had known each other a little in New York. But again I was not aware for a single second of anyone befriending me because of my predicament. So it was like finding a friend.   And I want to do a play with Kevin Spacey.  I don't know which, but I want to do one."

What of John Bayley, her counterpart in widowhood?  I  read  that  he had  seen Iris and been very moved by it.  

"Was he?" She sounds suddenly jumpy: "I didn't meet him. I think he thought it wasn't happening about him. I suspect that if it is your own life you are watching, then a lot of it would be wrong. I didn't want to meet him before. I didn't want to look into his eyes and see him thinking of me, 'Well, I suppose there might be a shadow of Iris '.  I thought I would see very nakedly in his eyes that I would be insufficient."

And would that have mattered?

"Oh, passionately, before I started it. But now it's done and I can't do anything about it. If it was the theatre, then he could come round and talk, and the performance might be better as a result. But with a film obvi-
ously it's different. All it is is a distillation of what you know of a person. That's all, to give people a slight sense, on the edge of the tongue, of the flavour of that person. It's not so much about her as about the life they had together. It's a love story; and an extraordinarily passionate one, about two very unique people finding one another. Long before I was married, I used to think it would be wonderful if you were Number 
214 and you knew that the other half of Number 214 was climbing the Matterhorn, and so that's where you knew you had to go to find your chap.

"And, yes, it did happen to me and Mikey, but it happened to them in the most extraordinary way, when you think how different they were when they met. He was the virgin and she ... she was not. And it was
her leading him until then suddenly the scales changed and it was him leading her." 

Regardless of any similarities there may have been between their marriages, Murdoch was always going to be played by Dench if the moment came. Not because anyone had said this would happen, but because there was no need for such a statement. On the grounds of age, appearance and aura, it was a shortlist of one. The novelist Martin Amis, writing in the current issue of the American Talk Magazine, says this: "Judi Dench as the mature Iris is transcendent. I knew Iris, I have respectfully kissed that cunning, bashful, 
secretive smile. It is as if Dame Judi and Dame Iris were always on a metaphysical collision course. Her 
performance has the rarest quality known to any art, that of apparent inevitability." 

Dench confirms this in her own words, and says that Murdoch had been a heroine others since A Severed Head, the 1963 play adapted from the novel published two years earlier. When she was doing her background reading for the part, and talking to Murdoch's highly praised biographer Peter Conradi, she was struck by the fact they both had an Anglo-Irish background and an interest in Quakerism.

This common ground, and the inevitability which Amis notes, point to another problem which has beset both women. This time the key word is goodness. It is not just that they are very good at what they do, but 
that they have acquired some air of sanctity in their lifetimes. It has caused embarrassment to both. In neither case was it sought, but appended to them by people who seemed to wish it so.

In Dench, a famously popular company player, it has to do with calmness and generosity.  In Murdoch it was more complicated, and surely came about because the characters in her fiction were so earnestly
engaged in pursuit of morality, even purity.  As was she. Neither she nor they may have believed they had found it. The point was to see where it lay, and to experience whatever happened along the route to its discovery.  Towards the end of her life but before the onset of Alzheimer's, when she was asked what she thought about God, she would reply that she thought more about good; the one shaded into the other.

These beatifications have been wished on other actors, such as Paul Scofield, and on other writers, such as George Orwell.  The critic D. J. Taylor, writing about Conradi's biography of Murdoch, said of her and
Orwell:  "They put the moral energy that they detected in religious belief to work in a world that had lost its religious sense.  What happened - something that they themselves deplored - was that much of the moral energy they inspired ended up being focused on their own personalities."

Much of that surely applies to Judi Dench also, who in a secular way is the priestess of a form which had its origins in the church.  What is not in doubt is that she has experienced the overlap between her world and
Murdoch's in her own way  "I cannot believe that at some time I wasn't in the same room as her," she says. "I cannot believe I missed the chance of ever meeting her. If I had had one atom of that mind, I can't think what it would be like, my God."

Soon after this, the backstage Tannoys crackle into life, and there's just over half an hour till The Royal Family starts. Peter Bowles comes up the stairs making a colossal noise.  The glitterball moves on and Judi Dench focuses back on Fanny Cavendish, for the moment. Privacy again, well hedged behind the public lines. Not darkness exactly, but a bit of shade. There's a lot of death in the lives of actors. There's immortality too since they are keeping people alive who never actually lived. Just as fiction writers do. You
should let go of an analogy when it has served its purpose, but Dench's image of the mirrored globes hangs there a little longer.  She and Iris Murdoch rotating away up there on their own axis and then a ray from
each falling suddenly on the same spot at the same instant and making it flash like lightning. Very good, very right. 

Iris is released on January 18.  Judi Dench will be contributing to Omnibus on Iris Murdoch which will be screened on BBCI on January 23.






 

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