The Unofficial Chronology of Dame Judi Dench's Career
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   Judi Dench

    The Classy Dame of the British Empire!

      
     Dame Judi with Finty / receiving her DBE / as Gertrude in Hamlet / as Bridget in Behaving Badly with Ronald Pickup

Judi Dench is theatre's Dame of great delights and infinite variety.  Acclaimed by Peter Hall as "the
greatest speaker of Shakespeare in her generation," she has also played her share of suburban housewives (Mrs. Pooter, Laura in A Fine Romance and, most recently, Bridget in Behaving Badly).

Shakespeare is her first love: "If Mike," she says of her actor husband Michael Williams, "and I were wrecked on a desert island, I suppose we'd sit with our feet up, have a few sundowners and do a few sonnets to each other!"

In a single week, recently, Dame Judi opened as a "regal, sensual" Gertrude in the National Theatre's Hamlet, ended the run of Behaving Badly with her frumpy divorcee character transformed into a triumph of female defiance and won a BAFTA award for her movie role in A Handful Of Dust: "which was very nice and very unexpected" says Judi Dench in that wondrously husky voice which is like cracked-glaze pottery. 

This new run of Hamlet has a special significance for Dame Judi:  it's the play she first trod the Old Vic boards in, as an unknown Ophelia, freshly plucked from The Central School of Speech and Drama. After 32 years, her great repertoire has come full cycle. 

So unfamiliar was Judi's name back in 1957 that an early good luck telegram arrived - at the stage door addressed to Tudor Bench. But today all heads swivel in the Waldorf Hotel Palm Court as Dame Judi enters, a tiny, cropped-haired figure great-coated in suede, her mobile fingers heavily be-ringed. She says she doesn't mind being the focus of undisguised public fascination: "To tell the truth I'm so short-sighted nowadays I hardly notice!" 

She does however object quite fiercely to the misguided popular view that she is a thoroughly nice 
woman, who is the model of dressing room cosiness.  "Nice," is far too limiting a tag for Judi Dench, who leaps to her feet for a huge hug with her 16-year-old daugher Finty, joining her mother at the end of her London school day. Tiny, like her mother, her elfin prettiness is very much a composite of both Williams parents' looks.

To revere her "cosiness" is to overlook Judi Dench's self-confessed "larder" of temperament - the 
sweeping emotional rainbow that made her a great Lady Macbeth and, quite simply, a great lady.

Dame Judi, does it seem strange to be back in Hamlet after so many years? 
"It's extraordinary. I find I have total recall and never had to learn the lines for Gertrude at all. Coral Browne played the part in '57 and I can hear in my head every word as she then spoke it. I used to stand in the wings and watch all the time when I wasn't on stage."

Last year you made your debut as a director of Much Ado About Nothing with Ken Branagh's Renaissance Theatre.  Did you enjoy the experience? 
"I loved a lot of it and I was also extremely frightened by it.  I made a long speech on the first day in which I meant to talk about the play but ended up going on about how sexy men in white trousers and boots were! I threw out the idea of Elizabethan costume because I wanted a period equivalent to jeans and shirts." 

What pleased you most about your work as a director - and will you try it again? 
"I was absolutely thrilled that people said Much Ado was wonderfully spoken, because speaking the verse is the one thing I feel I can pass on.  Now I'm going to direct the third year students at the Central in Macbeth."
 
Did you ever shout at your cast? 
"I don't think I ever shouted. I got excited when they got it wrong and excited when they got it right - but I certainly made sure they knew which was which!" 

How did Michael propose to you? 
"I was doing The Winter's Tale in Australia. I thought he was in England but one night on stage I turned round during a dance to see an 'extra' who had never been there before!  Recognising him I froze - this must be the first time anybody has dried on stage when they weren't actually speaking!" 

The Antipodean setting seemed so heady that you wouldn't give Michael an answer to his marriage request there and then. But it seems that he has never stopped being a romantic...
"He certainly hasn't. He had a very special-to-us quotation from Shakespeare engraved on the inside of my wedding ring. And we do go in for special treats: for example on our last anniversary the whole family had dinner at the Savoy Hotel and then we stayed the night. But our surprises aren't always that extravagant!"

Do you still holiday in Scotland?
"Well my daughter Finty is now a bikini-on-the-beach girl, but Michael and I are wellies and macs chaps. We love it. We went back to our favourite place on Mull last year and found exactly the spot where we camped and Mike used to light a fire and the icy cold burn where we used to wash our hair."

Is there a nasty side to you at all?
"Of course! I can't bear the comfortable image so often ascribed to me! 'So nice,' they always say 'so nice...' I get angry, first of all because I don't know what the word means and then because it's not my business to be anything but myself in everyday life. My business is to try and tell a story on stage and if I was just this terribly bland, nice person I wouldn't ever have been able to play Lady Macbeth or Sally Bowles! You draw from yourself and therefore I have all those people in me.  "People also say, 'Oh, but when you go home you must take your evil character with you.' Of course I don't! I'm too tired when I get home. I just want to be relaxed."

What do you think is your worst characteristic? What makes you angry and resentful?
"I have a terrible temper which, fortunately, I don't lose very often.  But when I lose it, it is fearsome and short. I resent more than anything in the world being taken for granted, and so does Michael. Nothing makes me angrier than cavalier behaviour or deep insensitivity. We have sometimes walked into a room where people have greeted me but not Michael and I could just turn around and walk straight out. It upsets me more than anything. Michael is a great classical actor - he's played the best Fool in King Lear I've ever seen. The one thing I don't like about a being a Dame, is that people refer to it as if it represented a score.  And it's not meant like that. I hate being told people don't know how to address me any more. What's wrong with calling me Judi or Mrs. Williams? I don't quite know why the honour was given to me, but if it was for anything to do with my life then it was to do with Michael too."

Was it a happy day last year when you went to the Palace to receive the DBE award?
"Yes, because it was also the first night of Much Ado. Mike and Finty came with me and had a family lunch. Then Mike and I got on the train for the first night at Birmingham.  Of course I had to show the whole company how I'd got on in the morning - with my hat and all! It was a lovely, lovely day. And what made it so very moving, which I wasn't to know beforehand, was that all the Zeebrugge people were also honoured that day ."

Have you also had your share of professional disappointment?
"You can't be in this business and not have. I'm disappointed with some of the notices for Hamlet. But the wonderful thing about theatre is that you can keep on doing it better each night. You often look back later on disappointments and see that something positive followed them."

Is it true that you can't sing and were so frightened of auditioning as Sally Bowles in Cabaret that you delivered your musical numbers from the wings? And that you can't bear to watch your own performances replayed on screen? 
"Yes. I was so frightened that I had also got a little drunk, having gone to lunch with my agent beforehand! I can only sing the way I can talk, which was fine for the part and for people who had read the book and knew Sally Bowles was supposed not to be able to sing either. Those who hadn't read it just said to themselves, 'Well, here's a non-singer if ever I saw one!' And although I watch all Michael's screen work (I just doted on his Angel Voices.  I didn't ever want it to end) ... I can't bear mine. You know how appalled you are when you hear even your own voice played back for the first time! I've never seen A Room With A View, I've never seen A Handful Of Dust because I just can't bear it ... you can always think of other ways you should have done the part and feel you've missed an opportunity. And, gosh, you think... I can't look that fat. In my head you see I'm always a tall, thin, frightfully elegant woman wearing marvelous clothes!" 

Do you still have any unfulfilled ambitions?  Any aspirations left in the air after your one early year spent at art school before changing to drama? 
"I'd like to do another musical - even though I can't sing! I'd like to do a part that's very, very unexpected.  I do get restless, so I don't suppose Dirty Gertie will see me through for all time! I'd also like to illustrate a book - I'll never get around to doing it I don't suppose, but it's what I'd like to do. 

What do the Quaker values you learned at your school - The Mount in York - mean to you now? 
"Being a Quaker does mean a tremendous amount to me. I'm a  rather flighty, non-restful person really, and the Friends philosophy gives me a kind of peace and hope and calm."

Has Finty given any public performances of her own so far? 
"At the end of term school concert she sang The Man I Love. She was Maisie in a school production of The Boyfriend and some time ago she joined Michael and I in a poetry recital in the Channel Islands, doing a poem with a very pointed line at me along the theme of, 'I'm 17 and she is 49.' She was a huge success."

Do you mind your daughter going on the stage?
"When she was two we used to say to her 'What does King Lear say' and she would say 'Never! Never! Never! Never! Never!' Having introduced her to Shakespeare I suppose we have only ourselves to blame!'  "I don't mind the choice of career as long as she knows what she's letting herself in for, which I think she does. She is like me but she's cleverer and a great deal wiser than I was at her age... and yet there are odd moments when she's really quite young, which is also lovely in away.   Perhaps that's just the quality of being 16."

So, Finty - what draws you to the stage? What style of actress do you want to be?
Finty: "Acting's the only thing I've ever known... and it's exciting.  I want to be very glamorous - but my parents just want me to be happy and to be myself" 

Finty claims she gets her giggling fits from you - but she's not inherited your idiosyncratic voice!
"Lucky Finty! No director's going to tell her to come back when her cold's better, as they did me! I was absolutely delighted to discover they said the same to Edmund Kean, which rather takes the sting out of it!  As for the appearance of 16-year-old schoolgirls, one of the fathers at Finty's school commented that they looked like the remnants of some defeated Turkish cavalry. It was a very witty thing to say but actually I think they look very nice! We tell Finty when we think she's looking lovely, but we can also manage to keep pretty stumm unless we're asked for an opinion, or unless she's turned out in enormous pink earrings! I haven't forgotten what it was like as a drama student to arrive back at York station for the holidays bursting with the news that I'd just learned an incredible new way of making up my eyes. All my mother said with meaningful economy was 'So I perceive!' "

Finty is slightly dubious about acting with you in the future as she says you'd make her laugh too much.  But do you look forward to being her audience, as she for years has been yours?
"You bet!"

REPORT BY MADELEINE KINGSLEY
PHOTOGRAPHS BY BRIAN MOODY





November 25, 2006