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Iris,
Michael and me Judi Dench dreaded taking on the harrowing role of
Iris Murdoch so soon after her own husband's death. She talks to John
Hiscock ALTHOUGH Judi Dench is an actress who loves her work, she admits that she faced the filming of Iris with deep apprehension. The story of Iris Murdoch's life with her husband John Bayley, of her descent into illness and eventually oblivion, echoed a recent tragedy in Dench's own life. Her husband, Michael Williams, had just died of cancer at the age of 65 after a long illness and she quailed at the thought of dealing with the emotional needs of Richard Eyre's and Charles Wood's script.
"It came very, very soon after my husband died and so I simply dreaded doing it," she says. "But in fact it was probably one of the best things that could have happened to me because grief generates an incredible energy. "It's good if you can use that energy to a purpose and I had the equivalent of a huge amount of stored up petrol with a long way to go; so that was very, very helpful, because in a way you can detach yourself." Based on John Bayley's memoir of his life with the brilliant writer and philosopher, Iris deals with their bizarre but loving relationship, from the romance of their early days at Oxford in the 1950s to her death in 1999. The young couple are played by Kate Winslet and Hugh Bonneville, while Dench and Jim Broadbent portray them in later years. Although Dench never met Iris Murdoch - "It seems to me that everybody in Britain knew her except me" - she had read most of her novels and when the role came her way she threw herself into research. "I talked to a whole section of people who knew her and worked with her, and who were at Oxford with her, and I just gleaned as much as I possibly could. I also read John Bayley's books and went to the places where she was and looked at her house from the outside. With Richard Eyre's guidance, I hope I managed to capture something of her." Eyre, in writing about the film, which he also directed, describes it as neither biography nor fiction, but as occupying a poetic territory somewhere between the two. A good subtitle, he suggests, would be "Enduring Love", which Dench wholeheartedly endorses. "They were two unique people with extraordinary minds who happened to discover and find each other, like two halves of an apple," she says. "And, although Iris went on having sexual encounters, I suspect she had given herself totally to John Bayley and him to her. This film is not about somebody dying of a disease and another person looking after them; it's about an extraordinary love story." Dench turned down the chance to meet Bayley until filming was finished. "I didn't want to meet him beforehand because I felt sensitive about looking into his eyes and seeing that he might think, `No, this is not anything to do with Iris Murdoch'. I also thought I wouldn't perhaps be able to cope with everything I might hear from him. "He's quite a nervous man and I listened to him on radio, on The Psychiatrist's Chair and took numerous notes." The tragedy of Alzheimer's was brought home to Dench because, as well as Murdoch, both Richard Eyre's and Jim Broadbent's mothers suffered from the disease. "I had a lot of references apart from John Bayley's book," she says. "It seems tragic to me that somebody who was so brilliantly clever and had such a mind is then struck down with that disease. A great friend of mine who is a very sharp intellectual wit has now contracted Alzheimer's and sometimes he is quite lucid, but then he says something in the same voice which you can't make any sense of." Although Dench has had a long and successful stage career, she did not play her first starring role in a film until she was 63, when she won an Oscar nomination as Queen Victoria in 1997's Mrs Brown, and she is now an actress whose every role is considered award-worthy. She won a best supporting actress Oscar for her eight minutes on screen as Queen Elizabeth I in Shakespeare in Love, a Tony Award for her return to the New York stage for the first time in 40 years in Amy's View, a Golden Globe and a Bafta award for her role as a saxophone player in the television film The Last of the Blonde Bombshells and a Golden Globe nomination for playing the crusty French villager in Chocolat. Now comes Iris, opening in the UK on January 18, followed by The Shipping News in February - in which Dench co-stars with Kevin Spacey, Cate Blanchett and Julianne Moore and which she filmed in Nova Scotia in two stages, around Iris - and, later in the year, The Importance of Being Earnest. "I feel like a late starter," she says, with a laugh. "It's a whole new bit of a career. It's like finding out you've got another arm or you can be a great potter. It's wonderful because I love working and I'm getting a lot of things sent to me, which is also extremely gratifying." She is not, she confesses, at all careful about choosing her projects and rarely reads the scripts she is sent before accepting them. "I get told the story by somebody. Anthony Hopkins and I didn't know that Antony and Cleopatra died at the end of Antony and Cleopatra because neither of us would read it," she says. "I didn't read The Royal Family [the West End production in which she is currently appearing] until four days before we started rehearsing. Not reading pushes me to a kind of dangerous edge and there is something in me that needs that: to say yes to something which is a totally unknown quantity. "It's like being on a hugely tall diving board and I get right to the end when it starts to slightly bounce. Then I'll just have a look down and see what I've got to dive into, but by then I've committed myself so I've got to go. There is something in me that needs that fear." She will be on familiar ground when she returns for a fourth tour of duty as M in the 20th James Bond adventure which begins production in January with director Lee Tamahori, although she hopes that she will be more fortunate with locations than she has been in the past. "They're always promising me that I am going to go abroad," she says. "For the last one, they said I would definitely go to Scotland and I might go to Turkey as well, and I was absolutely thrilled about that. When we came to film it, Loch Ness was painted all along one side of the studio wall and Turkey was upstairs in the same studio." Dench will get to travel next summer for a film she will be making in Italy with Juliette Binoche and Benicio Del Toro. She doesn't, however, know much about it yet: she hasn't read the script.
Thanks to Paula
November 25, 2006
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