February 11, 2002 

A brilliant mind fading 

Dame Judi Dench portrays famed novelist Iris Murdoch in her twilight years as Alzheimer's dimmed her fierce intelligence

BY: Jamie Portman

LONDON - When you enter the interview suite in London's august Savoy Hotel, Dame Judi Dench -- a small, trim figure in brown suede -- is standing at the window, gazing across the Thames at the South Bank and the hulking edifice of the National Theatre, scene of some of her greatest stage triumphs. She swings around and advances across the floor, hand outstretched, that distinctive square face with the striking almond eyes breaking into a warm smile of greeting.

"Would you like anything?" she asks, moving toward a well-stocked table. "Tea? Coffee? No? Are you sure?" She's both friendly and solicitous, but of course she's legendary, not only for her acting brilliance but for her kindness and generosity.

"People completely adore her," says American producer Scott Rudin who brought Dench to Broadway in 1999 to reprise her National Theatre achievement in David Hare's Amy's View. Ostentation is not part of her nature. Yet, at 67, she is perhaps the most successful British actor -- male or female -- of her generation, and tickets are at a premium at London's Haymarket Theatre where she has been portraying a formidable theatrical matriarch in a revival of the 1927 George S. Kaufman/Edna Ferber comedy, The Royal Family.

Shakespeare that play isn't but Dench sees it as good for the post- Sept. 11 blues. "It's a blessed relief to do it at this time. Critically it hasn't fared that well, but I think that at this moment it's fun for people to enjoy a couple of hours of people behaving very badly."

She is also enjoying a late-flowering career in film: she won a best supporting actress Oscar for her eight minutes on screen in Shakespeare in Love and is winning accolades this winter for two performances -- her harrowing tear-inducing portrayal of novelist Iris Murdoch in Iris and her feisty work as Kevin Spacey's indomitable aunt in The Shipping News.

Her work -- particularly in film -- became a lifeline for her over the past 12 months. The year 2001 began with the death after a long illness of her husband of 30 years, actor Michael Williams. Within weeks of his passing, she was in Newfoundland to begin filming The Shipping News. After four weeks on that movie, she was back in Britain for a five-week Iris shoot, after which she returned to Canada again for a further month on The Shipping News. Then, once that film was done, she returned home to play Lady Bracknell in a new film version of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest. So, yes, she has been working very hard. And yes, work has been a solace.

"I was dreading it because I started very soon after Michael died. But in actual fact, it was a saving grace." She learned something important about dealing with grief. "I've said this many times. Grief creates tremendous energy. The energy you get from grief is extraordinary. It's like a lorry with too much petrol: you have to go some distance." Going back to work released that energy.

Iris could have been an emotionally harrowing experience because it chronicles in painful detail the slow disintegration and death from Alzheimer's of one of the 20th century's most distinguished novelists. Dench chose to take a pragmatic approach.

"It was much less stressful than I expected, but very difficult because she had died so recently (in 1999) and because so many people knew her very well. But where I thought it was going to be harrowing -- it didn't happen."

The film is based on a pair of moving memoirs written by Murdoch's husband, Oxford academic and writer John Bayley. Dench and Jim Broadbent portray the couple in later life, and Kate Winslet and Hugh Bonneville portray them in their younger years. Director Richard Eyre, who has known Dench for many years, calls her performance in the film -- with its depiction of the disintegration of a remarkable mind (for Iris Murdoch was also a respected philosopher) -- a "courageous" accomplishment. But Dench, perhaps characteristically, plays down this aspect.

No, she says emphatically, chronicling Murdoch's mental disintegration wasn't difficult. "But I was interested in learning about it. That was uppermost in my mind -- just getting the actual steps of the disease in the right order, trying to understand it and comprehend what it would do to a mind like hers."

She consulted friends who are afflicted with Alzheimer's. "A good friend of mine has it. He came to lunch with me not long ago. He's in his 70s. He had the most brilliantly sharp mind. He came into the house and said: 'As I came through St. Mark's Square, all the tables and chairs were laid out as usual, but there was nobody there.' " Dench suddenly realized this irrelevant observation was a reference to St. Mark's in Venice. "He said it in a perfectly normal voice, the voice he would always use. Then he went on to say: 'How are you? It's ages since I've seen you.' It was the lucidity of it. What's so extraordinary about the disease is that although there's puzzlement in the beginning, it's very much in their heads and they're cut away from it. So it's not so distressing to them. It's distressing to the care-giver."

Dench also studied Murdoch as a person. There were scenes that she wanted to be as right as humanly possible -- one of them revealing Murdoch's brilliance as a lecturer, the other evoking the terrible moment during a live TV interview when her mind failed her and she lost her way in the course of giving an answer.

When she accepted the role, she was already an admirer of Murdoch's books, which included the Booker-winning The Sea The Sea, The Bell, A Severed Head and The Philosopher's Pupil. "I was a huge fan. I became one when I saw the stage version of A Severed Head in London in 1968 -- that's when I began to read the books. And of course she also had Anglo-Irish parents -- an Irish mother and an English father -- as I had, so I found lots of lines to parallel."

Dench studied surviving TV footage of Murdoch in her prime. "She had a great stillness about her. I was fascinated in the way she watched a person. You know, you've got some people who will listen and then you've got some people like her who listen but are also watching. She had practically no small talk at all. But of course she was a philosopher too -- an extraordinary, extraordinary person."

Dench says the real core of the film is Murdoch's relationship with Bayley. "It is a love story. That's exactly how I approached it. People talk of the film as being about Alzheimer's, but it's not. It's about a love affair. She in a way is the dominant person at the beginning of the relationship, but he became the dominant person at the end. It was a role for which he wasn't really equipped, but out of love he was able to do it."

It's 45 years since Dench first burst into prominence, portraying a memorable Ophelia at the Old Vic Theatre, opposite the Hamlet of John Neville, who later emigrated to Canada and became artistic director of Edmonton's Citadel Theatre and later the Stratford Festival. By the time she played Juliet in Franco Zeffirelli's legendary 1960 production of Romeo and Juliet, she was one of the bright young lights of the English stage. The years have been good to her, and she's definitely no theatrical snob. She's as enthusiastic about her popular TV situation comedies (the current one is the ever popular As Time Goes By) and her stints playing "M" in the James Bond films, as she is about her serious stage work. And she is always seeking something new to conquer. "I like doing something that's completely different -- the most different thing and the most difficult. She feels a special glow when she thinks of playing Cleopatra to Anthony Hopkins's Antony in the late 1980s.

"People were openly hostile to me," Dench chuckles. "They were saying: 'Cleopatra, why are you doing it? Why?'" For Judi Dench, the answer was easy. "I like the jump to be high."

Thanks to Cindy

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