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The
Millennium Dame |
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At this late date it hardly needs pointing out that Judi Dench is a great actress, but it is the specific nature of her greatness that continues to enthral. Whereas Maggie Smith brilliantly peddles a persona and Diana Rigg traffics in a defining English cool, Dench remains the sole theatrical dame to disappear inside roles so varied that she is playing Cleopatra, Gertrude and Lady Bracknell one minute, singing Sondheim and Kander and Ebb the next. Like the late Peggy Ashcroft, Dench is finding well into her career a screen renown that has eluded her for the better part of 40 years. Just turned 63, Dench is being touted by The New York Times as the one performer assured a best actress nomination (for Mrs Brown ) when the Oscar hopefuls are named in February. And she has already been nominated for a Golden Globe, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association's annual awards which are widely regarded as pointers to the Oscars. It is not surprising, though, to learn that Dench isn't sure she can attend the March 23 Academy Awards ceremony if she is indeed nominated. The actress is otherwise engaged until April with her first love, the theatre, giving a performance in Amy's View that her director, Richard Eyre, rightly describes as "completely incandescent". David Hare's play opened last June at the National and is now preparing its West End transfer, with Broadway to follow in spring 1999. Written with Dench in mind, Amy's View casts the actress as an actress, so one can safely assume that the gifts ascribed to her character, Esme, are no less true of the player herself. "Layers, I play a lot of layers," Esme explains early on, adding in the final scene that true artistry "comes with the passage of time: you go deeper - right down to the core". Dench, for her part, prefers not to analyse a talent that she has been refining since 1957, when she attracted attention as Ophelia to John Neville's Hamlet at the Old Vic. "After all, it is the profession. It is the basic skill; if you can't get that right, you simply shouldn't be doing the job," she says, paraphrasing a remark of Esme's in the play. Speaking in that distinctive vocal husk matched only by her Amy's View co-star Samantha Bond, Dench continues: "It's like a mille-feuilles cake that's 1,000 layers down: when you're reading a part, you see a line but you're not necessarily saying that line at all. If you can't understand that, you might as well give up." Esme is the third actress played by Dench of late, following her Arkadina in The Seagull and a remarkable Desiree Armfeldt in A Little Night Music , who made of the potentially overfamiliar Send In the Clowns a poignant act of self-criticism: for once, one recognised Desiree herself as the greatest dupe. "They're three different girls, though," says Dench. "That's why any similarity didn't occur to me because they are different people, and different people react in different ways, whether they are accountants, secretaries, or whatever." More apparent, at least at first, was the difficulty Dench was having learning a role about which she can afford many months later to be passionate. "I mean, I could do the whole of Twelfth Night now, and Midsummer Night's Dream and Measure For Measure : none of that is hard because Shakespeare has such a rhythm and you just remember it." With Amy's View , by contrast, "after three weeks, I asked Richard to release me. I was in a terrible state; I couldn't learn it at all. I used to go straight home, get into the bath, and say to myself I cannot get out until I have learnt four to five pages. I was desperately unsure." Such perils notwithstanding, Dench remains a creature of the theatre, both solo and in tandem with Michael Williams, her husband of nearly 27 years. (The couple have a daughter, Finty, herself an actress who has a small role in Mrs Brown .) "I know some people don't want that thing of ever having to do a play twice or four times or 100 times, but I like it. I think if I chose only to do films, I would get very easily and quickly disheartened." That may explain why she sounds mostly bemused by her enhanced screen profile at the moment, not just as Queen Victoria in Mrs Brown but as James Bond's no-nonsense boss "M" in the two most recent instalments of the enduring cinema franchise. Previously, her film work had consisted mostly of supporting roles in Henry V , 84 Charing Cross Road and A Room with a View , among others, and about two seconds in the Kenneth Branagh Hamlet . "I'm squeamish about seeing myself anyway on screen; I don't like it. A friend saw Tomorrow Never Dies and said, 'Do be prepared; your face is bigger than your house'." The Bond film, Dench says, is proof positive of what the theatre offers that all too many films do not. "It's not witty. I mean, it's wonderful for chases and all those things, but somehow you long for real lines." Has Mrs Brown changed things? "Only that lots and lots of people have written to me saying, 'I've never heard of you; will you send me a biography,' " smiles Dench, aware that even an arthouse film originally intended for television will reach more people than a lifetime on stage ever could. In the spring she will play another queen - this time Elizabeth I - in Shakespeare In Love , the new film directed by Mrs Brown' s John Madden from a Tom Stoppard script; Gwyneth Paltrow is the star. After that it's back to the theatre to star in a revival of Eduardo De Filippo's Filumena for Peter Hall. "If it's a question of film or theatre, theatre will probably always win out," says Dench, who greets talk of Oscars with a healthy scepticism. "An award is lovely but it means the next day you've got to do better: could do better, I think it means."
Thanks to Lisa S, UK, for sharing this
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