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The Quiet Truth
After losing her husband to cancer, actress Judi Dench lost
herself in work.
More than a year later, she pauses to take stock
by Laurie Winer
Portrait
on left by: Joyce Tenneson
Click on above link to go to her
Website and see another pose of Dame Judi
I am asking Judi Dench about envy. At
age 67, Dench is one of the busiest and most esteemed actresses in the world. I
am asking her about envy, about how she deals with it in other people. But she
answers my question from an oblique angle, and her response surprises both of us.
We are sitting in the outdoor dining room of the Four Seasons Hotel in Los Angeles,
amid palm trees and polished silver and privilege - all the trappings of earthly success.
She is eating a small plate of bacon, which is
cooked so perfectly to her liking she cannot get over it. Then, for some reason, my question about envy triggers the memory of a 40-year-old betrayal, an event that preceded her
long and happy marriage. "It was to do with a boyfriend going off with
someone else," she says, and she blushes deeply. "It was really painful. Really deeply painful."
But just as Dench the actress is quick to access long-buried feelings,
Dench the Quaker is quick to make something constructive out of them. "I believe there is a pattern of
some kind," she says softly. "It's all a kind of a journey and you have to make the
journey, though I can't make sense of it sometimes." Dench says she keeps "a kind of inside
shutter" on painful experiences so that she can open it up and use them, as she needs to.
Dench is wearing a white blouse that
looks expensive and white pants that flare out enough to have dash, but not so much
as to seem faddish. Her pixie-cut silver hair
offsets her blue eyes with their impish slant, and her numerous small gold rings flash
emerald, ruby, and turquoise stones. She seems earthy and solid - making it clear
why the British public (through a survey sponsored by Boots, the pharmacy chain)
this spring voted her the female celebrity with the greatest sense of well-being.
It's the day before
the Oscar ceremony, and the dining room is full of film stars. Dame Judi
has been nominated for her portrayal of the writer Iris Murdoch in the film Iris, her
fourth nomination. (The Oscar will go to Halle Berry.) Dench
can't wait to get out of the white-hot center. "It's frightening, very frightening," she says
of the ceremony. "You've got a huge amount of nerves going through you, and
you're scrutinized from top to toe. It's very much not my thing." She'd much rather be sitting in
her garden at Wasp Green, the home on five acres in Surrey where she lives with her
only child, 29-year-old daughter Finty Williams; Williams's five-year-old son Sammy; and
assorted animals, including nine cats.
This has been an extraordinary year in
a fun and busy life. And if anyone has ever been
a picture of having it all -- worldly acclaim, talent, and the deepest
grief -- it is Judi Dench at this moment. In January of last year, her husband,
Michael Williams, succumbed to lung cancer. They had been married for almost 30 years, and it had been an
uncommonly close partnership. "We were happy just to be in the same room
together," she recalls, and then she changes the subject.
"I'm a person who looks for pluses," she says. Her speech is both definitive and musi -
cal. "You have to be quite hardy and just keep things in proportion. And then perhaps
you don't get so hurt by failure. It's all about what we do with the little time we've got."
Dench infuses her "stiff upper lip" ethic with softness, and it is a combination that has
served her well. She was raised, along with two brothers, in a close-knit family in York,
where her father was the official physician for the Theatre Royal. At times she went with
him on his rounds; that was her first taste of life backstage. Dench's father died in 1964,
but he is obviously still very present in her life. "My daddy used to say, 'If you want
something, just go for it, ," she says. "'Don't be surprised if it isn't the thing that you expected "'
A beloved stage actress in London since
the 1960s, Dench became a Dame of the
British Empire in 1988, the equivalent of being knighted. In 1997, she defied all odds
by attaining movie stardom at age 62 with her role as a bereaved Queen Victoria in the film
Mrs. Brown. She followed the next year with her portrayal of a subversively wry Queen
Elizabeth in Shakespeare in Love , for which she won an Oscar. Most recently, Dench
recreated onscreen one of her great stage success, that of the battle-ax Lady
Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest. (Her daughter, Finty, has a small role in the film.) And in
November she will again be seen as M, James Bond's prickly boss, in Die Another Day.
Dench is known as an incorrigible prankster. She recently pulled a stunt
on Harvey Weinstein, co-chairman of Miramax Films, the man she credits with creating her
movie career. Setting Weinstein up, she told an interviewer that in gratitude she had
had his name "tattooed on my bum." When she next saw Weinstein -
at a lunch in New York - he asked nervously, "So, what about this tattoo?" Dame
Judi moved some fabric aside to reveal the spot where she had had his name
painted on by a makeup artist.
Dench is also famously self-deprecating. When the director Sir Peter Hall suggested she play
Cleopatra, she asked why anyone should want to see the Queen of the Nile as a "menopausal dwarf." For Dench, wit is essential.
"I don't want to work with anybody who can't laugh at themselves,"
she says. "Lack of sense of humor - it's like not having a leg or an arm. "
Dench met Michael Williams in the early 1960's, when they were both unknown actors at the Royal
Shakespeare Company. It took almost a decade for the romance to start. Dench
was in Australia touring with Twelfth Night when a fellow actor to whom she
was close died suddenly. She was devastated. Williams flew out to comfort
her, and while he was there, he asked her to marry him. It felt wrong at the
time, says Dench. "I thought, well now, yes, but when we get back to England
he might change his mind. " So she told him to ask her on a rainy night in
Battersea. Soon afterwards, he did exactly
that. They were married in 1971.
Though they appeared together on television and on stage, Dench was
clearly the star in the family. There are differing accounts of how her husband, a
respected actor, dealt with his wife's fame. According to The New York
Time, Williams "never seemed to
begrudge Dame Judi her success and so adored her that he had a single red rose
delivered to her every Friday , no matter where in the world she was."
A recent
New Yorker profile, however, quoted a friend of the family as saying, "The fact
that all his married life he was Mr. Judi Dench - and that's difficult for any man. He
used to get very low. He sat at home feeding the bloody swans while she was
doing three jobs a day."
The marriage surely contained both truths. Dench freely admits that she shored up her husband regularly.
"Michael had no confidence at all about himself. And so I used to feel that I had
to have a kind of confidence sometimes for him. " she says. By almost any measuring stick other than Dench's career,
Williams was a successful actor, playing
leading roles with the Royal Shakespeare Company. He was also adept at
comedy and appeared in several popular British TV shows. He was a devout
Roman Catholic and was reportedly overjoyed to receive a Papal Knighthood
just before he died. His faith apparently drove a temporary wedge between him
and his daughter, Finty. When she
became pregnant, she avoided telling her parents because she was unmarried
and feared her father's disapproval. They learned of her pregnancy
only a month short of the birth of their grandson. But when Williams became ill, the
rift was mended and Finty moved in to help with the caretaking.
Many people experience grief as an enervating experience, but for Dench,
a habitually productive person who, in the scope of her working life, took little time
off - mainly to bear her daughter and to nurse her husband for seven months
before his death - grief was something to be "burned off." Two months after
Williams's death, Dench went into a whirlwind of activity, making four films and starring in a play.
And now, after that whirlwind, one has to wonder if Dench avoided meeting her grief head-on. During
the interview , I bring up her portrayal of the bereaved Queen Victoria in
Mrs. Brown as a way to ease into the topic. At the beginning of the film,
the Queen is described as
"inconsolable," and Dench plays her as a woman so stricken with grief that just
to be in the room with others is agony. In the movie, the Queen is comforted by an unexpected and
profound friendship with a servant. The film is eloquent on the nature of
grief, and seeing it one can't help but ask: Isn't "inconsolable" an
ephemeral state; doesn't life insist that the living be consoled? "I wouldn't know,"
says Dench. And in the silvery sunlight, she begins to cry very softly.
It's peaceful in the garden dining room. In the background you can hear the clinking of china. Dench
collects herself and returns to the subject of what does give her comfort. She
smiles shyly. Her one oasis of quiet, she says, is attending Quaker meetings
on Sunday, something she has done regularly since she was introduced to the practice as a teenager at The
Mount School in York.
"I need to impose a kind of stillness on myself," she says, and Quaker meeting is where she
does it. "I might think - my anxiety, my grief - I'm too busy to deal with that now. I can
work on this role and it will take up my time. But eventually I have to stop
and let the inside and the outside catch up. So then the inside, which has gotten very lean with all of the
things I've been doing, can take a breath and fill out the shell. That's as
well as I can say it."
Consulting Editor Laurie Winer wrote about Lily Tomlin in March.
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Modern Maturity Magazine is only available through subscription by
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A Big
Thanks to Nancy H. and Stephanie
for scanning and sending this article to me
Thanks also to Marilyn G. from MM Magazine for bringing it to my
attention
and for sending me two copies of the Magazine.
Congratulations to Dolores L. from Las
Vegas who won the
the extra copy of the magazine in the Mailing List Contest.
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