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I never
watch my films, but I'm chuffed |
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"I can't sing; everybody knows that. I don't pretend to be able to sing. But I can act it." Dame Judi Dench's cat-like face and Tallulah Bankhead voice from her Irish mother are extraordinarily adaptable: Sally Bowles, Cleopatra, Lady Bracknell ... She may sound as if she has smoked a hundred a day for years, but she hates cigarettes. "Can't smoke," she says. "Don't know how to. You must have noticed that, in Absolute Hell? In The Seagull I had to smoke cigars, so they wrapped mildest Silk Cut in licorice paper for me. Quite revolting. I coughed all night." Rodney Ackland's Absolute Hell gone now, sadly, from the National's repertory was not a play to miss. Dench played Christine, madame of the rackety 1940s Pink Room (based on Olwen Vaughan of the seedy French Club). It was a tour de force of ensemble acting by a huge cast of 28 mad, bohemian characters with Dench at the centre. "I've enjoyed plays as much as this, but I've never enjoyed one more. It was just such fun. We actually did feel crashing-about drunk on water. I'm now convinced that you can psych yourself into being drunk on a glass of water in a wineglass. "We had a letter from someone who knew all those people, and said the `Treacle Queen' was based on someone known as Dorothy Dorothy. She came into the club one day and high-kicked all the way round the table and nobody batted an eyelid, even though she was wearing a pair of high-heeled shoes and a large hat and that was all." To listen to Dench on stage or off is to realise what comic timing is. The craft of comedy came naturally to her. "My father was a wonderful storyteller. Timing is entirely instinctive." Her father was a doctor in York. She went to the Mount School in the same year as A.S. Byatt, then known as Susan, "I was her bedroom head. She used to sleepwalk." She trained first as a designer before going to the drama school. A director told her, early on: "You can't call yourself Dench. It won't do, a name like Dench." But at 22 she was Ophelia to John Neville's Hamlet, and Miss Dench had arrived. She remains a Quaker, and recommends the Friends' Meeting House if you need to work out a problem. "You're made very welcome. I have never been to a meeting where I haven't come away with something. That's why I became a Quaker, at school. At first, it seemed rather funny to sit in silence, and hear people's stomachs going. But that's what you do. I have only once got up to speak, can't recall what about. After an hour the elders shake hands. It's lovely, if you have a week like mine was last week." The week culminated in a terrifying final dress rehearsal when so many things went wrong that they were all in stitches out of sheer fright. It was too late to change anything; the first preview followed immediately. Stephen Sondheim had been there; he didn't say much. I was at the preview and it went brilliantly. But had Jude meant to put her dressing gown on inside out? Were we supposed to see the battery of her microphone strapped to the inside of her plump, little thigh? Dench is convulsed at the memory, mimicking herself trying to find the button to close her gown. "And in the dress rehearsal, when I say, `Wait till you see my bedroom', I had to add `If you can see the bedroom' because at that moment we were plunged in darkness." She doubles up with laughter. Afterwards she had driven home to her farmhouse on the Surrey Sussex border. "It is worth it just to get back and be quiet, to Michael and the cats. It is such a benison. A haven. I get out of the car and just stand there, and see stars, and hear owls. And Michael will have a fire lit, even in summer: firelight, and candles." Dench and her husband Michael Williams and daughter Finty an unusually close family unit used to live in a dolls' house down a tiny narrow lane in Hampstead, yards from St Mary's Roman Catholic Church, where they married. Then the Williamses moved to the country, and Finty stayed on. One night, Finty fell asleep by candlelight. Fire broke out; the three occupants of the house managed to put it out. Then a second fire broke out in the early morning, and the whole house burnt down. Dench dashed up to the cottage and saw, from a distance, its ruin. Things were being flung from the windows. She then had to go and play Goneril to Gielgud's King Lear, his ninetieth birthday broadcast for Radio 3. "Everyone was so kind. And all the things we lost, we've completely come to terms with. Friends, and complete strangers, replenished our stock of programmes and mementoes. The very first person to send anything was Adrienne Corri: an exquisite parasol. We had so many letters from people we had never met," (and from the Queen). "Sir John (perfect mimicry) `Oh darling how terrible, were you insured?' sent a little box that belonged to Peggy Ashcroft. So kind," she whispers, shaking her head. One glittering evening at Buckingham Palace, Sir John and Dame Judi and a galere from the RSC performed Shakespeare for the Prince of Wales. Dench gave a splendid passage from a Bernard Levin essay with its refrain, "You are talking Shakespeare...". "I think the Prince enjoyed having a lot of larky people around. I sat next to him at dinner afterwards, and my brother came up and leant on the back of the Prince's chair `Hello Jude, haven't seen you for ages' without noticing who he was." She is 60, that awkward age, too old for ingenues, too young for crones. But even if she weren't permanently busy, she would never do a one-woman show. She is a team player. "I only like the process of being a company. I don't know how I'd get ready, on my own, without the banter. I would hate it." Ideally she would be at the National all the time "Richard Eyre's choice is so daring and classical and unknown, and I love walking into the foyer where people are playing music and reading and seeing exhibitions, it's exactly what theatres should be like all the time" but others must have their turn. She talked of two turned-down parts, later regretted. "But I do feel there is a divinity that shapes our ends. There is a reason why things happen to you, a kind of pattern. It is a comfort to live by that. Even if you take the most difficult path, it is the right one: Michael's mother used to say that. It gives you a more optimistic approach to failure or disaster. "Our fire was a terrible, terrible thing. But exactly a year after it happened, Finty and I slept there again. And it has no vibes at all. It's just very very pretty. And ultimately, the three people got out, and that is all that matters. One would say, let everything else burn, every single thing, Finty is all right." In the next James Bond film, Goldeneye, Dench is playing "M". Normally she never watches any film she is in. "But I might see that because I'm just so chuffed at being a Bond woman." She has never seen A Handful of Dust or Wetherby or Room With A View. "During the filming of Room With A View, I wrote to Finty's headmistress asking permission to bring her out to Florence for the weekend to see the Uffizi. She flew out and I took her to look at three pictures to kindle her imagination, the ones I had liked as a young girl Primavera and Venus Arising and the young Catherine de Medici and on the Monday, when she'd gone home, a letter arrived from the headmistress saying no, she can't go." Now Finty is at the Watermill, at Newbury, in Lloyd George Knew My Father. To watch her makes Dench even sicker with fear and excitement than she is on her own first nights. "Someone said the stress of it was the equivalent of a large bus crash. You think, why do I ever want to put myself through this?" When this week is over she will take a four-day break, far away in the Western Isles, her favourite retreat. "A bit of painting, that's all I do. Walking, getting wet, swimming. Lovely nothing."
Thanks to Lisa S, UK, for sharing this
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