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By BBC News Online's Rebecca Thomas Oscar nominated actress Dame Judi Dench has revealed how difficult and dissatisfying she finds working in film. Dame Judi made her admission while speaking in front of a packed audience of around 600 students at the Oxford Union on Friday. "Acting just sort of crept up on me but I don't regret it for a moment." The actress, who is up for an academy award for her role in Iris, said she preferred working in theatre because there was always the chance to improve on things at the next performance. "But with films, the finished result is out of my hands and has been put together from another person's point of view," she added. "I never go to look at the rushes of a film because when I see what I look like I'm done for." Speaking candidly, Dame Judi who has been acting in theatre and film since the late 1950s, said her performance of writer and philosopher Iris Murdoch was one that she would like to have changed. She said Murdoch, who died in 1999, had been one of her heroines and like many people she still had a vivid impression of what the writer had been like. "I was frightened to play her because lots of people must have known her and seen her and of course her husband John Bayley is still alive," she said. "I did not have the ability to put in bits of my own, I had to be totally true to her." In her long stage and screen career Dame Judi has accumulated a long list of honours, including a Bafta for A Room With a View, and a best supporting actress Oscar for Shakespeare in Love. However, when asked by a student how she felt about winning awards for acting she said she was perplexed by the whole process. "With dancing or singing you know when someone is good, but with acting it is so much about personality," she said. "It sounds like I'm being ungrateful, but I'm not." Dame Judi said that with the forthcoming academy awards on 24 March she would bet on her Iris co-star Jim Broadbent and Gosford Park actress Dame Maggie Smith to win Oscars. She told another student how she never intended to take up acting as a career and had originally intended to be a theatre set designer. It was the enthusiasm of her brother who went to drama school who awakened her own interest. She said there had been many roles in theatre and film which she had enjoyed playing. In particular, she loved the plays of Shakespeare, who she said her family used to jokingly refer to as "the man who pays the rent". She also relished her recent part in the West End comedy The Royal Family. More current and equally enjoyable, she said, was her part as M in the Bond movies - of which the next in the series is currently being filmed. Dame Judi described 007 star Pierce Brosnan as "good news" and said she loved playing "the Boss". But she dispelled the myth of many of the students in the union chamber that working on the Bond movies was glamorous. "I thought it would be more romantic, but I ended up working in a shed," she said. At the end of the evening she was given a standing ovation. First year student David Dolley, of St Anne's College, said: "She was absolutely terrific, better than I had imagined, charming and amusing. I was very impressed." Reuters Oscar-Bound
Dame Judi Dazzles Oxford University
By Rachel Sanderson OXFORD, England - Doyenne of stage and screen Dame Judi Dench says she would put money on her "Iris" co-star Jim Broadbent scooping the best supporting actor award at the Oscars next month. Playing to a rapt audience at Oxford University on Friday night, which jostled in the gallery and queued in the rain to grab a glimpse of the diminutive star, Dench said Broadbent was a sure bet for his portrayal of author Iris Murdoch's husband, John Bayley. British stars garnered 11 Academy Award nominations this year, with Dench hotly tipped for her a second Oscar for the eponymous Alzheimer's-afflicted novelist in "Iris." Her first came in 1998 for an eight-minute turn as Queen Elizabeth I in "Shakespeare in Love." But when asked on Friday about the chance of bagging another golden statuette for best actress, already having scored a British Academy Film Award for the role, the famously un-starish star was having none of it. "I'd put a bet on Maggie Smith," she told Reuters, referring her British peer's best supporting actress nomination for upstairs-downstairs period piece "Gosford Park." EVER THE THEATER FIRST Dressed in a neat black suit and white shirt with a silk scarf thrown over one shoulder, the attire of the star of James Bond films, "Mrs Brown" and "Chocolat," belied the vigor and wit of her performance in the beamed, high-ceilinged hall. "If you are doing a shrug on film you just need to think it and the audience sees it," she said treating the 800-strong audience to an impromptu acting lesson. "I knew Kevin Spacey and I would get along because...he's an irresistible practical joker," she said jumping to her feet to re-enact on ongoing joke between herself and her co-star in "The Shipping News." Multiple award-winner Dench rose to fame as a Shakespearean stage actress and despite her recent success in Hollywood it has remained her first love, she said. "It (film) will never take over from the theater for me," she said. "Theater's much more exciting." And as her closing act, in among the dreaming spires, she turned to the dazzled audience and counted from one to 10 in newly learned Cantonese. "The thing is to try new things," the 68-year old said. "That's the message I've got for everyone." The 74th Academy Awards will be presented on March 24.
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