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Saga Magazine |
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Judi Dench is an extremely private woman: someone who avoids the interview circuit and the razzle-dazzle exhibitionism of celebrity. So it comes as a slight shock – though a pleasurable one – to find that at 70 she has agreed to a new book called Scenes From My Life: a beguiling mix of pictorial career-record and private photo album. It offers a fascinating portrait of her performances, from an angel in the York Mystery Plays to her formidable “M” in the Bond films. But it also offers revealing glimpses of the woman behind the actress. Finding old photographs is difficult enough for any of us. But Dame Judi admits in the preface that she hadn’t realised quite how complicated a task it was going to be for her. “I began,” she says, “by ransacking my cupboards and searching through the loft, finding some pictures I had forgotten about and failing to find some others I thought I had. I fear that some of the latter went up in flames when I had a house fire some years ago.” But with the aid of her biographer John Miller, she has come up with a remarkably rich record of her life. Inevitably it’s the private snaps that grab the attention first. And what emerges strongly is Judi Dench’s intense sense of family: there’s a genuine love and warmth in the pictures of her with her late husband (Michael Williams), daughter Finty and grandson Sammy. But one picture is especially revealing: a glimpse of the entire Dench-Williams clan in their shared home at Charlecote, a few miles from Stratford-upon-Avon. It was Michael’s idea that his parents and Judi’s mother should come to live with them and Finty at Charlecote. “That,” says Dame Judi, “was absolutely my idea of heaven; it’s like a Quaker community, both for bringing up a child and the whole idea of looking after your parents. It appals me more than anything else in this country, how they are shot off somewhere where they sit like zombies in a room and they’re there to die.” That in itself says a lot about Dench as both private person and actress: her instinctive compassion, her dedicated faith, her belief that the group is more important than the individual. Indeed I suspect that the real truth about Dench is that the woman and the actress are indivisible: that acting, for her, is less a matter of impersonation than of self-excavation. Years ago the dramatist David Hare said to me that “acting is a judgment of character”: his point was that the older they were, the more actors dug into their own inner resources. To Hare, that was why Gielgud, Richardson and Ashcroft became richer and more expressive with age. Since Dame Judi has worked with Hare a lot – most recently in Amy’s View and The Breath of Life – I asked her if she agreed with him. “Is it all about who you are?” she reflected. “My Michael once said to me: ‘You can’t ever be more than you are as a person.’ He felt that whatever anger, jealousy or lust that you had to portray had to come from somewhere within you. I disagreed with him violently at the time. I’ve now changed my mind. I think you can only comprehend as an actor what is inside you. But I also believe that you have to submerge your discoveries inside the character. Acting is not just about self. “I was in New York recently with Maggie Smith publicising a film, Ladies in Lavender, and we were asked about the Sanford Meisner Method School of acting, which is based on ruthless self-exploration. Maggie, in her inimitable way, said: ‘Oh, we have that in England too. We call it wanking’.” But if acting really is a judgment of character, what does Dench’s career reveal? For a start that she has a universal sympathy that has enabled her to embrace characters as diverse as Cleopatra and Lady Macbeth, Brecht’s Mother Courage and Shaw’s Major Barbara, Sally Bowles in Cabaret and Queen Victoria in Mrs Brown. The range is extraordinary. But what shines through them is Dench’s own intriguing mixture of moral authority and mischief. Dench can play contradiction better than anyone. Which is what made her an incomparable Cleopatra at the National in 1987. One minute she was highly comic as she rushed for the door in outrage at being told Antony’s wife was only 30; the next she was downright dangerous as she felled an unwary messenger with a right hook. For once Cleopatra’s “infinite variety” seemed more than a piece of Alexandrian hype. Dench also brings to her work a quality I can only call a “calculated innocence”: a rare ability to treat every role, however famous, as if it had just been written. “It’s important,” she says, “to avoid preconceptions, though not every actor would agree. The first Macbeth I did was a Nottingham Playhouse production starring John Neville. We were walking round Sloane Square one day when we bumped into Paul Rogers who’d just played it at the Old Vic, and John simply said to Paul, ‘I’m copying you!’ But when I got to play Lady Macbeth again for the RSC in 1976, the first thing I said to the director, Trevor Nunn, was that we’ve got to remember a lot of schoolchildren will come to the play not knowing that they’re going to kill Duncan. If Lady Macbeth is simply some terrible, bloodthirsty monster from the beginning, the play is over before it has begun.” Dame Judi often goes to extraordinary lengths to preserve this innocence. Famously, she hadn’t read David Hare’s Amy’s View through to the end before the first cast meeting. With less familiar Shakespeare plays, she will also ask the director to tell her the story. She did that recently with Gregory Doran and All’s Well That Ends Well. The result, in her performance as the Countess, was an extraordinary mixture of comic irony and spiritual grace. And the climactic moment, when she advanced towards the newly restored Helena with palms outspread in welcoming benediction, was entirely and upliftingly Dench’s own. As much as she loves the theatre, however, Dame Judi happily admits that her whole life was changed by Mrs Brown. “It gave me a film career,” she says, “which I never had before. Now I never seem to stop. I’ve got a new Stephen Frears film, Mrs Henderson Presents, still to be shown here. There should be another Bond film next year. And I’m making Notes on a Scandal, based on a book by Zoe Heller and directed by Richard Eyre. “I play a sad, lonely woman who virtually blackmails a teaching colleague into becoming her best friend. I tried to find my way into the character by observing a couple of friends who have never managed to achieve a fulfilled relationship. But the great joy is working with Cate Blanchett. I look at her every day and I learn so much, particularly that in front of the camera, less is more.” The good news is that Judi Dench, at 70, has no thought of retirement. Indeed when I mention that awful word, she lets out a heartfelt sigh. “Please God not,” she cries. “I just want to go on acting. I’ll be doing Hay Fever with Peter Hall at the Haymarket next spring. Then I’ll be going to Stratford in the autumn to do a musical version of The Merry Wives of Windsor. I’ll be playing Mistress Quickly. Possibly very slowly: even with a Zimmer frame. But I desperately wanted to be part of the final Stratford season in the old Elizabeth Scott building. I feel passionately that the RSC should try to preserve the exterior of the old theatre. People say the auditorium has problems; but generations of actors have made themselves audible and I have wholly happy memories of working in that building.” There are a few things Judi Dench won’t be doing in the future: no one-woman show, no master-classes and, rather more sadly, no more directing, although in the past she staged work by Shakespeare, Osborne and Rodgers and Hart with great success. “I prefer to be a part of the puzzle rather than solving the jigsaw,” she says simply. But, if Dame Judi intends to go on acting till she drops, it is partly because of her Quaker work ethic and partly because the process itself is infinite. “The thing about acting,” she says, “is that there’s always some obstacle that the play or the part puts in your way that you have to overcome. The learning never ends.” In that last remark, you hear both the professional humility and youthful curiosity of spirit that make Judi Dench not just a great actress but an inspirational human being.
A Special Thank You to Lisa S, UK, for bringing this to my attention
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