|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Taormina Arte Awards for Cinematic
Excellence |
|
Information about the Screening of "Ladies in Lavender" Set in 1936, Ladies in Lavender is the charming and
sweetly melancholic story about Read more about the Film Festival
Click here for the "Ladies in Lavender" Webpage New Sci-fi ambassador to the voice of a cow - all in a dame's work RICHARD MOWE -- The Scotsman.com WHEN Dame Judi Dench makes her appearance in an ancient Greek amphitheatre, open to a starry Mediterranean sky and a balmy whisper of a breeze, it’s as if she has a direct connection to the ancients of the theatrical arts. She accepts, as graciously as ever, a lifetime achievement from the organisers of a film festival in the Sicilian town of Taormina with all the finesse of stage royalty. That is, after all, what she is - Dame Judi, a national treasure. Yet with the pomp and circumstance out of the way, she drops all pretence of airs and graces and reverts simply to Judi, a 70-year-old with elfin appeal, an infectious zest for her profession - and a constant craving to do something different. Over five decades, she has won innumerable accolades, including two Golden Globes, six Baftas and an Oscar. She has established herself as the grand old lady of the British acting profession with a series of classical roles, so the two films she has coming out this summer mark something of a departure. In The Chronicles of Riddick, she plays an intergalactic ambassador opposite Hollywood hardman Vin Diesel, while in Home On The Range, she provides the voice for a cartoon cow. She accepted the part in The Chronicles of Riddick after action star Diesel filled her dressing-room with flowers during the West End run of the play Breath of Life (a two-hander with Dame Maggie Smith). He besieged her to take part in the sci-fi epic, a sequel to the surprise hit Pitch Black, which Dame Judi had seen and admired. She committed to The Chronicles without even reading the script, and confesses that she found Diesel "charming and quite a hunk". Again written and directed by Pitch Black’s David Twohy, The Chronicles of Riddick finds escaped prisoner Richard Riddick (Diesel) hiding out on the fringes of the galaxy, keeping a low profile and dodging occasional bounty-hunters. Dench plays Aereon, an elemental who conveys prophecies of doom. "I was extremely surprised to be an intergalactic ambassador," she says disarmingly. "I have not been one of those before and I thought I would have a go - and I did, and it was absolutely thrilling. I love to do the most unexpected things." Home on the Range, a Walt Disney animation, is another case in point. She gives voice to Mrs Calloway, a cow, alongside fellow ruminants Roseanne Barr and Jennifer Tilly. Providing cartoon voices (she also did ballet teacher Miss Lily in Angelina Ballerina for TV) is not as easy as some might think, she says. "Because they film me all the time, I must have grown to look like her, or she must look like me," she says. "The process is weird - you are in this booth, and you have to do a line like ‘Ohhh, there goes Slim’ as many times as you can possibly do, until you are exhausted - and then two weeks later you are back in the booth and they are asking can you do that same line again. It’s all about three cows who go on an adventure." Dame Judi’s relatively late-flowering screen career gives her immense satisfaction because her beginnings were not auspicious. "I was told a long time ago by a director when I went up for a part in a film that I had every single thing wrong with my face," she says. "I kind of settled for that because I preferred theatre anyway, fortunately. "It was not until I did a film about Queen Victoria called Mrs Brown [alongside Billy Connolly as John Brown] - which was done in 30 days for television until Miramax’s boss Harvey Weinstein saw it and decided it should be a movie - that I moved towards films. Since that point I have been asked to do a lot of films, and I am delighted [to do different things] because it is totally new to me." Her credits include plenty of Shakespeare and period dramas (Shakespeare In Love, A Room With A View, The Importance of Being Earnest, etc) but in recent years she has also popped up in a wider variety of roles, in films such as Iris alongside Jim Broadbent and The Shipping News with Kevin Spacey. She is exceedingly busy - in the autumn, she has another film coming out - Ladies in Lavender, which marks Charles Dance’s first sortie as a film director. Taken from a short story by William J Locke about two unmarried sisters whose lives are turned upside down when a young Polish castaway is washed up on the beach by their house, it unites Dench with her long-time sparring partner and fellow grande dame of stage and screen, Dame Maggie Smith. They had a ball, both on and off screen. Although very different in personality and sensibility, the two dames - who shared a London dressing-room in their very early days - have become closer as the years advanced, providing mutual support in the face of life’s switchbacks. Dame Judi recalls: "Maggie and I do go back a long time, to the Old Vic in 1958 when we first worked together on several plays and we shared a dressing room. "We were not particularly close friends at that time. Then there was a long pause and the next time we worked together was on Room with a View [released in 1985] when we were in Florence and then we became quite good friends. We renewed our acquaintanceship. "Then the next time we worked together was on Tea with Mussolini [in 1999] when it was about a year after Maggie’s husband [the Shakespearean actor Robert Stephens] had died. "We had a lot of time together, and just walked and talked in Rome and Florence and we got to know each other frightfully well. By the end of the film, my husband [the actor Michael Williams] had become ill, and the next time we worked together was last year in the theatre in London on Breath of Life. "This time, I was at the stage which she was at when we did Tea with Mussolini, my husband having died a year before. In a way, and I don’t mean it to sound sentimental, there was a great bond between us and it was like a path somebody has trodden before you. "We are very close; working with someone like that, you form a kind of shorthand. There are so many things you do not need to say." Dame Judi herself never wastes words. When I ask her to unveil the mysteries of her art and longevity, and her constant quest for new pastures, she responds: "How long have you got - a couple of weeks?" She agrees instead to give a condensed version: "I have never ceased to be grateful for the fact that I’m able to do a job I really love and run to do every time. "I have never got over that. We must be 1 or 2 per cent in the world - I mean people who are doing something they are really committed to. "Remember, I did not start off being an actor. I began training as a theatre designer. Suddenly, by some extraordinary Road to Damascus, I saw something by the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford-upon-Avon in the Fifties, the design of which was absolutely supreme and I thought that I would never emulate that quality of design, so halfheartedly I decided to opt for acting instead. "What I relish is the contact with people, being part of a company, and telling a story ... an author writes something, the director organises how you do it, and then it is you who gives it to the audience. It is that process that I find irresistible. "And, of course, that happens much more in the theatre than on film. I love the fact that actors never really lose touch. You form incredible friendships and often you come together again. It is the thing of being part of a company that I like best." Since the death of her husband - with whom she starred in the long-running television series A Fine Romance over three years - she has thrown herself into work with a renewed vigour, partly as a defence mechanism in recovering from her loss which she still finds painful. The public reaction to some of her metamorphoses has surprised her. She did not realise that her female M in the Bond franchise would cause quite such a commotion, winning her a new generation of male admirers. Dame Judi has done four Bond films, with a fifth due out next spring. This is one of three projects she already has pencilled in to an already busy diary. She explains: "We start in September on Mrs Henderson Presents, with Stephen Frears, which is about the woman who started the Windmill Theatre in London, a nude revue which carried on throughout the whole of the Second World War. This woman was a friend of the Lord Chamberlain who at the time also acted as a censor." She is also involved in another voice role in Gnomeo and Juliet - along with Ewan McGregor and Kate Winslet - in a film described as "a romance between garden gnomes". Dame Judi confesses she throws herself into work as a way of coping with grief: "I have to keep busy. I’m not good in my own company, and I never have been. I like being in the company of people I love and people I like. Actors have been my family - and still are." Her profession still clearly gives her great joy: "You learn something every time. "I suppose by the time I get to 80 maybe I will have learned a lot more, and hopefully there will be a lot of parts for very old people on Zimmer frames." • Home on the Range is released 6 August through Buena Vista, The Chronicles of Riddick on 27 August through UIP and Ladies in Lavender on 1 October through Entertainment.
|
|
|
