One evening in 1998, in front of an international television audience of (if you can believe the hype) a billion viewers, Dame Judi Dench was robbed. Anyone with any sense knew that the only possible recipient of the Oscar for best actress that year was Dame Judi for her portrayal of Queen Victoria in Mrs Brown. Unfortunately, the Oscar voters, not always renowned for their sense, gave it instead to Helen Hunt for a workmanlike performance in As Good as It Gets.
Daylight robbery. Everyone was outraged -- well, everyone except Ms Hunt obviously (she was well chuffed) and, rather less obviously, Dame Judi who, as she told me, was just thrilled to have been invited to an Oscar ceremony. The fact is that this woman, accurately described by the director Richard Eyre as "our greatest actress," is starstruck. She didn't care, she said, whether she won the Oscar or not; the great thing was that she was going to meet people such as Harrison Ford, Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholson. It wouldn't surprise mc if she asked for their autographs.
A year later, still starstruck. she was back in Hollywood to collect the award for best supporting actress for her performance as Queen Elizabeth I in Shakespeare in Love. At last the cinema had recognised the remarkable ability that had been evident for so long on the stage. In the theat,'e. where she has played ust about every classical role from Lady Bracknell to Ophelia and Lady Macbeth. she has long been revered, though I use that word hesitantly because it would probably make her giggle.
One of her most endearing qualities is that she never takes herself seriously. Indeed, when Peter Hall asked her to play Cleopatra in Antony and Cleopatra for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1987, she at first refused scornfully on the grounds that since she was in her fifties her Cleopatra would be a "menopausal dwarf". It wasn't. of course, and she won an award for her performance.
But perhaps this diffidence accounts partly for the fact that she was 62 before she played a leading role in the cinema. Previously, she had appeared in many films, invariably acquitting herself splendidly as, for instance, Mistress Quickly In Kenneth Branagh's Henry V and the spy mistress M in Goldeneye (the latter role she reprised in Tomorrow Never Dies and will play it for the fourth time in Beyond the Ice, or whatever the forthcoming Bond movie is finally called). But hers were always the supporting parts; star billing eluded her until Mrs Brown came her way - and then only by default, after Elizabeth Taylor dropped out.
Since then her career has enjoyed something of an Indian smmer. In the next year or so she will be seen not only in the Bond film but as Lady Bracknell in a remake of The Importance of Being Earnest, playing Madame Raquin to Kate Winslet's Therese in Therese Raquin and in the title role of Iris: A Portrait of Iris Murdoch.
Such belated recognition is no more than she deserves but, as she would probably be the first to admit, she is an unlikely addition to Britain's little group of international movie stars, not least because she doesn't really like film-making much. "I've turned down a lot more film work than l've actually done," she said. "I don't enpoy the process."
In particular what she doesn't enjoy is the fact that while a stage performance is, or should be, a living, changing entity a film performance is "like some dead thing, crystallized forever."
It's a point, I suppose, but against that she does admit "playing M is the closest to glamour I ever got." Besides, appearing in films means she gets to meet a lot of movie stars and for someone as starstruck as she is that's an incalculable bonus.
Thanks to Kevin McHugh for sending this article, which appeared in the October 27 - November 2, 2001 issue of the Radio Times (UK)