Writing to Harold Wilson's wife Mary in 1970, Sir John Betjeman mentioned that he was using a pen given to him by Judi Dench. Dench's latest biographer, John Miller, does not mention this friendship, but it is easy to imagine the effect she must have had on Betjeman. Even today, at the age of 63, she still speaks in the husky tones of an English schoolgirl, the kind who tended to affect Betjeman like a dose of Viagra.
Miller sets out to portray her as a great classical actress, but all through his book the image of the jolly school prefect keeps breaking through. One of her former teachers at the Central School of Speech and Drama says that her student performances seemed to have "the background noise of hockey sticks". Similarly, the late Caryl Brahms, in theatre reviews, used to refer to her as "Dench, J.", implying that she acted as if she were in a school play.
Kenneth Tynan said much the same, reviewing Dench's professional debut, as Ophelia at the Old Vic in 1957, when he called her "a pleasing but terribly sane little thing". Indeed, her reviews for this were so bad that she was dropped before the production went to America. But like a good English schoolgirl, she swallowed her pride, and waited. After three years of patiently accepting small parts, she was rewarded with the role of Juliet, and this time the Old Vic's guest director, Franco Zeffirelli, no less, tailored the production to a schoolgirl-style lead. Tynan called her "a calm, wise little Juliet", and it was the first rung on what was, thereafter, a continuous, steady climb to success.
Like Betjeman's Miss Joan Hunter Dunn, Judith Olivia Dench was born into a doctor's family. Her father was a stage-struck GP who liked to hold open house for the actors from his local rep, in York. She had two elder brothers but no sister, and grew up a tomboy, fond of comic japes. This has persisted to an almost unbelievable extent, so that to act opposite Dench, even today, is to make yourself the target of a vast range of schoolgirlish pranks, designed to reduce you to helpless laughter, however serious the play.
She has a similarly no-nonsense attitude to new scripts. Far from studying them closely in advance, and worrying about her character's motivation, she tends to turn up for the first read-through without having looked at more than a few pages. Miller is convinced that this approach is an asset, and shows that her technique and intuition usually make her an excellent sight-reader; but one does discern at least a hint of the long-ingrained English middle-class belief that the arts are not to be taken too seriously.
Dench has ostensibly co-operated with Miller, allowing him to watch her rehearsing and filming, and talking chattily to him. But (and again this is typical of her class and background) she has given away nothing intimate. Miller seems to have discovered very little about her private life before she married fellow-actor Michael Williams in her mid-thirties, nor does the book examine their marriage. Indeed, neither Williams nor their daughter Finty seems to have granted Miller an interview. Consequently, he has to depend on the usual theatrical biographer's pile of press-cuttings, so that every few pages we return wearisomely to What the Drama Critics Said.
As the book progresses, it begins to appear that Dench's greatest achievements have been in spite of - or maybe because of - being cast against type. As one would expect from her background and character, she is comfortably at home in light comedy, such as the television sitcoms A Fine Romance and As Time Goes By. One understands why her fellow-actress Coral Browne, hearing that Dench was to play Lady Macbeth, remarked cattily that the dagger scene would become "the postcard scene".
But it didn't, and Dench's performance (opposite Ian McKellen in Trevor Nunn's remarkable 1976 RSC production) presented not a ruthless killer but a likeable woman gone wrong. As Dench herself said to Nunn: "We must do it so that any schoolchildren who come to see it, and don't know it, will think that they may not do the murder." This intelligence of approach has sustained her in other apparently unsuitable roles, such as Sally Bowles in Cabaret and Shakespeare's Cleopatra. Arguably, her recent triumph as Queen Victoria in the film Mrs Brown was in the same category - a not naturally regal actress exploring the loneliness of queenship.
Miller's book ends with Dench's diary of a wide-eyed trip to the Oscars this spring after she had been nominated for Mrs Brown. Betjeman's jolly schoolgirl is very much in evidence here, as she gasps at receiving "champagne from Dustin Hoffman", so that one is left in the final pages wondering once again how this Joan Hunter Dunn has managed to become one of the finest actresses of her generation.
This review appeared in The London Times