School drama classes placed Judi Dench (1934— ) under the influence of the professional actress and teacher Kay Macdonald, who inspired in her a love of the theatre and acting. Eventually, she gave up her ambition to become a theatre designer to enrol [sic] in the Central School of Speech and Drama in 1953 where she trained with Elsie Fogarty’s successor, Cicely Berry. Her first professional role was as Ophelia to John Neville’s Hamlet (1957) with Michael Benthall’s Old Vic Company...

Judi Dench’s work proves that a highly competent actress can play a multiplicity of strenuously demanding roles simultaneously throughout the spectrum of dramatic genres. The pattern of Judi’s career has been one of ever-widening spheres of influence, beginning with two major national companies, progressing to two leading repertory groups followed by three vastly contrasting foreign tours, before branching out to West End and TV acting. Her definitive performances of Shakespeare’s women, together with her special gifts for generating a company spirit whose cohesion is felt in the final production, gave a lead in popularizing the classics. She is also recognized as one of the century’s greatest actresses for extending the modern classical actress’s repertoire into musicals and for raising the significance of middle-aged roles as centre-pieces of dramatic action.

Judi added to the popularization of Shakespeare by revealing a frank earthiness in his women. In Franco Zefferelli’s Romeo and Juliet (Old Vic, 1960), Judi and co-star John Stride played the lovers in a balcony scene which had Romeo climbing a tree so as to touch a Juliet who leaned toward him eagerly. Critics accused them of throwing away the poetry so necessary to the romantic and tragic dimensions of this play, for the passion. Nevertheless, the play ran for a record 122 performances. Peter Hall’s memorable A Midsummer Night’s Dream (RST, 1962) capitalized on Judi’s sensual and earthy qualities, refining them into a ‘spun crystal performance’ of the definitive Titania whose mystery and mischief perfectly suited her own personality.

During her stay at the Nottingham Playhouse (1965-66), Judi pioneered the technique now common among younger contemporary actresses of cross-fertilizing roles played during the same season. She distinguished, for instance, the more naďve brand of religious idealism Isabella represented in Measure for Measure from the vigorous crusading zeal of St Joan, a precise differentiation which enriched both these roles. Though Judi now believes she ‘concentrated too much on the spiritual aspect then’, her version nevertheless made the heroine more accessible by concentrating on her ordinary human qualities. In her view:

Too many Joans make up their minds she’s a saint from the moment she walks in. I think she’s a rebel. I worked . . . for that kind of intolerance of youth. . . that dogged determination and stubbornness that can go out and win battles.

The ensemble system allowed Judi to portray the heroine from other characters’ points of view, by showing how Joan acts as a catalyst for their passions. Judi now views Joan as ‘a fanatic, dogmatically intolerant of other people’s views’, and regards the role as one of the most demanding for actresses, given the extraordinary physical and mental resources required.

Judi’s developing expertise in playing off her various roles as foils paid dividends during the crucial mid-1960s turning point in her career when she began a breathtaking conquest on all theatrical fronts. She explored her own versatility to the point where the roles that attracted her were those most opposite to the ones she was currently playing. With Pirandello’s Rules of the Game and Alexei Arbuzov’s The Promise (Oxford Playhouse, 1966) in tow and a prospect of doing The Shrew at Stratford, Judi accepted the role of Sally Bowles in a new Broadway musical called Cabaret (Palace, 1967). Her mastery of the technique of ‘putting over’ a song rather than actually singing and dancing won her a following that amounts to a cult in our own day. Despite critics’ nagging doubts about classical actresses turning unlikely hands to musicals, Judi’s Sally Bowles freed them to explore their powers outside the confines of conventional drama. Her work in forging links between the classical and commercial theatres reached a high water mark with her Adriana in Trevor Nunn’s RSC musical version of A Comedy of Errors (Aldwych, 1976), which used the company spirit to create a masterpiece of comic timing and an exuberant fantasy of a Mediterranean bazaar.

Judi’s skill in dealing with the complexities of characterization set a new standard for bringing out the full tragicomic richness in Shakespeare’s heroines. Her gifts for poignant comedy, first noticed when she played Irma in Three Sisters (Oxford Playhouse, 1964), flowered five years later in her bittersweet treatments of Hermione in The Winter’s Tale and Viola in Twelfth Night (RSC overseas tour, 1969) during the same season. Trevor Nunn’s production of the former lay in his idea of doubling the parts of Hermione and Perdita, an effect of heightened ironies untried since American actress Mary Anderson’s Lyceum (1987) performance of the two roles. Judi averted the inherent danger of upstaging Hermione with the Perdita character by deliberately playing them as foils. Reviewers prefered [sic] her ‘superbly dignified’ mother to the ‘barely more than skittish’ daughter whom Judi made an earthy Yorkshire lass. Judi’s abiding idea of characters as catalysts in a play proved particularly useful in these plays because:

There’s so much bittersweetness tinging all those characters, that you cannot play too much on the comic side.. . you have to open the valve and let that rush of pressure off. And then you’ve got a graver more icy pressure underneath it.

Judi’s practised double-act with Donald Sinden’s Malvolio smoothed their way to playing Beatrice and Benedick in John Barton’s Indian Raj version of Much Ado (RST, 1976) a feat of teamwork which built a history of the characters’ relationship into the usual lovemaking wordplay. Again Judi displayed a mastery of multiple layers of characterization, delivering single lines full of touching ironies which revealed Beatrice’s true feelings. Most innovative of all, Judi introduced a contrast between a more serious and romantic Beatrice to Benedick’s extroverted clowning.

Judi’s approach to tragedy is equally challenging. The small-scale and intimate production with Ian McKellen as Macbeth at the Other Place (1976) moved furthest away from the ‘fiendlike queen’ and realized more fully than ever before both Siddons’s and Terry’s belief in the heroine’s love for her husband as the root of her tragedy. As Judi says:

she was totally besotted with her husband. Not that she wanted it all for herself - to be queen - but for him. Having tasted blood he goes further and she draws back, and the rift between them begins.

The actress established this gentler Lady Macbeth in the letter scene, where, in a highly charged atmosphere created by a circle of orange boxes that tightened gradually round her, she played out the Satanic ritual of damnation Nunn’s production emphasized. Rapidity and wilfulness of movement marked Judi’s interpretation.

Irving Wardle wrote of Judi’s Lady Macbeth as ‘not impersonation but revelation’ and Billington admired her ‘novice dabbling in Satanic powers half-fascinated, half terrified by the pit she has entered’. Despite the few murmurs that Judi sacrificed some of the grandeur necessary to the scene, she won the Society of West End Theatres Award for Best Actress.

More than a decade later Judi’s acclaimed Cleopatra (NT, Olivier, 1987), a second major Shakespearean role that seemingly went against the grain, made of the wily and exotic heroine a study of ‘greatness going off’ in middle age. Instead of an alluring coquette, Judi portrayed a fading beauty’s desperation to keep her man which the critics found ‘immensely moving as we watch her losing that grip’. In so doing Judi established that ‘Cleopatra’s sexual magnetism lies not in any centrefold posturing but in emotional extremism’ which the actress displayed with breathtaking volatility. Judi’s triumph finally brought this elusive role within the province of the English actress by redefining her sexuality in terms of an overpowering energy and vitality that has survived the loss of youth.

Among Judi’s greatest achievements as a comic actress was her creation of more youthful versions of the traditional comic viragos. She had already played Cecily Cardew to Fay Compton’s Lady Bracknell as an Old Vic novice in 1959 and major comedy of manners roles such as Kate Hardcastle in She Stoops to Conquer(Old Vic, 1960), Margery Pinchwife in The Country Wife (Nottingham Playhouse, 1966), Amanda in Private Lives (Nottingham, 1965) and Millamant in The Way of the World (Aldwych, 1978). Her portrayal of Mme Ranevskaya in Richard Eyre’s BBC production of The Cherry Orchard (1981), a play which keeps its characters on the brink of crying and laughing throughout, also nurtured her talent for tragi-comic portrayal. Judi’s comparative youth in the role - she was 27 [sic] - gave Ranevskaya more girlish qualities than was conventional in her relations with a cooling lover and fostered her youthful version of Lady Bracknell a few months later. {NOTE: Actually Judi was 47 years old in 1981). The challenge of Lady Bracknell fully suited Judi’s penchant for roles that were ‘not right’ for her. Instead of Edith Evans’s formidable dragon, Judi was a youthful mother in her forties, vying with her daughter in her attentions to young men. Judi gave the character a marked sensual warmth, though she often felt the audiences’ disappointment with her more generalized delivery of the ‘handbag line’. The more astute critics appreciated the essential humanity Judi gave the character by:

needing only to remove her spectacles when she comes to the notorious handbag line.., a definitive Lady Bracknell in her own kind, to match Dame Edith’s in power, if not in extravagance, and perhaps to surpass it in humanity. With a touch less humanity, she will be just about perfect.

Judi’s portrayal of Juno, the tragic lynchpin of a disintegrating Dublin tenement family on the eve of the Irish Civil War in Sean O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock (Aldwych, 1980), established her as one of the greatest of modern actresses. The role especially lent itself to the full-blooded humanity Judi invests in her characters.

Judi’s career during the 1980s is unprecedented for combining a multitude of strenuously demanding parts with the maximum of economy and enrichment of her powers. As Barbara Jackson, the duped housewife betrayed by Helen Kroger in Hugh Whitemore’s Pack of Lies (Lyric, Shaftesbury Avenue, 1983), an account of the Portland spy ring, Judi was required to register deep emotional shock and pain with a minimum of voice and gestural leeway in a sustained performance of mental breakdown. The play ran without a break for a year and was followed by the even more rigourous title part of Brecht’s Mother Courage (Barbican Theatre, 1984). As the butt of the author’s anti-war theme, the heroine is a grasping, amoral creature shown in a tragic light only at the loss of her three children. Judi managed the general discouragement of sympathy for the character needed to make the play work by drawing on her experience in musicals to play her as a clownish cockney con-trickster with a plucky, aggressive voice to balance the representation.

Though she has figured less prominently in films than contemporaries like Glenda Jackson and Vanessa Redgrave, she is more of a pioneering multi-media actress. Her Katharine in Henry V was transmitted live by the BBC under the title of An Age of Kings (1960) while she was playing the role at the Old Vic, a situation which she claimed enhanced her evening performances. Judi found media cross-fertilization had the same effect later when she played A Fine Romance (London Weekend Television, 1981) her most successful of all TV productions, while doing Lady Bracknell on stage at night. This was another bittersweet comedy in which she and husband Michael Williams played Laura and Mike, a pair of 37-year-old unmarrieds gauchely managing a belated but promising relationship. The twenty-six episode series with Judi singing the title song won the 1984 BAFTA award for Best Comedy Actress of the Year.

Judi’s first major TV triumph was as the rebel daughter Terry in John Hopkins’s quartet of plays, Talking to a Stranger (BBC, 1966), each drama centring on one of four family members following the mother’s suicide. As a piece of naturalistic drama exploring the complex texture of family relationships, the series so captured the imagination of viewers that it was transferred to BBC I to reach a wider audience. It was the first time on screen that Judi was to arouse compelling viewing from commonplace family situations, a form of drama she was to make her own particular strength on television.

Judi’s proven flair for documentary drama flowered as Hazel Wiles, a woman who adopted a thalidomide-damaged boy in On Giants’ Shoulders (BBC Play of the Week, 1979). Going Gently (1981) set a new standard of courage and coherence for TV drama largely because Judi represented Sister Scarli, a ward nurse for terminal cancer patients, with a depth and authority that bordered on public service.

Much of her current work on stage and screen explores the middle-aged woman. In Kenneth Branagh’s film version of Henry V (1989), Judi’s portrayal of Mistress Quickly in predominantly low-angle close-up shots gave us a richer and more imposing character painfully aware of the toll life takes on those most fully engaged in it. Judi’s recent BBC serial Behaving Badly (1989) boldly explored the middle-aged woman’s sexuality. What begins as a hackneyed situation of the abandoned wife retiring gracefully in favour of a more alluring and liberated younger replacement metamorphoses delightfully into a freeing of the spirit that ironically brings fulfilment to the heroine just when everyone else has consigned her to superfluity. Bridget challenges our notions of appropriate behaviour for middle-aged women, especially when her self-assertion is treated by her family as mental illness. If such plays continue to emerge from television, that most potent of media, the time when actresses come to regard mid-life as a professional golden age may not be long in coming.

Thanks to Delda White for sending this article which appeared in the book The Rise of the English Actress by Sandra Richards. (Published by Palgrave Macmillan; ISBN: 0312075782; (May 1993)

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