....broadcaster Martyn Lewis asks Judi Dench how her career took off after one of the most inauspcious starts in acting history.

For all her achievements on the stage, Dame Judi Dench believes that she is only ever as successful as the last production she has appeared in. 'Peoples memories are very, very short, and I don't think you can say that a person is successful all through their life,' she says. 'Even if you get wonderful notices for doing a play, it doesn't necessarily mean everybody sees you as a success. Success, I'm afraid, is a very ephemeral word for actors.'

Dame Judi says she is always frightened about the prospect of a prolonged period of unemployment. 'I have been in the profession 40 years now but the more I do, the more frightened I get, the more doubtful I get about myself and the more unconfident I get.

'But I suspect that's something that I need, a part of me. I'd hate to think I knew it all; I'd hate to get to the point where I thought, "I know how to play that part. I've never done that, and I don't expect it is ever going to happen.'

As much as she likes receiving awards, she does not see them as an end in themselves. 'They are ships that pass in the night,' she says. 'They are there in your home and you think that was wonderful getting that recognition for doing something that people enjoyed. And then it's on to the next thing.'

Of her recent work -- the TV sitcom As Time Goes By, a spell at the National Theatre in A Little Night Music and the part of the spy chief M in the James Bond film Goldeneye ---- she observes simply 'It was keeping employed, that's always pleased me.

A doctor's daughter, she had trained to be a designer, but suddenly realised the career was not for her. She looked at her brother Geoffrey who wanted to be an actor and, thinking that acting might be for her, she went along for an audition at the Central School Of Drama.

'I don't remember feeling it was risky but I do remember being a bit half-hearted about it. I just thought I'd have a try. I didn't think, "Oh, I am going to he an actress", I just thought, ''I will just see how I get on."

She says that unlike so many actors and actresses today, she was very lucky in that she had the opportunity to perform in a company of actors, from 1957 to 1961. "I watched all that was going on around me," she recalls. 'It's so important to watch people. to see how they use their craft.

Nowadays a lot of young actors want to make a big name for themselves in films, so they might do a bit of television and they do a bit of film.

'But when it comes to projecting in a theatre, they don't know how to do that. It is sad, hut without the reps, where do you go to train? I don't know. You need to get as much experience in everything as you can, and watch everybody. Even watch somebody whom you think cann't do it, and make up your mind why you think they can't do it. That teaches you something. Everything teaches you something.'

Her career has not been an altogether easy ride. In the first part she ever played, Ophelia in Hamlet at the Old Vic, the reviewers panned both her and the Vic for having taken on a virtual schoolgirl straight from acting school. One review said, 'She stepped out into the limelight, tripped over her advance publicity and fell flat on her pretty face.'

She concedes it hurt her deeply but says fellow cast members, such as John Neville, helped her through it, persuading her to focus on the more positive reviews. Later, when she was doing The Cherry Orchard with Dame Peggy Ashcroft and Sir John Gieigud in 1961, she became depressed because shee couldn't appear to do anything right for the director. Dame Peggy gave her some valuable advice when she told her: 'Don't ever let him see you cry because you're the whipping boy.'

The only time she thought of giving it all up was, she says, when her daughter, Finty, was born. 'I would have given up and just been a housewife and painted and done things at home, but Michael (Williams, her actor husband) said, "No, don't do that."

'He said. "It would he awful, you wouldn't like it." And I suspect, in a way, he's right.

I tried as best I could to build my career around her. When she was little I didn't do any television; when she was having a bath and going in bed I went to the theatre. When she got to an age when she went to school, then I started doing television and didn't go to the theatre, so that I was there at the end of the day. I did that as much as I could.'

As to what Dame Judi regards as her greatest successes, she says: 'I feel 'very proud of the fact that I played Juno in Juno And The Paycock with an all-Irish cast. I can't say that I am totally un-Irish as my mother came from Dublin and my father was brought up there, but it was a terrific experience for me to do that play with a really Irish cast. At the same time, I was doing A Fine Romance for television with Michael which was quite hard work.

'I was also pleased that I got away, because everybody had expressed their susprise. They laughed in my face about the fact that I was going to play it at the age of 52. As I said to Peter Hall, ''I am a menopausal dwarf. You don't want this playing Cleopatra, do you? People were very openly scornful. I felt that I climbed a big mountainm with that part and absolutely loved playing it.'

Rare among many of actresses, she never felt the need to tranform herself into a film star in Hollywood. I have always turned down the opportunity to go to America,' she says. 'I was there for six months with the Vic and I haven't been hack since 1959. If you really want to be a big name in Hollywood some things have to go by the board. You may have to decide very early on what is more important, a family life or your career. For us, because of our close family background, the most important thing is family; career comes second.

You ask her if there are any really big challenges left for her in acting and she replies 'I don't know; I have no idea what I ought to do. I just hope that there are parts for me. I remember reading not long ago. "What is Maggie Smith going to do in Juliet: the wheelchair part?" I thought, "Christ, not wheelchair parts yet.' I just hope that people go on writing good plays. I am going to do a new David Hare play this season at the National. I hope people at are going to write parts for people who are getting much older. I am going to start playing grandmothers now.

As for frustrated ambitions, she says she has too many to mention. 'I would have loved to have had an exhibition as a painter. I am going to start a hit of woodwork. I want to do a bit of wood carving. The other night on television there was a girl making a willow chair from planted willow in the garden. I was so excited by it. I thought, "I have got to try and make something like that." I have masses of frustrated ambitions!

And for her epitaph? Simply for people to say that she had a sense of humour.

Extracted from Reflection On Success by Martyn Lewis, published by Lennard Publishing on June 2.

Thanks to Mary Lynn Travers for sending this article which appeared in the Daily Mail on February 17, 1997.

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