Dame Judi Dench was in town last night for
the premiere of her new film, Iris.
The actress — who won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress in Shakespeare in Love and has been nominated two other times for last year's Chocolat and 1997's Mrs. Brown — is admittedly a late bloomer. A theatre and TV star in the United Kingdom for years, the 66-year-old thespian has only recently vaulted to the unofficial title of "Best Actress of All" — a title held at various times by Meryl Streep, Katharine Hepburn and an elite group of others.
But Dame Judi — who looked stunning last night on her two-day break from performing in The Royal Family in the West End — said that she's trying to find ways to improve herself.
"I'm always trying to learn and be better at what I do," she said at the Iris premiere, where co-stars Kate Winslet (with new beau director Sam Mendes), Jim Broadbent and Hugh Bonneville were among the guests along with Glenn Close, Natasha Richardson and husband Liam Neeson, Blythe Danner and Gwyneth Paltrow. In a really unusual move, the stars and the screening audience gave Iris a standing ovation when it was finished.
Dame Judi also confided that until recently she wasn't so comfortable becoming a film star late in life.
"I've been learning about it, and now I know more," she said. "When Mrs. Brown happened, I was new at it. It took so long for me to break into films. But now I'm enjoying myself a bit."
And why not? In addition to Iris — for which she will undoubtedly be nominated for an Oscar, and may in fact win — Dench will return to the big screen next Christmas in the next James Bond movie as 007's boss, M. "They haven't even finished the script yet. I don't know what it's called or what I'm doing in it. But we start in the spring."
She also stars in Miramax's The Shipping News for Christmas and the same studio's The Importance of Being Earnest, which arrives next summer.
And British Dench fans will be happy to know that the actress — who's a certified TV star back home — will resurrect her popular series As Time Goes By for "four or five more episodes next year. We're going to wrap it up. We didn't want to leave people hanging."
The series celebrates its tenth anniversary in January.
Thanks to Anne Marie Bourdon for finding this article online at Fox News on December 3, 2001.