The Royal Family is a fitting title for a play that stars the queen of British stage and screen In Japan eminent artists can be officially designated National Treasures. Whatever this may mean in tax rebates or free trips up Mount Fuji, the title confirms that the individual in question is publicly and widely acknowledged as a supreme artist, venerated by all. No equivalent honour exists in Britain, but we override this lack by honouring certain people unofficially through a sort of unspoken consensus of desire. And there is little doubt that a name figuring on most lists would be that of Dame Judi Dench.
In the 44 years since she made her debut on the stage, as an unremarked-upon Ophelia at the Old Vic Liverpool production of Hamlet, she has climbed to the top of her profession in the overlapping fields of theatre, television and cinema, and has been taken to the hearts of a public for whom, it is safe to say, she can do no wrong. Her enjoyment of onstage mischief is notorious, so that there are many tales of the practical jokes she contrives to play (as do many actors) in a good-humoured attempt to discombobulate a colleague. But she has a quite phenomenal ability to wipe her mind free in an instant of all such irrelevancies, and so expressively charge a line, alter a smile or turn her face that the emotion of it catches the heart.
Dame Judi can indicate grief by the slightest twitch of the mouth or by allowing her voice to break into the curious half-crack, half-sob that has adorned her performances from the start, when she was working her way through a range of young heroines from Shakespeare’s Juliet to Chekhov’s Irina and Shaw’s St Joan; vulnerable yet resolute young women trapped in unfortunate circumstances.
And yet this is the same vocal break that enlivens the absurdly pert or drily ironic lines of her numerous comic roles, the most celebrated being in two long-running sitcoms that together made hers one of the best known and loved faces on British television. As one of the shy lovers in A Fine Romance she co-starred with her much-loved husband Michael Williams (who died earlier this year).
But this was in 1980, when sitcoms were not considered quite the thing for classical actors to be involved with. Trevor Nunn, then in charge of the Royal Shakespeare Company, where she was working, tried to dissuade her, but she says: “I think it’s our business to do as many things as we can. People shouldn’t demean situation comedy, because it’s so difficult. You only get one go at it, and you’ve got to make people laugh. It’s very, very hard.”
So after A Fine Romance she went on to co-star in As Time Goes By, playing a middle-aged widow sorely tried by an infinitely lugubrious Geoffrey Palmer. He would subsequently appear as the courtier who introduces Queen Victoria to her Scottish gillie in Mrs Brown, the 1996 film that brought her, at the age of 62, a worldwide audience and an Oscar nomination for Best Actress.
This performance has defined for her generation the complex character of the widowed Victoria, commanding yet vulnerable, and it would have been a most worthy winner. But she was back in Hollywood a year later, nominated in the category for Best Supporting Actress after playing another English queen, this time Elizabeth I, in Shakespeare in Love. Appearing in only three scenes, at the start, the centre and the climax, her screen appearances lasted only eight minutes but were enough to secure her the Oscar that had eluded her the year before.
Her brother Jeffery is an actor, her doctor father was a keen amateur actor as well as being the official GP for the Theatre Royal in York, the city where Judith Olivia Dench was born in December 1934. Her daughter Finty is also an actor, though whether the dynasty will continue into a further generation remains to be seen, since grandson Sam is only four years old. But next week she opens at the Theatre Royal in The Royal Family, the 1927 comedy by George Kaufman and Edna Ferber that pokes genial fun at a glamorous dynasty of Broadway actors not unlike — indeed very much like — the celebrated Barrymores. Lionel, Ethel and John were revered in their time but hardly loved, and certainly lacked any ability for self-mockery or fun.
A sense of humour does not exclude passion or the understanding of pain or any other of the gifts and skills that go to make up sensitive acting, but in its absence an actor has a far smaller chance of becoming a national treasure. At least in Britain.
Thanks to Mike Kennedy for sending me this article which appeared in The Times (UK) on October 27, 2001.