LONDON (AP) -- After four decades winning acclaim and applause on the London stage, Dame Judi Dench has shown movie audiences that she is a class act on screen as well.
She is nominated for an Academy Award for her portrayal of a lonely Queen Victoria in ``Mrs. Brown.''
``Lots and lots of people who've never heard of me have written to me,'' the actress said one recent afternoon, her inimitably husky voice bearing traces of a lingering cold and cough.
``I get a huge amount of stuff from America saying, `I've never heard of you; will you send me a biography? I only knew of you in `Goldeneye' and `Mrs. Brown.' And now,'' she adds mischievously, ```Tomorrow Never Dies,' if they're lucky and quick and don't blink too much.''
While contemporaries such as Vanessa Redgrave, Glenda Jackson and Maggie Smith were regularly traveling to Hollywood, picking up Oscars along the way, the Yorkshire-born Dench was making her name as a brilliant actress whose physique somewhat belies her success on stage.
``She's 5-foot nothing, and yet she's got sex and wit, wit and sex,'' said Sir Peter Hall, who directed her bravura performance as Cleopatra to Anthony Hopkins' Antony in the Shakespeare tragedy at the National Theater in 1987.
They subsequently worked together in Peter Shaffer's 1992 play, ``The Gift of the Gorgon,'' with Dench as the distraught wife to Michael Pennington's masochistic writer.
As he prepares to direct Dench once more next fall in a West End revival of Eduardo de Filippo's ``Filumena,'' Hall said Dench was the latest in a grand tradition of British actresses dating back to the late Peggy Ashcroft, an Oscar-winner herself in 1984 for ``A Passage to India,'' and, before that, to Edith Evans and Ellen Terry.
``She can be anything,'' Hall said. ``She can find the humor in anything, and that's terribly seductive. Her range is colossal when you think what she's played.''
Dench has performed Shakespeare, Ibsen, Chekhov and Oscar Wilde, as well as new plays such as David Hare's ``Amy's View,'' in which she currently stars at the Aldwych Theater on the West End. So beloved is she in English theater circles that one scribe once wrote that to pan Dench in a play was ``like strangling a dog.''
Away from straight plays, she led London's first ``Cabaret'' in 1968, playing a Sally Bowles who by all accounts was light years removed from Liza Minnelli in the film version. Two seasons ago, she made a definitively moving and barbed Desiree Armfeldt in ``A Little Night Music,'' delivering a rueful ``Send in the Clowns'' that sent listeners into states of rapture.
In the early 1980s, producer Cameron Mackintosh, composer Andrew Lloyd Webber and director Trevor Nunn tapped her to be the first Grizabella in a then-iffy project called ``Cats.'' Injury forced Dench to leave the production before it opened, only to find the role reconceived as a vehicle for belters like Elaine Paige and Tony-winner Betty Buckley.
``Who would have known,'' Mackintosh says now, ``what a big difference it made Judi Dench not playing Grizabella, having a singer (Paige) as opposed to an actress who sings?''
But if Dench missed out on mega-musical stardom, she long ago earned the producer's devotion. Mackintosh's foundation backed the Royal National Theater's acclaimed ``Night Music'' revival. Of her Oscar prospects, Mackintosh says, ``She can win everything under the sun, as far as I'm concerned.''
Not that Dench ever had anything so lofty as an Oscar in mind when she and co-star Billy Connolly set out for Scotland to make a small-scale love story in which passion is communicated by glances and feeling rather than by shedding clothes.
The movie was originally intended for the BBC. ``It's very surreal,'' Dench said. ``This is a film that was going to be done on TV.'' Now it has two Oscar nods, one for makeup design.
Making movies, with its multiple takes and and final cuts, is so different from stage work, she said.
``I never ever hankered after doing movies at all... Even now, when I see `Mrs. Brown,' there are lots of things I want to change. It irritates me that it's immovable,'' she continued.
``In the theater, you're always working towards something, towards telling the tale better for the author. But in the film, there's the terrible sense that it's not anything to do with you, in a way.''
``Mrs. Brown'' is Dench's largest screen role to date, even if the movie has been seen by a fraction of those who caught her in the last two James Bond films.
But the actress has been a regular supporting player in English movies for years, whether in the corset-laden Tuscan landscape of ``A Room With a View,'' the film that paired her with fellow Oscar nominee Helena Bonham Carter, or the bookish, musty London of ``84 Charing Cross Road,'' again with Hopkins.
To play Victoria, Dench did her customary research, reading the queen's highland journals and various biographies as well as discovering mere days before shooting started that Victoria was left-handed while Dench is not.
``They insisted everything was right, all those corsets and petticoats and stockings and boots,'' recalled Dench. ``That does a lot of the job for you.''
Less helpful were the shoot's ``amazing conditions, really, with rain and wind and wet and early hours. I thought, `Can I do it on five hours a night?' My call was at 4:45 every morning.''
Her greatest pressure once again is one of time. There is the daytime filming of her popular English TV comedy, ``As Time Goes By,'' plus seven performances a week of ``Amy's View.'' She'll miss two performances of the play to attend the Oscars.
``That's not very fair,'' Dench says. ``Then you come back not having won something, and you think, `Oh charming; I've had a couple of days off.''' Oscar night will also mean she misses the opening night party on the West End for ``Brief Lives,'' the solo show of Dench's husband of 27 years, actor Michael Williams. They have a daughter, Finty, an actress, and a 9-month-old grandson.
But Dench was upbeat about her date with Oscar.
``Isn't it thrilling?'' she said of the strong British lineup in a category that finds only one American, Helen Hunt, up against four English women.
``It shows that people think we can do it. I hope it shows that.''
Thanks to Angela for pointing me to this article.