She's gone from being a quintessentially English character actress to an international star. But it's all down to luck, Judi Dench tells Matt Wolf, as she returns to the West End
In
America, not to
mention at her local
bank, they call her
"Dame Dench", while a
New York hotel
telephonist once asked
whether
"Damejudidench" was
all one word. Closer to
home, the waiter at the Clapham bistro where we are having
lunch addresses her first as Mrs, then as Dame, proceeding in
frustration to elide the two: "MrsDame." Judi Dench chuckles
kindly once the man is out of earshot. "That's rather good."
Whichever title one uses, the simple fact is this: at 67, Judi
Dench has established herself not just as a consummate and
versatile actress (that much was clear long ago), but as her
generation's biggest star, far outpacing the men - the likes of
Finney, Bates, O'Toole - who once ruled the roost. For proof of a
box-office supremacy rivalled these days only by Dench's friend
Maggie Smith, check out the hefty six-figure advance bookings
for The Royal Family, the American comedy now previewing at
the Haymarket and signalling her first London stage appearance
in three years. Or simply scan the annual line-up for the
Oscars, where Dench - until five years ago, mostly a film virgin -
seems to have become a mainstay.
"She's a bona fide star in America," says Scott Rudin, the American theatre and film producer who was among those behind her slam-dunk 1999 Broadway appearance in Amy's View. The David Hare play recouped its $1.5m costs twice over, and won Dench a Tony award.
"People completely adore her."
"A lot of people think that if it were up to me, Judi Dench would be in all my movies," says Harvey Weinstein, the Miramax mogul who has distributed and/or produced six of her films, beginning with Mrs Brown. (It was that film, originally intended for a one-off television showing over Easter on the BBC, that started the ball rolling for Dench abroad.) "I will tell you," adds Weinstein with a laugh, "Johnny Depp, Kevin Spacey and myself are the three musketeers in our admiration for her - though I think Judi likes Johnny better than Kevin and me." Weinstein has produced some of Dench's most celebrated star turns at his annual Oscar parties, the first of which found Dench and her fellow nominee Helena Bonham Carter impersonating Ben Affleck and Matt Damon from Good Will Hunting. "We were effing and blinding all the time in two yellow hats," Dench recalls. "I have never been so frightened."
Dench could find herself twice nominated at next year's
Academy Awards, courtesy of Miramax once again. She is
being positioned for best supporting actress for Lasse
Hallström's The Shipping News, where she found a firm friend in
her co-star Kevin Spacey (and couriered his tux to last year's
ceremonies). At the same time, her harrowing performance as
the late Dame Iris Murdoch in Richard Eyre's Iris, co-produced
by Rudin - a shoo-in for a leading-actress citation - is quite
simply the stuff for which such statuettes are made. Those seen
wiping away tears at an early screening included John Bayley,
who was heard uttering the word "tremendous" - and as
Murdoch's husband, there can be no better judge.
"Judi doesn't perform," says Eyre. "She just is. There's not an atom of ostentation about her, or display. She's not just one of the most generous actresses, but actually just about the most generous, good-hearted person I know." That explains why colleagues sing her praises, and also why my window-cleaner, Timmy, does: two decades or so ago, he says, he did a job for Dench, who to this day remembers his name. The actress, in turn, recently went to a party honouring her window-cleaners, John and Dave, who happen to be twins. "It was a wonderful opportunity to show them I actually do wear clothes, since they were always catching me when I wasn't." The occasion, she says, her eyes giving a typical twinkle, "was very merry indeed".
It seems fair to say by way of tribute that Dench couldn't be less like
Fanny Cavendish, the awesomely egotistical thespian matriarch she plays
in The Royal Family, the 1927 George S Kaufman/Edna Ferber Broadway
comedy that, rather surprisingly, marks Dench's first American role.
(The comedy debuted in the West End in 1934, under the title Theatre
Royal.) For one thing, Dench is rather more sleekly elegant (Fanny is
described as looking "careless"), or at least she is when dolled up in
black, ready to go on to a drinks party at Bafta.
"Fanny's attitude towards people who aren't in the theatre is pretty acid, I must say," acknowledges Dench, "and you're obviously an outsider if you're not part of that world. We've grown out of that now - if we ever were like it. You would get slapped down very, very quickly if you behaved like that today, and rightly." Yet Dench would be well within her rights to come across as a grande dame, especially now that the rest of the world has sat up and taken notice. (Rather amusingly, some American journalists during her press tour for Mrs Brown politely asked "what other wonderful things" she had done.) After all, there aren't too many performers who are leading Shakespearians, sitcom mainstays (A Fine Romance and As Time Goes By) and now, with the passing of Jessica Tandy, the film world's senior actress, with roles ranging from James Bond's headmistressy M to Queens Victoria and Elizabeth. Had injury not forced her, all those years ago, to pull out of Cats, she might even have been a musical diva. "I know," smiles Dench, who has starred in Cabaret and A Little Night Music. "Just think of it. Though I can tell you, Memory would never have got into the hit parade."
Whereas some careers are carefully planned, Dench defines hers only by a consistent desire to surprise. "It's always been that thing of Michael Codron [the West End producer] saying very, very early on, 'Oh no, she'll never be anything but a soubrette,' and I was conscious of going and finding that word, and looking it up and thinking: 'Well, that's a bit of a challenge. I'm not just going to be that all my life.'" The rest she attributes to luck, a word that crops up several times during our chat.
"It's
about things coming your way if you're lucky enough, or
not, if you're unlucky, and then a question of being in people's
minds and the choices that you make. Going to the Old Vic
was just wonderful, the best schooling you could possibly have"
- her first role was as Ophelia, opposite John Neville's Hamlet, in
1957 - "and then Stratford after that: that was just luck, that just
happened." What counts, she says, is "opening your mind to
possibilities". "All I've ever wanted to do, if it's at all possible,
is
choose the most unlikely next job - like playing Cleopatra [for
the National Theatre in 1987], where people were openly aghast.
In actual fact, if somebody says, 'Oh, well, you're perfect for that
part', I think: 'Beware, beware.'"
A lot of it comes down to trusting the creative company she keeps, as Dench, by her own admission, is "terribly bad at choosing for myself". With The Royal Family, she accepted the play without having read it, as a longtime friend and colleague of the show's director, Peter Hall. And Iris? "Richard just asked me, and I said yes, because I was a huge fan of her books, even if it now feels as if everyone seems to have known Iris Murdoch except me." Dench has the completed film at home on video, but hasn't watched it yet. "I daren't look; I just cannot bring myself," she says, voicing her problem with the medium. "I would like it better if I could really distance myself from a movie and look at it as a whole, instead of homing in on thinking: 'Oh, I didn't know I did that.'" Even her eight minutes of screen time in Shakespeare in Love - enough to win her an Oscar two years ago - could, she thinks, have been improved. "I'd do it differently if I had seen that; I could do it differently, and better, afterwards. Film acting is not second nature, and never, ever will be, which is why I'm kind of a stage creature more than anything." In the theatre, she explains, "you go on and do your bit, then you come off, and you create the evening".
Nonetheless, Dench sounds pleased to have a second home on screen, not least during a year that began with the death, after a long illness, of her husband, Michael Williams. (Nine months later, she is still answering condolence notes, having received, by her own estimation, somewhere between 3,000 and 4,000.) Eight weeks after his death, there she was in Nova Scotia, on location for The Shipping News (she plays Spacey's aunt, the deliciously named Agnes Hamm), followed by Iris, more work on The Shipping News and then to Ealing Studios, to play Lady Bracknell in Oliver Parker's movie version of The Importance of Being Earnest, opposite Rupert Everett and Colin Firth.
"What
a relief," she says of the spate of activity, "and a
wonderful thing to happen just at that time." Work, then, is a
good thing? "I'm sure it is, and" - post-September 11 - "it
certainly is now. This is good when everything is so alarming
and unstable, and nobody quite knows what the next move is
going to be." Dench's own next moves include another Bond
film, in 2002, and an English-language film for Walter Salles, the
Brazilian director of the acclaimed Central Station.
Were she relaunching her career now, Dench adds: "It would still be in the theatre because, you know, you get more chances at it, though I suppose if you went on and on in the same part for 13 years, it would be a bit of a trial." Offers now come in abundance in all media, which Dench again puts down to luck. "I'm just lucky to be working, and I mean it, I really mean it. I'm terribly lucky to be working." And the truth is, we're lucky she is, too.
Thanks to Mike Kennedy and to Jan M for sending me this article which appeared in the Sunday Times on October 28, 2001. Mike also sent along these pictures of Ethel Barrymore which he thought you might find interesting -- the play is allegedly about the famous Barrymore acting dynasty. Thanks also to Mary Lynn Travers for scanning the pictures of Judi.