TOM BROOK: We begin today with the World Premiere here in New York of Iris the story of British novelist and philosopher Dame Iris Murdoch who died from Alzheimer's disease in February,
1999. This film really focuses on Murdoch's enduring love affair with her husband of more than 40 years, the literary critic John Bayley. Iris also boasts a stellar cast that includes Dame Judi Dench, Kate Winslet and Jim Broadbent. The world premiere of Iris brought out quite a crowd eager to witness the combined star power of Dame Judi Dench and Kate Winslet.
TOM: In this British film Dame Judi plays Iris Murdoch in her later years. Dame Judi says it wasn't easy playing a woman like Murdoch, a relatively contemporary figure who only died in 1999: [Camera cuts to Judi][While he is talking, the camera pans the crowd and shows the cast of the movie. Clips of the film are also shown]
JUDI: It's very difficult to distill someone who's very recent in people's minds and who so many people knew so well.
[Brief sound bites are shown with Kate Winslet and Richard Eyre and then Tom introduces his interview.]
TOM: For Americans, when it comes to acting, nothing can quite beat Dame Judi. After the film's premiere in New York, I got the chance to hear more from Dame Judi Dench about her role in Iris. To my mind, it's one of her best performances to date. You really do forget you're watching an actress up there because Dame Judi becomes Iris Murdoch. [Another clip is shown, at the end of which the scene is a studio where Tom sits across from Judi Dench.]
When you were preparing for the role, was there a moment when you felt that you got it right, that you did something and it clicked -- the way you held yourself or the way you talked ...JUDI: No. No, but there was one moment when I caught sight of myself in a glass door and I actually thought that I looked very, very like her. In makeup we had a photograph of her just on the mirror beside where I was being made up and I just caught a glimpse in this glass door of somebody that I thought looked like her.
TOM:Eventually Alzheimer's disease does really get the better of her. How did you play the onset of the disease, because it does actually happen in a rather subtle way, doesn't it?
JUDI: That's the only way you can play it. That you know that it starts with just instead of looking and understanding a word what happens is that you look at a word and you don't understand it -- you don't understand the form of the word and, for somebody whose business is words, that must be terrifying. And very gradually other things happen, the mind just -- the shutters come down.
TOM:
TOM: Do you still always get a thrill out of acting or some days when you're doing it is it really a chore? Do you find it quite difficult?
TOM: What about film?
TOM: [Another clip is shown] I don't mean to be insensitive in any way at all, but your husband died shortly before you made this film. Do you think that loss, in a way, helped your performance because Iris Murdoch was really confronting loss the whole time when she got Alzheimer's disease, wasn't she?
JUDI: [Judi contemplates the question for a bit] Yes, but I can't answer that in a way. I don't know. I mean perhaps I should have been doing a comedy and then it would have been interesting to see how loss affected being comedic.
JUDI: Uncomfortability was invented last night. I mean -- really -- it's shatteringly unnerving because you cannot be objective about it. And you watch, and you watch things that you had difficulty with or that, you know, you cannot watch the story, you (what she said here is unintelligible to me -- maybe some sort of slang which sounded like "you completely stote in a rabbit time", and if someone does decipher this, please let me know) ...mesmerized, you wish you could redo it.
TOM: Do you feel though, you got it down, because I thought it was a very, very good performance and I think a lot of people do? Don't you feel that you really did a pretty good job ?
JUDI: No. I have no idea. I have no conscious feeling about that. That's not what I feel. I just feel that I wish I had the chance to do some of it again.
JUDI: I always get a thrill out of acting in the theatre. Always.
JUDI: I'm getting to like it much more and to know more about it. And so I like it. There was a time when I didn't like it at all. I like it more now. Except when it's finished and I want to do it again, you see. In the theatre I can have another go.
Thanks to Mary Lynn Travers for alerting me to this presentation of Talking Movies, which appeared on BBC America on December 11, 2001.