Judi Dench may be the grand dame of British theatre, but recently her private life has been shattered by the loss of her soul-mate, Michael Williams. Sheridan Morley meets the actress working through her grief.
"Age is a funny thing," Dame Judi Dench once said to me. "Here am I, a dumpy old woman in her mid-sixties, and I still see myself as a willowy blonde of about 40."
Amazingly, Judi is now 66, although her urchin haircut and Peter Pan features have always made her seem oddly ageless. She is by no means the only Dame to have conquered Broadway and Hollywood from a Shaftesbury Avenue start, nor the only one to have Oscars and Tonys on her mantlepiece, but ever since Mrs Brown, Amy's View and Shakespeare in Love, Judi has subtly moved ahead of Maggie Smith, Diana Rigg, Joan Plowright and Vanessa Redgrave. In crude financial terms, she is now far and away the most bankable British actress of her generation. She is also one of the funniest, although only when she thinks no reporters are around will she tell you of an Edinburgh Festival spent almost entirely locked in the loo to avoid the romantic advances of Sir Ralph Richardson, or of a nervous usher (the actor Alec McCowen) opening what he assumed to be the bridal limousine on Judi's wedding day only to see Danny La Rue then walking down the aisle to the strains of Here Comes the Bride.
A HEAVY LOAD
Then again only when she thinks nobody else is listening will she tell you of taking on Mother Courage without having closely read the script: "No one told me I had to pull that f***ing cart round and round the Olivier stage, and for the first few rehearsal days I was livid at never having a scene off; but it was my own fault for not reading the bloody play properly in advance.
The best of times, the worst of times: professionally these last few months have seen Judi move ahead of almost all her contemporaries on stage and screen alike. While maintaining a classical theatrical career at the National and in the West End - to which she returns next month in The Royal Family, a long-lost l930s backstage satire on the Broadway Barrymores (John. Lionel and Ethel) - she has also been filming furiously. Projects include the latest James Bond (where, for the third time, she is the somewhat unlikely spymaster - or rather spymistress - M to Pierce Prosnan's 007, through The Importance of Being Earnest (Lady Bracknell opposite Colin Firth) and The Shipping News (co-starring with Kevin Spacey and Julianne Moore) . to playing the real-life novelist Iris Murdoch in her writer's late-onset Alzheimners - one of those "disability roles" that Hollywood always loves to reward come Oscar time. "What I like best is variety and risk and unsuitability," she asserts. "People in the theatre say 'go on, fall 3,000 feet and see how you feel'; that's the way to avoid and learn something new every time you start a new play or film."
But ever since Judi had briefly to abandon her award-winning run in David Hare's Amy's View, on Broadway a couple of years ago, to come home to the bedside of her beloved husband Michael Williams, who had been diagnosed with cancer, her cherished 30-year marriage and home life with their daughter Finty have been traumatic, culminating in Michael's death earlier this year.
A few weeks ago. on a bright-sky July day at the Actor's Church in Covent Garden, so many people gathered to say farewell to Michael at his memorial service that the vast courtyard was as crowded as the church itself. I have seen many actors memorialized there, some even more distinguished than Michael, but I have never seen so large a crowd. It's testament to the unique place he occupied in the hearts of so many. In a notably bitchy and envious profession, I never heard a word about Michael that wasn't loving in the extreme, and although Judi has now to rebuild her life, she has an extraordinan Quaker inner strength with which to do it.
PEGGED FOR SUCCESS
Judi hardly ever gives interviews, but talking to her after Michael's service I suddenly realised whom she now most resembles: the late Dame Peggy Ashcroft. Like Peggy, Judi started her stage life at RSC 40 years ago. Like Peggy, she often appears in films and sometimes television, but always retains a sense of theatrical separation: whatever the project, she dignifies it with an extraordinary kind of stillness and security. If she runs up against a poor script - and show me the actor who hasn't - she dignifies it with her presence: if she hits a good one, she soars with it.
And there is no doubt now that, with Finty also in the acting prnfession, both mother and daughter are using work as an escape from their private grief: again like Dame Peg -- as Ashcroft was always known -- Judi virtually never talks to the press. Her life is her work, and on that alone does she chooses to he judged.
JOKER OF THE PACK
Those of us who have been trying to interview her in print or on the air these last 30 years or so, have learnt as much as we are probably ever going to about the real Dench. We know, for instance, that she is a chronic on-stage giggler: that she goes in for elaborate backstage practical jokes; and that on being offered Cleopatra at the National a few years ago, her only response was to wonder vaguely whether the Queen of the Nile should really be played by, as she so delicately put it, 'a menopausal dwarf'.
When The Royal Family first opened here almost 70 years ago, Laurence Olivier and Edna Best were in the leads and the director was Noel Coward. Because the title was thought to be disrespectful to the monarchy, it was duly changed to Theatre Royal. Now presumably, the only confusion will be with television's The Royle Family but the fun will be to see the often minimalist Dench playing the role of a scenery-chewing theatrical matriarch.
FLOWERING PROJECT
As if she didnt have enough to do. Judi has also arranged, almost single-handedly for the replica of the 16th century Rose Theatre that was built for Shakespeare in Love to he moved in its entirety to a permanent home where it once stood four centuries ago, next to Shakespeare's Globe.
"All I really want now," she says, "is to make people angry or happy, make them think of something they have never thought of before."
Besides, as she once sang in the London premiere of Cabaret "what good is sitting alone in your room."