|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
A Widow of Opportunity |
|
In her latest Shakespearean role Judi Dench plays a tragic dowager. But in life she refuses to be bowed by bereavement - and bridles at those who suggest she should slow down by Matt Wolf Dame Judi Dench has a remarkable gift for ordinariness. She wears her anonymity like a kind of invisibility cloak as we walk down Clapham High Street, stopping off at a cashpoint, peering through shop windows. Scarcely anyone gives a second glance at this animated and diminutive white-haired figure bundled up against the winter cold. Then we arrive at the bistro where she likes to eat when working in south London. A quiet corner of the restaurant is opened up and dusted off for us. A reverential tremor seems to pass through the waiter, who takes her floor-length leather coat from her as if it were an ermine robe. And in a sense, he's quite right too. Since her Oscar-winning cameo as Elizabeth I in Shakespeare in Love, Dench has become royalty: indeed, last year, at the height of the Jubilee celebrations, she beat the Queen into second place in a poll to find the most respected and liked public figure in Britain. The Dame herself, fresh from rehearsals with the Royal Shakespeare Company, has her mind on lower things than the crown today. Next week, she opens in All's Well That Ends Well at Stratford-upon-Avon, 24 years after her last appearance on stage there. The role - the Countess of Roussillon, one of Shakespeare's great tragic dowagers - isn't big, but it is a personal milestone, and her name on the cast list is a coup for the RSC, which is in desperate need of stardust. Dench herself is distinctly nervous about returning to the town that witnessed some of her most celebrated early performances. "I'm dreading a lot of it. There isn't a footstep in the whole of Stratford that isn't associated with someone or something. It's got all these resonances." She pauses, her characteristic vocal husk suddenly sounding uncertain and plaintive: "It's good, though, isn't it, to face up to things?" The clincher, for Dench, was her daughter, Finty, who made a shameless appeal on behalf of the actress's only grandchild, Sammy, six. "I was in two minds and Finty said: 'You know you ought to do this, nearly all my childhood was in Stratford. And it was so happy and Sammy ought to know about that.' And so I want to do it." Sammy and Finty, it is clear, will be spending a lot of time in Stratford over the next couple of months. For 12 years, Dench and her late husband, the actor Michael Williams, lived six miles outside Stratford at a converted stables in the Warwickshire village of Charlecote. It wasn't a typical actors' menage, certainly not once the couple had invited Williams' parents and Dench's mother to move in, but it apparently worked beautifully as an experiment in communal living. "It was a very special time, and Fint remembers it terribly well, being brought up with three grandparents. Those were good times, it was absolutely wonderful and it kept them all pretty sparky." So how did it end? "My ma-in-law died first, and then my ma. Then Michael's brother and his wife moved in with my father-in-law, and then he wasn't well and was put into a home nearby. That's another story; I wish that had never happened. But it was expedient." For a moment Dench seems on the verge of tears, but she stops herself just in time. Michael's own death from lung cancer - almost three years ago - is clearly never far from her mind as we talk. Their marriage was a remarkably resilient partnership, on stage and off, and tales of Williams' weekly delivery to Dench of a single-stemmed red rose are still repeated with awe. Dench's reliance on Williams was both professional and personal: he would guide her through her choice of roles, often finding the one line in a script to persuade his wife, who was famous for never reading plays in advance, to take on a particular venture. "That's a facility," she notes ruefully, "that I've got to pick myself up to be able to do." The Countess of Roussillon is the archetypal elderly grieving widow - her refrain, says Dench, is: "I'm so old, I'm so old; I hope I'll see an heir afore I die" - but the actress, at the age of 68, is sensitive to charges of typecasting. The director, Greg Doran, touched a sore spot recently when Dench asked if she had to "act old" to play the part convincingly. He replied, with a little too much alacrity, "No, absolutely not," which an indignant Dench took to mean that he thought no acting was required for her to play an old lady. "I was so angry," she says, laughing as she tackles a plate of pate. Age is definitely on her mind. When I ask whether she might return to the Old Vic, the site of her first London stage appearance as Ophelia in 1957, to appear in the season currently being programmed by her friend, the Hollywood actor Kevin Spacey, Dench returns to the ageing theme: "I hope we do something, but I told Kevin: 'I won't under any circumstances play your mother or your grandmother.' "Her stance has hardened since she played his aunt in the film of The Shipping News, three years ago. Growing old is no advantage when you are portraying Shakespeare's women. If you have played a defining Juliet or Viola or even Lady Macbeth, as Dench has, you notice when the Bard no longer has much to offer an actress. "After this, it's the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet or Mistress Quickly," she says. "The Nurse! F--- that for a game of marbles! Peter Hall keeps saying I should do her. I say, 'Get off, Peter! Get off!' " Dench's most recent West End appearance - in The Breath of Life, David Hare's two-hander - was distinguished by a raging fury that was all the stronger for being underplayed. She was cast as a novelist, Frances Beale (she objected to Hare's initial name for the character, Angela), who visits the Isle of Wight to see her husband's former mistress, played by Maggie Smith. Since both actresses had suffered the death of their husbands not long before, the play cannot have been easy: Hare's landscape is everywhere concerned with loss. Dench has said before - and she reiterates it now - that The Breath of Life was the hardest thing she has ever done. Because of Michael? "Yes, of course. It's like nerves; it creates adrenaline, and I suppose you draw on all that, and indeed the Countess is virtually the same: her husband's just died." I tell her that I felt she captured the anger of Hare's betrayed wife very well. Hers was no sentimentalised approximation of grief, but the real thing. "Oh yes, people get much angrier and more outspoken as they get old, and if you let a wound fester, like Frances has, then it becomes explosive. Or you get very ill because you suppress it - and there's nothing so terrible as having to suppress a great anger or hurt in you. It actually does damage to the fabric of your body." Dench didn't go that far, but the role did take its toll. One night she slipped up on the words "When Martin left", saying instead, "When Martin died". She tells me about the time that she and Maggie Smith spent together in Scotland before The Breath of Life rehearsals began. "One day we went for a walk and we didn't speak at all. All I could think of was, perhaps I could fall down and break my leg or suddenly go into a deep faint or something to prevent us having to do this play. I'm never going to be able to learn it, ever." As it happened, the play ran to full houses at the Haymarket and there has been talk of a Broadway transfer. Dench, however, has flatly refused to take it to New York. "The part has no laughs." She likes laughs, Dame Judi. Which perhaps explains some of the films she has been working on recently - most alarmingly, the action film The Chronicles of Riddick, a sequel to Pitch Black with Vin Diesel, the American muscle man. They make an unlikely couple, this icon of machismo and Britain's most acclaimed theatrical dame, but Diesel, Dench insists, is "absolutely charming". And what of her run of Oscar-friendly Miramax films, overseen by the producer Harvey Weinstein: Mrs. Brown, Shakespeare In Love, Chocolat, Iris? "Oh, Harvey's gone off me," she laughs. "Perhaps he knows I've had his tattoo removed from my bum." Fans who want to see more of the Dench they know and love can look forward to her recently re-released performance in Harold Pinter's Langrishe Go Down, a film originally made in 1978 for the BBC, in which she can be seen cavorting naked with Jeremy Irons. Dench's face lights up. She revels in the abandonment required of her role as one of three dotty sisters living in Ireland: "No clothes, no clothes at all for me. My character used to go out into the meadow and take all her clothes off and run through the meadow at night." Then there was a wonderful scene where she puts cream on her nipples and she and Jeremy, playing this German boy, get into bed and he, of course, licks the cream off. "We did it in the afternoon, and when we came out for tea, the caterers had done an enormous pile of meringues and cream. It was very funny." Funnier still, one imagines, for an audience whose image of her has been shaped entirely by her portrayal of, say, Iris Murdoch in the later stages of Alzheimer's. Dench is quick to correct any idea that she sees herself as a big deal, though of course she is. And she's generous to the next generation, offering words of praise for Helena Bonham Carter ("Hasn't she matured? Come into herself, in a way?"), Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, even if she can't quite believe that Affleck reportedly gets pounds 12.5 million a film. "I mean, sorry? I'm not saying anything about Ben, who I think is a jolly good actor, but if people are going to demand that amount of money, then the whole thing is cockeyed." Not that she's immune to the strange power exerted by Hollywood royalty. She tells of one year at the Oscars, when she left the stage after presenting an award and brushed by Jack Nicholson, who said (here Dench drops her voice in mimicry): " 'Good job, Jude.' And I thought, well I don't care what happens to me now." So what does happen to her now? There's the family, of course: even without Williams, there's always the family. They all live in a comfortable house in Surrey, 90 minutes' drive from London. Dench does the roll call: "Five cats, a doggie, Finty, and Sammy - not in that billing, of course - and lots of ducks and coots." She is a devoted grandmother, no question about it: indeed, she is about to take Finty and Sam to We Will Rock You, the musical, and is fussing about the right rock-music clothes. "What should I wear? A dog collar?" So much for the immediate future, but what about the long term? "People say to me all the time, 'Why don't you stop? Why don't you slow down?' Dench throws the question back. "Why should I? Why? Perhaps they're people who don't do what they like, as if their job is some drudge. Somebody got quite irritated with me and said, 'Why on earth aren't you taking it easy?' " She pauses, and then smiles, turning the question in her head. "Why? Then I'd turn into that old person that Gregory Doran already thinks I am." All's Well That Ends Well runs from Wednesday (December 3rd) at the Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon
A Special Thanks to
Rhian, UK, for sending this to me
Empire
Online Related Article
"Oh Harvey's gone off me," she tells the Sunday Telegraph when asked why her string of Miramax roles seem to have dried up. "Perhaps he knows I've had his tattoo removed from my bum." See what we mean? Currently returning to the Stratford stage after a 24-year hiatus, Dench will play The Bard's iconic dowager, The Countess of Roussillon in All's Well That Ends Well - one of the few appealing Shakespearean characters remaining for an actress of Dench's age. "After this, it's the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet or Mistress Quickly. The Nurse! Fuck that for a game of marbles!" She's similarly unwilling to submit to ageist casting from friend and Shipping News co-star Kevin Spacey, who is currently serving as Artistic Director at the Old Vic - where Dench made her stage debut in 1957. "I hope we do something, but I told Kevin: 'I won't under any circumstances play your mother or your grandmother.'" The 68-year-old actress is (quite bizarrely) next appearing in sci-fi sequel, The Chronicles of Riddick alongside Vin Diesel, whom she describes as "absolutely charming". Dench will play an ethereal being called Aeron - a far cry from the stern, matronly roles she often finds herself cast in. But one effect laden sci-fi film doesn't mean Dench's feet aren't still firmly planted on the ground - talking about Ben Affleck's salary of £12.5 million per picture, the actress can barely conceal her disgust. "I mean, sorry? I'm not saying anything about Ben, who I think is a jolly good actor, but if people are going to demand that amount of money, then the whole thing is cockeyed."
|
|
|
There
can't be a man, woman or child alive who
isn't a Judi Dench fan. Of all the actors working today, no other star
attracts the level of almost regal regard she carries in British acting
circles. Accomplished thespian, Oscar-Winner and national treasure, an
interview in this weekend's Sunday papers reveals that Dame Judi Dench
also has a rather wicked sense of humour.