Telegraph Magazine
Do Not Go Gentle
Interview -- February 3, 2007
Last Updated:  February 04, 2007

National treasurehood has done nothing to dull Judi Dench's edge. Chloe Fox finds her still firing on all cylinders

Dame Judi Dench and I are standing in the car-park of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon. 'I bet you can't guess which car is mine,' she says, a mischievous twinkle in her eye. There are only three to choose from: a dirty white transit van, a bog-standard burgundy Ford and a silver convertible BMW sports car.

I am thrown into a blind panic – how do you tell a 72-year-old national treasure that you suspect she might be Mondeo Woman? Thankfully I am spared having to answer. Just as I have opened my mouth, the locks of the sports car pip-pip and flash and the woman who is arguably our greatest living actress is beaming at me proudly. 'Well, don't look so surprised,' she chides, despite being obviously delighted that I do.

Dench loves everything about the car that she bought herself as a 70th birthday present. She loves how fast it is; she loves that she can drive to work with the roof down on sunny days and with heated seats on cold ones; she loves that she can play her Bond greatest hits CD at full volume and make the pensioners stare.

She loves it so much, in fact, that she insists – absolutely insists – on driving me to the station. 'What larks, Pip!' she shrieks as she turns the key in the ignition. She has absolutely 'not the faintest idea' where the station is but it doesn't seem to matter. 'It means you'll enjoy the heated seats for longer,' she says happily, before yelling at the traffic jam we are snarled up in. 'Oh, do get a move on, you absolute arses,' she shouts, making herself laugh like a gurgling drain.

For the past two months, Dench has been living and working in Stratford, playing Mistress Quickly in Gregory Doran's musical version of The Merry Wives of Windsor. The last time she was here was in 2004, when her Countess of Rossillion in All's Well That Ends Well was described by the critic Charles Spencer in The Daily Telegraph as 'some of the greatest Shakespearean acting I have ever witnessed'. It was a triumphant return to a theatre company that she had joined in 1961 at the age of 27, and spent the better part of the following two decades working with. 'Every single corner of this town has an association for me,' she sighs, looking out of her rain-spattered window.

Earlier in the day, I met Dench at the stage door of the theatre – a gloomy redbrick building that will be closed in March for redevelopment. Despite her diminutive stature – she is only 5ft 2in – she is an instantly powerful presence. With her straight-backed poise, close-cropped hair and heart-shaped face, she seems younger than her years, although it is those years that have endowed her with the kind of imperious beauty that she perhaps once lacked. That, combined with her distinctive rasping voice – at once full of laughter and loss – makes you feel as if you are in the presence of grandeur.

After a career spanning exactly half a century (she landed her first role – Ophelia in John Neville's Old Vic production of Hamlet – fresh out of drama school, aged 23 in 1957), Dench, who grew up wanting to be a set designer, has become much more than an actress. She has become an institution. In 2002, the Golden Jubilee year, the Queen only narrowly beat Dench to the number-one slot in an opinion poll for Britain's best-loved person.

The previous year, the families of the Britons who had lost their lives in the Twin Towers chose her to read at the Westminster Abbey memorial service held in their honour. 'I think that in a lot of people's eyes she is the equivalent of the Queen,' says John Madden, who directed her in two fittingly regal roles – as Queen Victoria in Mrs Brown and Elizabeth I in Shakespeare in Love.

It is rather ironic that many miles away from a rather rainy Stratford another acting dame, Helen Mirren, has just picked up two best actress Golden Globes in the California sunshine for her portrayal of Elizabeth I in a Channel 4 series of the same name and Elizabeth II in Stephen Frears's The Queen. In the latter category, Mirren saw off some fierce competition, not least from Dench herself, whose chilling performance in Richard Eyre's film of the Zoë Heller novel Notes on a Scandal might be her best to date.

As she is standing at the counter of the theatre's green room (she is determined to go up and buy me a cup of tea, despite an agonisingly painful knee – 'bone rubbing on bone,' she winces), the news of Mirren's success comes over the radio. From her total lack of a reaction, I presume that Dench must know already. Or perhaps she genuinely doesn't care. 'Oh, I couldn't give two hoots,' she says, wide-eyed with surprise that I have even brought it up. 'I'm thrilled for Helen, of course. I haven't seen the film but I've seen pictures of her in costume and I mean, well, it's just uncanny, isn't it? I honestly couldn't tell if it was her or the Queen herself.'

Dench is no stranger to awards. As a stage actress, she has 15 of them (not to mention several lifetime achievement awards, a DBE and the Companion of Honour for 'outstanding contribution to the arts' – she is the only actress in history to have been awarded the latter). Even more remarkable is her film record. Before she made Mrs Brown in 1997, Dench had worked on only a handful of films, put off by having been told at an impressionably young age that she didn't have 'a movie face'.

Originally intended as a television film, Mrs Brown was given a cinema release when it was bought for distribution by the producer Harvey Weinstein, who realised its potential. ('There are two words to describe Judi Dench – sheer class,' Weinstein says.) In 1998 the film's 64-year-old star was nominated for an Oscar. She lost out to Kim Basinger but was back again the following year for her portrayal of Elizabeth I. Despite being on screen for a mere eight minutes, Dench won the Oscar for best supporting actress.

She has since been nominated a further four times – best supporting actress for Chocolat in 2001, best actress for Iris in 2002, for Mrs Henderson Presents last year and, as long predicted, for Notes on a Scandal. How does she feel about the prospect of doing it all over again this year? She deftly avoids the question, choosing instead (a habit, I soon realise) to tell a self-deprecating story about last year's ceremony.

'We got locked out, Finty [her daughter] and I,' she says, a flicker of amusement on her face. 'The only other person with us was Morgan Freeman so we were totally happy. After the first break, they let us in. They showed Morgan Freeman to our seats and asked us to go and stand at the back.' She looks directly at me with an impish smile. 'Something fun like that always happens.'

Dench values fun above almost everything else in life. 'I'm deadly serious about what I do,' she says. 'But unless I have a great many laughs and jokes along the way, there's no point at all.' At times during the filming of Notes on a Scandal, she admits, it was hard to see the funny side. 'The most amusement I got was from the sheer hideousness of my costumes,' she says.

The film tells the story of Barbara Covett, an ageing spinster teacher of questionable sexuality whose best friends are her cat and her diary. When a beautiful young art teacher, Sheba Hart (played by Cate Blanchett), arrives at her school and begins to befriend her, Barbara's prickly disdain soon gives way to out-and-out adoration. When she spies on Sheba in a compromising position with an underage student, Barbara's 'friendship' begins to take on a more sinister dimension.

Dench's performance is characteristically layered; her Barbara is as amusing as she is ominous, desperate as she is demonic. You loathe her, and yet you can't wait to see the next trick she has up her starched sleeve. 'She completely inhabits the role,' one critic wrote in the Los Angeles Times. 'She rises ferociously to the occasion with her juiciest, most substantial performance to date,' was Variety's opinion.

When I congratulate her on her reviews, Dench seems curiously disinterested. 'I haven't read a single one,' she says matter-of-factly. That she has even watched the film is, it turns out, a kind of miracle – she admits she hasn't even seen two of the films for which she received nominations.

At times during filming, Dench would withdraw into her shell. 'I don't think she particularly enjoyed spending time with Barbara, but then who would?' says Richard Eyre, who also directed Dench in Iris, as well as a number of stage productions. 'I was very glad to be rid of her,' concurs Dench, who diverted herself between takes by placing bets on horse races. 'People often ask me if I like her, but it never occurs me to like or dislike a character that I'm playing. My job is to layer them in such a way that is going to be believable. And that, of course, is the hard part; trying to work out why a person behaves in the way that they behave.

'I think Barbara needs to find something to do with all that passion. No, actually, no, it's not passion. Or even affection. It's a kind of energy that she needs somehow to use up.'

In this, Dench found a common humanity between herself and her character. 'I have a great deal of energy,' she says. 'I always have to be busy, always have to be doing something. I can't bear the thought of being bored, or wasting a minute. I suppose some would call it anxiety.' Even sitting at a table, Dench is rarely still; she fiddles compulsively – with her keys, her handbag, the ruffles on the neckline of her cream woollen cardigan – and her gaze darts constantly around the room. Her conversation skips all over the place, never far from a joke and always with a deft avoidance of the intimate.

There is an essential mischievousness about her; the naughtier the story she tells you, the more she throws her head back and laughs joyfully ('She has the laugh of a docker, or a blacksmith,' Billy Connolly, her Mrs Brown co-star, says). But she is equally capable, in an instant, of heartfelt seriousness and compassion. Talk of swans (there are several bobbing down the river outside the theatre) quickly turns to a joke – 'We used to have a swan called Jonas, whose wife died. I can assure you he got a new bird very quickly' – which turns to matters of the heart. 'It seems that they don't mate for life, after all,' she says, looking fleetingly sad.

Six years ago, Michael Williams, Dench's husband of 30 years, died of lung cancer. 'Mike had been her North, South, East and West,' Richard Eyre wrote in Darling Judi, a book of essays published to celebrate her 70th birthday. 'Grief can make you cruel; but with Judi it made her determined, producing a ferocious energy.' When she lost the man she described as her 'anchor' (and who she talks of constantly and in the present tense), Dench threw herself headlong into her work.

A highly respected actor in his own right (they met when company members at the RSC), Williams – who sent her a red rose every Friday of their marriage – suffered the hardship of playing second fiddle to his wife's brilliance. Or, as Geoffrey Palmer, her co-star in the BBC sitcom As Time Goes By, puts it, 'He sat at home feeding the bloody swans while she did three jobs a day.'

'It's hard to live with another actor who is so publicly recognised,' Dench once said. It can't be a coincidence that her professional second wind – as a star of the big screen – has gathered a noticeable momentum after his death. 'Since he died, more of me goes to work,' she says.

Dench is the first person to admit that she 'hates, loathes, can't bear' to be alone. Even at home, it seems: she and Michael, two years after Finty was born in 1972, moved both of his elderly parents and Dench's mother into the family home in Charlecote, a few miles from Stratford. 'It was wonderful and terrible,' Dench remembers. 'We had some huge rows but my God it kept everybody going. There was such great spirit.' Today, Dench has recreated the same communal spirit at her home in Surrey, where Finty and her son Sammy, who goes to school nearby, live during the week.

She is famously social and a loving, attentive friend who rarely forgets a birthday (she carries a stash of cards around with her in her handbag, just in case). Is it really true, I wonder, that she doles out about 450 Christmas presents a year? 'That's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard,' she laughs, before admitting that Ian McKellen, with whom she has acted with on a number of occasions (most famously in Trevor Nunn's critically acclaimed RSC production of Macbeth in 1976), recently declared that he wouldn't work with her after July 'because I spend most of my time wrapping parcels on my dressing-room floor'.

It is when she is working in a company of actors that Dench is in her element. She is the axis around which a production turns. Her dressing-room door is always open to everyone in the cast – 'she is a wonderfully, warm, sexy democrat,' Bill Nighy says – and gales of laughter can usually be heard coming from within. So aware was the playwright Ned Sherrin of her need for a theatrical 'family' that he wrote extra parts into his 1986 play Mr and Mrs Nobody. A 'player' in the old-fashioned theatrical sense of the word, the modern usage can also be applied to Dench, who loves a practical joke.

While starring in Cabaret in 1968, she posted a notice outside the Oxford Playhouse that read, 'Judi Dench is not ill, she just talks like this'; in 1997, on the eve of the opening of David Hare's play Amy's View, she embroidered a cushion for the critically sensitive playwright with the words, 'F*** 'em, f*** 'em, f*** 'em'. McKellen (with whom Dench sneaked off to sit on the royal thrones when they went to Buckingham Palace) remembers one particular matinee during Macbeth.

'She organised a private game for the company and distributed small red dots which we were each to wear, wherever we wished, during the performance. Mine was on the pommel of my sword, Ian McDiarmid had his on the end of his nose. Judi sported hers as an earring.'

McKellen believes Dench 'discovered comedy as a defence against disparagement'. 'Beneath the gaiety and panache,' he says, 'there is always melancholy in waiting.' This can perhaps be traced back through her genes to her parents. Her father, Reginald, was a garrulous GP while her Irish mother, Olave, had the potential to be fierce. Those who know their beloved only daughter (Dench has an older brother, Peter, a doctor, and a younger, Jeffrey, an actor) say that, as well as their passion for theatre, she inherited her father's warmth and her mother's volatility in equal measure.

'I think you use your emotions and push them to the outer limits,' Dench once said of acting. This goes some way towards explaining her versatility as an actress; not far beneath Dench's elegant, composed exterior, a passion burns. 'You have to see Judi's back garden to understand her,' the director Franco Zeffirelli once said of her picture-perfect Surrey home, with a meadow growing behind it. 'You discover treasures there that you don't see at the front of the house.'

Essentially a private person, Dench finds it very difficult to talk about the emotions she seems to project so easily on screen. Even a mention of her marriage – 'often Mikey and I would say, "Gosh, we're so lucky" ' – prompts a palpable rush of emotion that forces her to look away.

Three years before Michael died, Dench discovered during the London run of Amy's View that Finty was eight and a half months pregnant (she hadn't told her parents for fear that Williams, a staunch Catholic, would disapprove of the child's illegitimacy). She needn't have worried; the minute he was born Sammy Williams was the light of his grandparents' life. Dench talks constantly about the little boy – just like his grandfather, with a shock of red hair. 'He's so like Mikey it's not true,' she says. 'He looks like him, walks like him, he even points his finger just like him.'

Finty has experienced her own hardships. An actress herself, life in her mother's shadow hasn't always been easy for her either, and she has fought a public battle with depression and alcoholism. Any hardships Dench has encountered (when the family home in Hampstead burnt down in the 1990s, she lost all her most valued possessions; a personal letter of condolence from the Queen was probably small compensation) have been put to good use in the work that just seems to get better and better.

There is a fearlessness about what Dench does that springs from an inner indestructibility. If anything, life's difficulties seem to stoke the fire. She still doesn't read the parts offered to her until she has accepted them. 'It's like being on a huge diving-board and not looking down to see what I've got to dive into until I'm bouncing at the end,' she explains. 'There's something in me that needs that fear.'

It is this same tenacity that makes Dench rail in the face of retirement. The thought of not acting is, she says, 'too grim to contemplate'. In this sense, the film career that fills her with anxiety – 'I'm not at all sure of myself when I'm making a film; it's a completely new thing for me' – has been a godsend. It has energised her in a way that she will always be grateful for. She is particularly glad she agreed to play M in the Bond films ('such huge fun') but her heart will always be on the stage: 'I'm happiest when I'm wooing an audience.'

Dench has been having trouble with her knee for the past few years. When The Merry Wives of Windsor closes she is going to have an operation and will need several weeks to recover. 'I hope I'm going to be like a spring chicken,' she says defiantly. 'I said to Finty the other day, "Am I ever going to be able to run across a lawn again?" I hope so. I do hope so.' For a moment, Dench looks away. 'Was it Dylan Thomas who said, "Rage, rage against the dying of the light?" Because he was absolutely spot on.'