Hush, hush, whisper who dares, Dame Judi Dench has reached 90 years!
Hush, hush, whisper who dares, Dame Judi Dench has reached 90 years!
Yes, our greatest living actress turns 90 on 9th December, but she does not want us banging on about it, thank you very much.
I know. I am doing a couple of shows in the West End with her in the run-up to Christmas. We are celebrating her extraordinary career on stage and screen, but in the advance publicity material she insisted on all references to her milestone birthday being deleted.
The only upside to the deeply frustrating age-related macular degeneration that has beset her in recent years is that if I manage to sneak a birthday cake onto the stage, she may not notice it.
A couple of years ago, when we were doing an earlier version of our show and I brought on Sir Trevor Nunn as a surprise guest, he was dressed in his trademark black and the audience recognised him instantly – but Judi didn’t.
‘Who is it?’ she hissed to me.
I did my best to call out his name over the applause.
‘A nun?’ she cried. ‘A nun! How wonderful!’
Judi Dench is a powerhouse of positivity. She always has been. When she was a little girl, she went to see her eldest brother, Peter, in a school production of Macbeth.
As Judi tells the story, ‘Peter played Duncan, so his first line was “What bloody man is that?”
‘And I thought, “This is for me! Not only Shakespeare but swearing!”’
She has always had a naughty streak. In October, we took our show to York, her home city, where her father was a GP and where Judi went to the Mount School.
Before the performance, she went back to revisit her old home and old school. It was a trip down memory lane that brought tears to her eyes. And prompted laughter, too.
She told me about the wet runs at school and how she and a friend would set out on the run, find a phone box and call Judi’s mum – who would come in the car to collect them and take them home for tea, before returning them to a spot near the Birthday girl: Judi Dench run’s finishing line, where Mrs Dench would dowse the girls in water from a watering can.
Today, in the sitting room of her home in Sussex, Dame Judi keeps her father’s desk and swivel chair from his surgery.
Her family is everything to her. Sundry cousins turned up to see our show in York and a raft of Irish relations (from her mother’s side) appeared when we were in Dublin in the summer. Her ever-generous, unfailingly outgoing approach to life stems, I’m sure, from what she describes as ‘a completely happy childhood’.
That, and her lifelong Quaker faith.
She is grateful for her film career – tells funny stories of Billy Connolly and the flatulent horse she rode when they were playing John Brown and Queen Victoria together in Mrs Brown; swoons at the mere mention of Johnny Depp; marvels at her success as M in eight James Bond films – but theatre is her first love.
‘With a film performance,’ she says, ‘you can’t change it once it’s done. On stage, you can always hope to do something different and better the next night.’
Kenneth Branagh is one of her favourite directors, on stage or screen.
I was once sitting in her garden with her, when someone came out of the house to say that Branagh was on the line and wanted to have a word with her. She looked up and said, ‘Tell him I’ll do it – whatever it is.’
And she did. She took on the project, sight (and script) unseen. ‘I trust him.’
Well done, Ken, who once said, ‘My definition of success is control.’
He and Judi are very different creatures. She has often said, ‘An actor with no insecurities would be lost.’
Standing in the wings with her, I marvel at how anxious, self-critical and nervous she is before going on. After all, she is the most garlanded and honoured actress on the planet. Once she’s on, of course, everything changes. Her control is complete. Her timing is matchless.
The palpable emotional engagement she has with her audience is what puts her up there with the likes of Sarah Siddons and Ellen Terry from the 18th and 19th centuries and the greats from her younger days, the formidable Edith Evans and Judi’s mentor, Peggy Ashcroft.
Judi does a fine vocal impression of Edith Evans. She appeared with her in Henry VIII with the Old Vic Company, back in 1958. Judi was simply an attendant gentlewoman. Dame Edith was Queen Katherine and, on tour in Paris one night, she fell back off her chair and lay like an upturned tortoise blinded by the stage lights above her.
‘Fermez la lumière!’ she cried with all the force of Lady Bracknell. Dame Judi does Dame Edith to perfection.
The truth is, Dame Judi does it all to perfection. As she approached her ninetieth, Dame Edith said, ‘I may never have been pretty, but I was jolly larky and that’s what counts in the theatre.’ Judi Dench is jolly larky and beautiful, too.
She speaks Shakespeare with an instinctive understanding that is unrivalled. She is funny, feisty, fabulous. I’ll be dammed: happy birthday, Jude!
Gyles interviews Judi Dench on his Rosebud podcast and at the Sondheim Theatre on 1st and 15th December
