AS the stage and screen star nears her 80th birthday Henry Fitzherbert & David Stephenson reflect on her brilliant career.
Ask Dame Judi Dench when she is going to retire at your peril. "It drives me absolutely spare when people say: 'Are you going to retire?' or 'Don't you think it's time you put your feet up?'," she said last month when promoting her Christmas TV drama, Esio Trot, in which she stars with Dustin Hoffman.
Just shy of her 80th birthday (her big day is this Tuesday), the great star of stage and screen shows no sign of slowing down. Earlier this year she received her seventh Oscar nomination for Philomena (remarkable when you consider her movie career took off only with 1997's Mrs Brown) and she is soon to appear in sequel The Second Best Marigold Hotel, reprising her role alongside Bill Nighy and Maggie Smith as a widower who experiences a new lease of life in India.
Like the first Marigold, it is sure to do blockbuster business: proof that Dench is just about our most bankable box office asset (apart from James Bond and she certainly did her bit there with her tenure as M from GoldenEye in 1995 to the billion-dollar grossing Skyfall).
Ask what keeps her going and she talks of a compulsive need to perform: "I just feel I have to keep doing it," she said. "I never want to stop. I need to learn every day."
She has taken time off only twice in her career: when she gave birth to daughter Finty in 1972, aged 37, and while nursing her husband Michael Williams who died from lung cancer in 2001. A fellow classical actor, he and Dench met in a pub in Covent Garden and were firm friends long before they married. "If we hadn't married he would still have been my best friend," she said.
She coped with his death the only way she knew how: throwing herself into work. "It came to my rescue," she said. "I went to Nova Scotia almost immediately after Michael's funeral and made The Shipping News with Kevin Spacey. And then I came back and the day after started Iris. And then I was into Pride & Prejudice. Friends kept saying: 'You are not facing up to it', but I felt I was; in the acting. Grief supplies you with an enormous amount of energy. I needed to use that up."
She credits legendary mogul Harvey Weinstein for the fact that she had a film career after years of work on the stage and small screen.
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Raised in York and brought up a strict Quaker by her drama-loving parents ("faith is essential to my life and work"), she landed her first acting job at London's Old Vic where she worked from 1957 to 1961 before joining the Royal Shakespeare Company. Initially she wanted to be a set designer. Then "I went to see a production of King Lear with Michael Redgrave at Stratford and I was so bowled over that, in my memory, my wish to act was an overnight thing."
Despite her illustrious stage career (she has won seven Olivier awards) in the likes of Romeo And Juliet for Franco Zeffirelli in 1960, Cabaret in 1968 and as Lady Macbeth for Trevor Nunn in 1976, she shied away from the movies.
Blame the man who told her charmingly at her first screen test: "You have every single thing wrong with your face."
Mrs Brown, in which she played Queen Victoria, earning her first Oscar nomination, was originally made for TV. Weinstein believed it had cinema potential and acquired the rights for a song, releasing it to great acclaim. "It is thanks to him that I've got a film career," said Dench.
Of the seven films for which she has been Oscar-nominated, six have been distributed by Weinstein.
This includes Shakespeare In Love which won her Best Supporting Actress in 1998 for a mere eight minutes of screen time as a waspish and witty Elizabeth I. Only a fool would discount a second Oscar. Not even the eye condition macular degeneration will slow her down. Earlier this year she said retire was "the rudest word in my dictionary". She added for good measure: "And 'old' is another one."
Her undoubted film success has not stopped her from "slumming" it on television either, though she would never consider it that.
She had a memorable sitcom success with As Time Goes By, with her long-time friend, Geoffrey Palmer. Most, however, will recall her turn in Cranford, as one of the more nuanced period performances we have seen on television.
SHE HAS set the bar very high indeed but remains extremely modest, almost embarrassingly so, about her achievements. Nearing 80, says Dench, is "merely a number".
She adds: "It is something that is imposed on you. The only time I got upset, for some reason, was when I was 40. After that, it's that old time that everyone says: 'You're as old as you feel'."
She has also found love again, dating younger divorcee David Mills since 2010, but has no plans to remarry, saying: "We are much too independent. But he is so lovely, with a great sense of humour. Now it's wonderful because there's somebody who makes me laugh."
Esio Trot will be shown on BBC One at 6.30 pm, New Year's Day
