Judi Dench

Judith Olivia Dench was born on December 9th, 1934 in the Northern English city of York, the daughter of a local GP and his Dublin-born wife, and educated at The Mount School, a local Quaker establishment. It is perhaps Judi’s continuing involvement with the Society of Friends, with its emphasis on silent contemplation and personal faith that gives her acting something of its moral authority. She toyed initially with becoming a stage designer but she was eventually persuaded to follow an elder brother into acting. Graduating, laden with awards, from London’s Central School of Speech and Drama, Judi played the Virgin Mary in one of her native city’s world famous Mediaeval Mystery Plays and then joined the prestigious Old Vic Theatre Company in London to play Ophelia opposite the Hamlet of John Neville, one of the great matinee idols of the day. There was a tremendous amount of expectation invested in Judi’s London debut - what a later generation would call hype - and in the inevitable counter-reaction, some critics were not kind in their assessment of her performance. Indeed, in a cruel blow that would have disheartened and demoralized most young actors, Judi was deprived of Ophelia and the part was given to another performer for the Old Vic’s American tour. Yet, with characteristic resilience, Judi bounced back from this disappointment and her Juliet in a controversial production of the play by Italian stage and film director Franco Zeffirelli had the critics eating their earlier words.

In 1961, she was asked by Peter Hall to be one of the founding members of the Royal Shakespeare Company and The Cherry Orchard, the first of two productions of the Chekhov classic in The Judi Dench Collection, dates from this period. In support of Dame Peggy Ashcroft and Sir John Gielgud, Judi made a great impression and over the ensuing decades she would regularly work for the company, giving some of her greatest performances with the RSC. At the time of writing she has returned to the RSC’s base in Stratford-upon-Avon to star in a musical version of The Merry Wives of Windsor.

For the greater part of the next thirty years Judi Dench worked almost exclusively on stage - with such celebrated stock companies as the Oxford and Nottingham Playhouses, and for the National Theatre as well as the RSC. There were occasional excursions into the commercial theatre with West End runs as Sally Bowles in the first London production of Kander and Ebb’s Cabaret and in The Promise with Ian McShane and her frequent partner Ian McKellen. There was also a brief early film career in 1964/65 but none of her movies at this stage made much of an impact at the Box Office. She was told that she had "the wrong face" for the camera and so Judi did not really start to take films seriously until she was in middle age and accompanying her great friend Maggie Smith in Merchant Ivory’s A Room With A View.

With the theatre claiming the lion’s share of her attention, Judi had little time to spare for television during these years and The Judi Dench Collection captures these rare appearances. The 1966 series Talking To A Stranger, in which a family is examined in turn through the eyes of its four members, created an enormous stir at the time of its screening and its reputation has grown over the intervening years. Coincidentally Michael Bryant, who played Judi’s brother in Talking To A Stranger, would later appear with her on numerous occasions at the National Theatre, playing a memorable Enobarbus to Judi’s equally outstanding Cleopatra in Peter Hall’s 1987 production of the Shakespeare play.

It is a surely a tribute to Judi’s greatness as an actor that the world’s foremost stage and film directors queue up to work with her and then compete to repeat the experience. Stephen Frears directed Judi in Going Gently and twenty years later steered her to her latest Oscar nomination in Mrs. Henderson Presents. Sir Richard Eyre first met Judi at the Nottingham Playhouse in the 1960s and directed her Mme. Ranevsky in the second production of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard to be included in The Judi Dench Collection. They collaborated on Amy’s View, one of playwright David Hare’s most successful stage works that played to packed houses at the National Theatre, at London’s Aldwych Theatre and then on Broadway where it won Judi a Tony Award. They were together again for Iris and most recently joined forces for the film Notes on a Scandal.

Judi’s most important partnership, both professional and personal, was with her husband, the actor Michael Williams, whose death in January 2001 must have been a devastating blow. They had met as RSC actors and worked together on stage (Pack of Lies, Mr. and Mrs. Nobody) and on television, as in the film Can You Hear Me Thinking?, as parents coping with a disturbed son. On a lighter note, Are You Still Awake?, was one in a series of plays for BBC Radio Three, that starred a succession of actor husbands and wives.

Now in her early seventies, Dame Judi Dench is working harder than ever. On television, she has enjoyed renewed situation comedy success with the gently humorous As Time Goes By, joined by Geoffrey Palmer to play former sweethearts embarking on marriage in later life. A steely M since 1995, she has been attempting to control various 007s, most recently Daniel Craig in Casino Royale. She has made annual appearances in the West End of London in David Hare’s Breath of Life, in Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well and in Coward’s Hay Fever with predictable stampedes to the Box Office whenever her name was announced. In private she is still the same warm and witty woman with a taste for practical jokes and a deep, throaty chuckle. She was famously reduced to hysterical laughter while recording the production of Ibsen’s Ghosts that is included in The Judi Dench Collection and was banished from the studio in the company of her equally helpless co-star Kenneth Branagh. She’ll sit in rehearsals, busy with her embroidery or writing countless letters relating to the various charities she supports.