Dame Judi Dench honoured in Japan's Nobel awards
Actor wins £155,000 Praemium Imperiale, sponsored by Japan's imperial family, as Anish Kapoor takes sculpture prize
Dame Judi Dench and Anish Kapoor at the Praemium Imperiale awards in honour of Japan's Prince Takamatsu at Claridge's hotel on Monday. Photograph: Felix Kunze/Getty Images
Winning Japan's equivalent of the Nobel prize, the £155,000 Praemium Imperiale, has come as a great relief to Dame Judi Dench: one of the world's best-known and loved actors is out of work again and panicking.
The fear never goes away, she said after receiving the award honouring actors, artists, musicians and architects by the Japan Art Association, sponsored by the Japanese imperial family. "Trevor Nunn always said I was in floods of tears on all my first nights because I didn't know where the next job was coming from," Dench said. "I've been bumming around. I haven't worked since February, so this is very nice."Since her professional debut, as Ophelia in 1957, Dench has seldom been out of work. Her career has been weighed down with awards including an Oscar, Tonys, Oliviers and Baftas for innumerable stage and screen roles, notably for the films Mrs Brown and Shakespeare In Love.
She is not likely to be bumming around for long this time. She returned to Britain in February from filming with Clint Eastwood, and in November starts again as M in the new James Bond movie. The film is shrouded in secrecy. "I can't say anything, I really can't," she said, before revealing the script was recently delivered to her London home by a man dressed all in black. "It was quite extraordinary. We were all standing around on the grass – there had been a family funeral – and this man all in black raced up the path, pushed something through the door, and ran away again, and it was the script."
She also revealed that the Oscar she won for her ferocious Elizabeth I, in the 1998 film Shakespeare in Love, has a slightly dodgy legal status. She was heading off, inevitably, to another job and gave it to her late husband Michael and daughter Finty to bring home to London. Later she was horrified to learn she should have returned the ceremonial Oscar to be replaced with one with her name. The following year the Oscars were stolen before the 72nd ceremony, and when they were eventually recovered dumped behind a launderette, just a week before the event, three were missing. One, she admits guiltily, was already missing. Never returned, or publicly admitted before today, it still has pride of place among the awards in her study.
The sculpture prize went to another UK-based artist, Anish Kapoor, and the prize for young artists was divided for the first time between two UK organisations – £18,000 each will go to the Royal Court's young writers' programme and the Southbank Sinfonia, which provides a bridge for young musicians between music school and a professional career.
Previous UK winners of the awards established in 1989 have included the architects Zaha Hadid, Richard Rogers, Norman Foster and James Stirling, artists David Hockney and Bridget Riley, composer Andrew Lloyd Webber, and playwright Tom Stoppard.
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