Dame Judi Dench and director Sam Mendes (right) on the set of the James Bond film Skyfall.
Published on Friday 15 February 2013 09:53
She’s a dame, an Oscar winner, she’s one of our truly great actors and has achieved the status of National Treasure. Film critic Tony Earnshaw talks to Yorkshire’s own Judi Dench.
It would be wrong to assume that Judi Dench, dame of the theatre, film industry darling and – cough, cough – national treasure, treats movies as secondary to theatre or that she sees them in some way as a lesser form of the day job.
She takes the work seriously. Herself she takes far less seriously. This despite the seven Olivier awards (a record), 11 BAFTAs, two Golden Globes, a Tony and an Oscar, the latter for playing one of her many single-minded monarchs.
And she can still be taken by surprise. When the phone rang at her home in Surrey and the voice on the other end of the line announced it was Clint Eastwood, she thought it was a mischievous pal pulling her leg.
The call was genuine, the offer to play J Edgar Hoover’s mother very real. That was how Cleopatra came to be working with Dirty Harry. Even now Dench pinches herself, recalling the experience of acting for Eastwood as “a bit terrifying”. She has admitted to being star-struck.
She is refreshingly free of ego, as most truly great people are. And at 78 refreshingly free of any hang-ups about retirement. She’ll work ’til she drops – in movies, on TV or on the stage.
Thus it was that in the same year as she made her seventh appearance as ‘M’ in a James Bond film she popped up as a bag lady in arch farceur Ray Cooney’s film of his own ’80s hit Run for Your Wife.
Judi Dench likes to work. And it matters not to her if the role is a meaty one in the world’s longest-running iconic franchise or a cameo amongst 150 others in an old-fashioned comedy with an old friend at the helm.
READ MORE: http://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/lifestyle/the-arts/cinema/dame-judi-dench-why-the-sky-won-t-fall-in-on-a-living-legend-1-5412834
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