Judi Dench
Dame Judith Olivia Dench is a retired English actress. Widely considered one of Britain's greatest actresses, she is noted for her versatile roles on stage and screen. Dench has garnered various accolades throughout a career that spans seven decades, including an Academy Award, a Tony Award, two Golden Globe Awards, four British Academy Television Awards, six British Academy Film Awards, and seven Olivier Awards.
Dench made her professional debut in 1957 with the Old Vic Company. During the following few years, she performed in several of Shakespeare's plays, in such roles as Ophelia in Hamlet, Juliet in Romeo and Juliet and Lady Macbeth in Macbeth. Although most of Dench's work during this period was in theatre, she also branched out into film work and won a BAFTA Award as Most Promising Newcomer. In 1968, she drew excellent reviews for her leading role of Sally Bowles in the musical Cabaret. Over the next two decades, Dench established herself as one of the most significant British theatre performers, working for the National Theatre Company and the Royal Shakespeare Company.
Dench received critical acclaim for her work on television during this period, including her starring roles in the two romantic comedy series A Fine Romance and As Time Goes By. Her film appearances were infrequent – though included supporting roles in major films, such as James Ivory's A Room with a View – before she rose to international fame as M in GoldenEye, a role she went on to play in eight James Bond films until her final cameo appearance in Spectre.
An eight-time Academy Award nominee, Dench won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance as Queen Elizabeth I in Shakespeare in Love. Her other Oscar-nominated roles are for Mrs Brown, Chocolat, Iris, Mrs Henderson Presents, Notes on a Scandal, Philomena, and Belfast. She is also the recipient of several honorary awards, including the BAFTA Fellowship Award, the Society of London Theatre Special Award, and the British Film Institute Fellowship Award.
Early life, ancestry and education
Dench was born in the Heworth area of York on 9 December 1934, the daughter of an English father and an Irish mother. Her father, Reginald Arthur Dench MC & Bar, was a doctor from Dorset who grew up primarily in Dublin and who fought on the Western Front in the First World War. Her mother, Eleanora Olave , was born in Dublin, and her parents met while studying at Trinity College Dublin.Reginald practiced medicine in York, serving local needs during the war years. Eleanora contributed as wardrobe mistress at the York Theatre Royal, hosting actors at home amid rationing—Dench later recalled taking in 17 cats from owners unable to feed pets. No records show military involvement for either parent in WWII.
In October 2021, Dench was the subject of BBC One's Who Do You Think You Are?, where it was revealed that she is descended from the Bille family of Danish aristocrats, and Steen Andersen Bille, the illegitimate son of , as well as Claus Bille, a grandfather of Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, member of the Danish noble Brahe family. She is a cousin of Greek-Australian actors Rebekah Elmaloglou and Sebastian Elmaloglou. Her niece, Emma Dench, is a historian of ancient Rome.
Dench attended the Mount School, a Quaker independent secondary school in York, and became a Quaker. She had two elder brothers named Peter Dench and Jeffery, the latter of whom also became an actor.
Through her parents, Dench had regular contact with the theatre: her father was the GP for York Theatre Royal, and her mother was its wardrobe mistress. Actors often stayed in the Dench household. During these years, Judi Dench was involved on a non-professional basis in the first three productions of the modern revival of the York Mystery Plays in 1951, 1954 and 1957. In the third production she played the role of the Virgin Mary, performed on a fixed stage in the Museum Gardens.
Though she initially trained as a set designer, Dench became interested in drama school as her brother Jeff attended the Central School of Speech and Drama. She was also inspired by seeing Peggy Ashcroft play Cleopatra on stage, which she later said "changed my life". She applied and was accepted by the Central School, then based at the Royal Albert Hall, London, where she was a classmate of Vanessa Redgrave, graduating and being awarded four acting prizes, including the Gold Medal as Outstanding Student.
Career
19571969: National Theatre
Dench made her first professional stage appearance in September 1957 with the Old Vic Company at the Royal Court Theatre in Liverpool, as Ophelia in Hamlet. According to the reviewer for London Evening Standard, Dench had "talent which will be shown to better advantage when she acquires some technique to go with it." Dench then made her London debut in the same production at the Old Vic. She remained a member of the company for four seasons, 1957–1961, her roles including Katherine in Henry V in 1958 and Juliet in Romeo and Juliet in 1960, both directed and designed by Franco Zeffirelli. During this period, Dench toured the United States and Canada and appeared in Yugoslavia and at the Edinburgh Festival. She joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in December 1961, playing Anya in The Cherry Orchard at the Aldwych Theatre in London and made her Stratford-upon-Avon debut in April 1962 as Isabella in Measure for Measure. She subsequently spent seasons in repertory both with the Playhouse in Nottingham from January 1963, and with the Playhouse Company in Oxford from April 1964.In 1960, Dench appeared on television as Anna in the very last episode of the TV series The Four Just Men, in 1964 as Valentine Wannop in Theatre 625's adaptation of Parade's End, and also played a juvenile trouble maker in an episode of the police series Z-Cars. That same year, she made her film debut in The Third Secret, before featuring in a small role in the Sherlock Holmes thriller A Study in Terror with her Nottingham Playhouse colleague John Neville. She performed again in Theatre 625 in 1966, as Terry in the four-part series Talking to a Stranger, for which she won a BAFTA for Best Actress. The 1966 BAFTA Award for Most Promising Newcomer to Leading Film Roles was made to Dench for her performance in Four in the Morning and this was followed in 1968 by a BAFTA Best Actress Award for her role in John Hopkins' 1966 BBC drama Talking to a Stranger.
In 1968, she was offered the role of Sally Bowles in the musical Cabaret. As Sheridan Morley later reported: "At first she thought they were joking. She had never done a musical and she has an unusual croaky voice which sounds as if she has a permanent cold. So frightened was she of singing in public that she auditioned from the wings, leaving the pianists alone on stage". But when it opened at the Palace Theatre in February 1968, Frank Marcus, reviewing for Plays and Players, commented that: "She sings well. The title song, in particular, is projected with great feeling."
19701989: Rise to prominence
After a long run in Cabaret, Dench rejoined the RSC, making numerous appearances with the company in Stratford and London for nearly twenty years, winning several "best actress" awards. Among her roles with the RSC, she was the Duchess in John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi in 1971. In the Stratford 1976 season, and then at the Aldwych in 1977, she gave two comedy performances, first in Trevor Nunn's musical staging of The Comedy of Errors as Adriana, then partnered with Donald Sinden as Beatrice and Benedick in John Barton's "British Raj" revival of Much Ado About Nothing. As Bernard Levin wrote in The Sunday Times: "...demonstrating once more that she is a comic actress of consummate skill, perhaps the very best we have." One of her most notable achievements with the RSC was her performance as Lady Macbeth in 1976. Nunn's acclaimed production of Macbeth was first staged with a minimalist design at The Other Place theatre in Stratford. Its small round stage focused attention on the psychological dynamics of the characters, and both Ian McKellen in the title role, and Dench, received exceptionally favourable notices. "If this is not great acting I don't know what is", wrote Michael Billington in The Guardian. "It will astonish me if the performance is matched by any in this actress's generation", commented J. C. Trewin in The Lady. The production transferred to London, opening at the Donmar Warehouse in September 1977, and was adapted for television, later released on VHS and DVD. Dench won the SWET Best Actress Award in 1977.Dench was nominated for a BAFTA for her role as Hazel Wiles in the 1979 BBC drama On Giant's Shoulders. She had a romantic role in the BBC television film Langrishe, Go Down, with Jeremy Irons and a screenplay by Harold Pinter from the Aidan Higgins novel, directed by David Jones, in which she played one of three spinster sisters living in a fading Irish mansion in the County Waterford countryside. Dench made her debut as a director in 1988 with the Renaissance Theatre Company's touring season, Renaissance Shakespeare on the Road, co-produced with the Birmingham Rep, and ending with a three-month repertory programme at the Phoenix Theatre in London. Dench's contribution was a staging of Much Ado About Nothing, set in the Napoleonic era, which starred Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson as Benedick and Beatrice. She has made numerous appearances in the West End including the role of Miss Trant in the 1974 musical The Good Companions at Her Majesty's Theatre. In 1981, Dench was due to play Grizabella in the original production of Cats, but was forced to pull out due to a torn Achilles tendon, leaving Elaine Paige to play the role.
From 1981 to 1984, Dench starred in Britain's BAFTA award-winning A Fine Romance with her husband Michael Williams. In 1987, Dench played a supporting role in Columbia Pictures film 84 Charing Cross Road, with Anne Bancroft and Anthony Hopkins. The film dramatizes a delightful and tender correspondence, of the same title, between American writer, Helene Hanff and British bookshop manager, Frank Doel, which began after WWII, in 1949, and ended in 1969. She also acted with the National Theatre in London where she played Cleopatra in Antony and Cleopatra. In 1989, she appeared in David Tucker's Behaving Badly for Channel 4, based on Catherine Heath's novel of the same name. That same year, she was cast as Pru Forrest, the long-time silent wife of Tom Forrest, in the BBC soap opera The Archers on its 10,000th edition.