Dame Judi Dench says her eyesight is almost gone, but she is still talking about the work that made her one of the most recognizable faces in British film and theater. In a new interview published Saturday, the 91-year-old actor discusses macular degeneration, her long career and a memoir she wrote with Brendan O'Hea.
The book, Is It Too Late to Make a Run for It?, comes as Dench revisits a path that began in 1957, when she started on stage as Ophelia in Hamlet at the Old Vic Theatre. She said her first starring film role did not come until 40 years later, in Mrs. Brown, and that theater has always mattered more to her than film because a stage company keeps trying to get it better every night. “Oh, theater, theater, theater, theater,” she said, adding that film never gives you the chance to fix a scene once the director calls cut.
That preference runs through the memoir, which Dench said grew out of conversations with O'Hea rather than a single sit-down recollection. The result is less a formal life story than a running exchange, shaped by memory, wit and the practical limits of age. O'Hea said working on the book showed him how much of her character was already there early on, while Dench talked about family, faith and the humor that has carried her through decades in the public eye.
But the memoir also puts a sharp edge on the old story of her rise. Dench recalled a movie producer telling her, “I’m sorry,” he said, “you have every single thing wrong with your face.” She walked out and returned to the Old Vic, a reminder that the same face dismissed at the start later won an Oscar for Shakespeare in Love and brought her eight Academy Award nominations and eight James Bond films as M. The contradiction is the point: the industry that once tried to define her appearance ended up being the one that kept hiring her for it.
Dench also used the interview to look at what has replaced the easy certainty of sight. She said it is tricky to work with an almost-blind person, though she still made room for the smallest routines, including Bananagrams. The memoir’s title now reads less like a joke than a question Dench is asking with real urgency: how much of the stage, the screen and the life around them can still be carried forward when memory is doing more of the seeing than the eyes are.
