Huge props to British Vogue for putting Dame Judi Dench on their June cover. American magazines, for the most part, avoid putting any woman older than 50 on their covers. If they put an 85 year old woman on an American cover, they would probably find some way to use a really old photo of her. Anyway, I love Judi. Everybody loves Judi. She’s one of the most beloved and unproblematic treasures in entertainment. This cover profile was exceptionally well-written too – British Vogue spoke to her just before and just after the coronavirus lockdown, and Judi was already hunkered down in her Surrey home. You can read the full piece here. Some highlights:
On the lockdown: “I am sure I feel like everyone else, such unprecedented times are quite hard to comprehend… What is a good thing is that it has made people aware of the predicament of others who are completely alone. If a great deal of kindness comes out of this, then that will be a plus.”
On her role in Cats: “The cloak I was made to wear! Like five foxes f**king on my back.” She’d hoped she would look rather elegant. Instead: “A battered, mangy old cat,” she says, appalled. “A great big orange bruiser. What’s that about?” I reassure her that irony-loving younger audiences can’t get enough of it, and she nods. “I had a very nice email… no, not an email.” A text? “Yes, a text, from Ben Whishaw [the actor], who just doted on it. So sweet. So lovely.”
She’s been a Quaker since her teens & she loves nature: “I’ve planted all those trees for friends. I bought an acre and a half or something in Scotland and, in actual fact, I’m going to plant 12 trees in the next two, three weeks, because the family is flying to Barbados and back, six of us. And I think that is, you know, being responsible. Don’t you?” She will later remark, after that holiday has been and gone and she is deep in quarantine in late March, “We have the incredible bonus of glorious weather at the moment, and for me it is the most wonderful time of year. To see the trees coming into blossom and daffodils in the garden, they certainly give you hope, and we need a lot of that at the moment. I am very aware of people who may not have a garden and are not as fortunate to be able to sit outside in the sunshine.”
What she enjoys about being 85: “Nothing. I don’t like it at all. I don’t think about it. I don’t want to think about it. They say age is an attitude… it’s horrible.”
On her deteriorating eyesight: “I saw Mags – Maggie Smith – the other day, and she said, ‘My god, I think they’re going to stop me driving my car.’” Dench had to give up driving a few years ago, when her sight began to deteriorate. She misses it horribly. “It’s the most terrible shock to your system. Ghastly. It’s terrible to be so dependent on people.”
Her late husband Michael Williams: “He used to cry when he laughed. The more he laughed the more he cried. Oh god, he made me laugh.”
On Harvey Weinstein: “My sympathies go to anybody who went through an experience like that. It’s very upsetting.” On some level it’s clear she is still computing it; to have so misjudged a boss and friend. “It’s good that things come to the surface and are spoken about and people feel a kind of freedom, I’m sure.” Were you ever sexually harassed in your own career? “No,” she says, adding obliquely, “not something that I wasn’t able to deal with.”
How she spends her time in lockdown: “I haven’t got my family with me, but we are keeping in touch lots by phone calls and FaceTime. I am disciplining myself to learn all the sonnets. I try to learn something new every day, anything.” If she makes the font mega-sized, it works, she says.
I’ve seen Judi talk in interviews about how her deteriorating eyesight has changed the way she works – she truly can’t sit and read her scripts and memorize her lines that way. She gets family members to read scripts to her, then she records the audio of her lines so she can listen to them repeatedly and that’s how she learns them. She seems incredibly close to her family and they seem to enjoy spending time with her, so I imagine the quarantine has been very difficult for her, even though she was putting on a brave face in March. Also, I had no idea she’s a Quaker! And omg, Ben Whishaw texted her a compliment for Cats?? I love him so hard.
Cover and photo courtesy of British Vogue.
Gorgeous cover!
Gorgeous human being. I love Judi Dench. And Kaiser is so right about how publications never put a woman this old on cover. Look at Vanity Fair recent cover which used a young photo of Princess Anne. At over 70, VF obviously felt a current photo of Princess Anne would not boost sales.
I didn’t know how much I needed Dame Judi Dench today.
I still love a good episode of As Time Goes By. And her narration of Spaceship Earth is perfection. She is a treasure.
you can thank the Phoenicians for that!!! (I hope they keep her as narrator when they redo it.)
Me too Becks! If I come back from lock down to find someone else saying “Like a grand am miraculous spaceship” I’m not sure I’ll be able to cope. I had to cancel 3 trips I had planned between March 15 when they closed and today. I should be there now. And I had planned to ride Space Ship Earth as my last ride because I knew it was closing for refurbishment. But there are always YouTube ride throughs If they take away her voice.
I love love love Spaceship Earth and hope they don’t have a new narrator, but they most likely will 🙁 If I’m not mistaken they get someone new to narrate with every remodel. I do hope they get rid of the travel to the future interactive section. It was cool the first couple of times, but mostly felt like a copout of some cool new scenes and animatronics.
Now you’re talking, Aang! Winter is only days away down here. How good would it be to binge-watch entire series of A Fine Romance AND As Time Goes By, all cosied up in my heated throw, a big pot of tea and double packet of Tim Tams by my side? As if I’m not going to look into this…
I saw a very amusing video clip of her and her grandson on social media. I think it was a tiktok clip and he was trying to stump her on riddles. I loved to see how close he is to his grandmother.
Watched both “Exotic Marigold Hotel” movies a couple of weeks ago. She a firecracker!
Those were awesome!
I didn’t know there was a second one!
I loved her in the James Bond movies, she was the Boss!!
@harla – yes, she & Daniel Craig has the best chemistry in those movies…
JudiDenchForever 💖
Of course, <3 Judi Dench.
Not being able to drive really made my dad depressed. He has Parkinson's, and insisted for so long (too long) that it was "just a diagnosis." We finally had to stage an intervention to confiscate his car keys-it got ugly.
Oh hugs to you, I’m so sorry. My uncle also has Parkinson’s but as he is more paranoid, he only drives in very limited circumstances–to places he knows well, not far from the house, never at night. My guess is at some point he will willingly stop driving altogether. He is such a fearful and nervous person by nature (even before his Parkinson’s diagnosis) so I don’t think that will be a challenge.
However, we had to stage an intervention to get my grandmother to stop driving. Not just because of her sight, but because of her dementia. However we made her PCP do it so there was no ugly family confrontation. She was a retired nurse so even she knew not to disobey a doctor’s order and I think wasn’t too deep in the dementia at that point that she realized if the doctor was telling her not to drive, then she really shouldn’t be driving.
Mom was willing and able to take Dad’s car keys before his Parkinson’s made it really dangerous for him to drive. It was starting to get bad, then he had to have cataract surgery. Mom simply asked his eye surgeon to “suggest” that Dad give up driving completely and then refused to give him back his keys, saying it was doctor’s orders.
I’m dreading the day when I have to take hers. She might be more difficult than my grandmother was – and Mom took her keys saying “Liz will not let her daughter ride in a car that you are driving. It’s time.”
“Are the shades of Pemberly to be thus polluted?”, the best.
Forgot that she was a great Lady Catherine in P and P with Kiera Knightly. Also there is a great documentary entitled, Tea With the Dames. Directed by Roger Michell, with Dames Maggie Smith, Eileen Atkins, Judi Dench, and Joan Plowright sitting around a table chatting about their acting history and aging in the business. Very much worth checking out. Loved all 4 of these salty, great broads.
Tea with the Dames/ Nothing Like a Dame! It is glorious! Eileen Atkins, Judi Dench, Joan Plowright and Maggie Smith drinking and serving up the tea (and more) on their lives and careers.
I can’t believe she’s 85. Crazy how time flies.
She exudes a lot of calm directness when she speaks, very blunt and no-nonsense, and I’m betting why she may have been spared some of that abuse she mentions – predators know to go over the more uncertain, vulnerable, and isolated. At least she answered the question respectfully and thoughtfully. There’s a lot of self-awareness here we don’t see too often with celebs.
That isn’t true for all situations. Women of all kinds have suffered rape and harassment. These kind of aggressors can be pretty shameless and assume their privilege will protect them, and it usually does. How you put that is veering a little toward victim blaming, I’m sure you did not mean that but it comes across a bit that way.
I know she’s 85 and all but… the Weinstein comment on “nothing I wasn’t able to deal with” bothers me. It seemingly exudes the sort of if you say something, you’re weak mentality.
I read it more as, “It was not as bad as what others have had to deal with.” Lots of people, but especially older people, feel like if they were “just” harassed but not raped then they don’t have the right to have it considered in the same way. It’s not great for them to downplay their own harassment but I got that vibe from what she said, not that she was casting others as weak for talking about it.
I get that and I didn’t think she was being judgmental, I meant that I think any perpetuation of that mentality is potentially harmful. Any time we frame victim-ness as having or needing qualifications, it’s not a good thing.
I agree, lamaga, it really seems like she hasn’t processed it. It is always weird to hear people say they knew an abuser well and never realized the reality of what he was doing… I guess she worked with him when she was also much older and more powerful in her career??
I think she was trying to be diplomatic tbh, implying nothing too traumatic had happened/nothing she felt was worth discussing.
I’m sure any actress who came up in the 60s/70s would’ve dealt with their fair share of dodgy men!
She’s so beautiful!
She made a documentary for the BBC a few years ago about her love of trees and it’s as delightful as it sounds!
On the eyesight thing, it is terrible to lose your mobility – car driving is a huge part of that – like that. Which reminds me, I’m going to get my parents started on some sort of organic purple powder and eye-health supplements asap.
Other older women who would KILL on the front pages of fashion mags:
Jane Fonda
Rita Moreno
Dolly Parton
Helen Mirren
Sally Field
Mary Steenburgen
Diana Ross
Joanna Lumley
Tina Turner
CHER!
@ Alyse, YES!!!! I particularly like the idea of Dolly, Mary Steenburgen and Lumley. 💛
Love that cover so much! Yasss!