Dame Judi Dench talks about her new film, her career, and her role as `M`

11-Jun-2004 • Actor News

These days, matriarchs are Dame Judi Dench's specialty: royal, familial, even official, like her spymistress M in the James Bond films, reports the Houston Chronicle.

But the esteemed British actress sees herself in a different light. Dench likens her ethereal space diplomat in the sci-fi flick The Chronicles of Riddick not to her aging Virgin Queen in Shakespeare in Love, but to that film's star and fellow Oscar-winner, Gwyneth Paltrow

"Perhaps after Riddick, audiences will think I'm this thing I've always longed to be: the tall, willowy blond," says Dench. "In fact, I act that all the time, until I catch myself in a mirror. Inside, I am absolutely that!"

In Riddick, Dench, 69, sports cascading locks and floats on air. Audiences who know her from Shakespeare in Love and her other Oscar-nominated performances in Mrs. Brown, Chocolat and Iris may be surprised to see Dench sharing the screen with Vin Diesel.

"It is a complete departure," she admits. "But I've never wanted to take the safe option -- never. It's a new challenge. I think it's very boring to do the same thing all the time."

Dench says Diesel charmed her when he visited her during her run in David Hare's play The Breath of Life.

"Vin was chivalrous. He came to London and gave me flowers I couldn't take upstairs, they were so large. I never read the script, since I never got over the asking. I was excited about being wooed to do this film."

Dench has acted professionally since 1957. Although she's always dabbled in films, she is generally regarded as the greatest British stage actress of the last half-century -- and one who has moved seamlessly between TV dramas and comedies.

Her movie career gathered momentum when she played M for the first time in the 1995 Bond entry GoldenEye. She then starred as Queen Victoria, grief-stricken by the death of her husband, Prince Albert, in 1997's Mrs. Brown.

"Nobody (in America) knew I'd done anything else besides M -- all of 38 years, gone in a flash!" she says, chuckling. "Almost all of Shakespeare's plays, a lot of Ibsen and Chekhov -- gone. Suddenly I had to learn how to act for films.

"It was very nice to be discovered, and a bit funny at that age. It felt like a new door opening. I was well known in England, and not known in the U.S. at all."

A few years after Mrs. Brown, Dench lost her own husband. She had met actor Michael Williams at the Swan Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon. They married in 1971 and performed together often. (Their daughter, Tara, known as Finty, is an actress, too.)

In 1999, Dench learned, while doing Amy's View on Broadway, that Williams had been diagnosed with lung cancer. He died in January 2001. "After Michael passed away, work was the great consolation," she says. "I did (movies like) The Shipping News, Iris, The Importance of Being Earnest, often with just a few days in between.

"I don't suppose I'll ever adapt to life without Michael. I think if one is fortunate to have a happy marriage for a very long time, and lucky enough to have experienced love, you never get over losing it -- but you do learn to live with it. Yet sometimes the loss catches you unawares, which is like a punch in the solar plexus.

"I talk about him now more than I ever did. I feel he's a kind of presence that's there all the time. When I did All's Well That Ends Well at Stratford last year, I was frightened, because all our life he had been there -- he wooed me there, we were both in the company, he's buried there. And there's no question in my mind that I was helped by him the whole time I was there."

But as for peppering her illustrious career with action movies like Riddick, Dench relies on her intuition. "I take the work very seriously, but not myself, and I think that's a saving grace," she says. "I go utterly on instinct. It is all I ever act on, and all I ever go by."

Thanks to `Ken` for the alert.