Dame Judi Dench on retirement ` I simply want to go on acting`

Judi Dench, at the age of 70, has acquired the dubious status of a national treasure. Ever since she played two formidable queens in Mrs Brown and Shakespeare in Love (winning an Oscar for the latter), Americans in particular have treated her with a reverential awe, as if she were an extension of the royal family - reports The Guardian.

What is Dench's secret? What is it that marks her out from other great dames of the British theatre? When she was a young actress at the Old Vic in the late 1950s, Alec McCowen's father dubbed her "the Mighty Atom". It's an apt phrase that pins down her formidable nuclear energy. "The thing about Judi," one of her sister-dames told me, "is that she never stops working." Even now, when she could be enjoying the lush pastures of semi-retirement, she is midway through an exhausting eight-week shoot on Richard Eyre's film of Zoe Heller's novel, Notes on a Scandal. It means getting up at five every morning and going off to location in London's Hornsey and Belsize Park. "Heigh-ho," says Dench, "the glamorous life!"

In the movie, Dench plays a waspish teacher who blackmails a female colleague into friendship by threatening to expose her guilty secret. Isn't it difficult, I suggest, to play such a deeply unsympathetic woman? "It's exactly the same process," she says, "whether the character is likeable or not. You have to find out why people behave as they do. If you play Lady Macbeth, you don't want to present her as some hideous monster looming out of the darkness. And with this character, Barbara, what I try to suggest is the invincible loneliness that makes her what she is. I know several women like her who, for whatever reason, have never enjoyed a fulfilled relationship and who end up in a state of terrifying solitude. I've simply used my instinct and observation to try and understand her."

Observation is clearly crucial. But David Hare once said that "acting is a judgment of character": in other words, what we respond to is some vital element within the performer's soul. The examples Hare cited were Gielgud and Richardson, whose spiritual grace and robust eccentricity became more visible with age. And Hare's point applies equally well to Dench. What we react to increasingly is some quality within the person herself.

"I used not to believe this," says Dench when I put the point to her. "My Michael [her late husband, Michael Williams] once said to me, 'You can't ever be more than you are as a person.' He felt that whatever anger, hate, lust and so on you presented had to come from within you. I violently disagreed then but I've now changed my mind. I think you use your own emotions and push them to the outer limits. At the same time, acting is about the exploration of character rather than simply a projection of self. I was in New York with Maggie Smith recently, promoting a film, and we were asked about the Sanford Meisner Method school of acting which is based on ruthless self-exploration. Maggie, in her unique way, said, 'Oh, we have that in England, too. We call it wanking.'"

But if acting really is a judgment of character, what shines through Dench's work is her mixture of compassion and mischief. And the former was sublimely present in her recent performance as the Countess in the RSC All's Well That Ends Well. This was not just a masterclass in Shakespearean verse-speaking. The whole performance was imbued with a charitable understanding of the follies and impetuousness of youth. There was also a moment towards the end when Dench simply opened the palms of her hands towards the seemingly dead Helena, in a mixture of relief and joy that went far beyond the demands of mere technique.

If there is a moral quality to Dench's work, it is interesting to speculate about its source. Brought up as a strict Quaker, she says of her faith "it's essential to my life and work", without elaborating. But she also sends up any tendency she might have to treat theatre as a quasi-religious event.

"When we were doing Arbuzov's The Promise," she recalls, "I said to Ian McKellen we should keep three seats empty and imagine we were playing to God the Father, Son and Holy Ghost. Ian rather wittily said, 'Surely we'll only need one seat rather than three?' I also remember a matinee of The Comedy of Errors at Stratford where I spotted a woman in the second row who was quite visibly unhappy. I said to all the actors that we had to direct the whole performance to her and do our best to cheer her up. So every gag, every one-liner, every song was directed relentlessly towards her. The only problem was that we looked at her seat after the interval and she'd fled!"

Only Dench, you feel, would use a performance to offer spiritual solace; but there is also a strong element of devilry within her desire to do good. She's the only Lady Bracknell I've ever seen to make a flirtatious pass at her future son-in-law. And although the legion of Dench fans who've admired her in TV sitcoms like A Fine Romance and As Time Goes By would be pleased to learn she has a passion for needlework, they might be slightly surprised at its results. When she played in David Hare's Amy's View, she presented its author, notoriously aware of critical reaction, with an embroidered cushion stitched with the motto: "Fuck 'em, fuck 'em, fuck 'em, fuck 'em."

What I suspect really makes Dench a great actress, however, is a calculated innocence: an ability to treat even the great classic roles as if they had been written yesterday. Famously, she often comes to a first rehearsal without having read the complete play. She also recalls telling Trevor Nunn, who directed her legendary Stratford Lady Macbeth: "We've got to remember that a lot of schoolchildren will come to the play and not know they're going to kill Duncan." As a result, her Lady M was not some bloodthirsty old harridan but a young woman shocked into self-awareness. When she cried, "Come, you spirits that end on mortal thoughts, unsex me here" she unforgettably started as if malign forces were stirring beneath her skirts. For a brief, extraordinary moment Dench made you believe you were indeed in the presence of evil.

"Acting," said Edith Evans, "is about cutting away the dead wood." And Dench has something of her legendary predecessor's ability to banish preconceptions: to view every character she plays with a fresh, unclouded, intuitive intelligence. As it happens, Dench will literally follow in Evans's footsteps in 2006 by playing the ultra-theatrical Judith Bliss in a Peter Hall revival of Hay Fever. After that, she returns to Stratford for the Complete Works season to appear in a musical of The Merry Wives of Windsor with music and lyrics by Paul Englishby and Ranjit Bolt. "I'll be playing Mistress Quickly," she says. "Possibly very slowly - even with a Zimmer frame. But I very much wanted to be part of the final Stratford season in the old building. Whatever its problems, whole generations of actors have worked there and managed to make themselves audible. I just have very happy memories of working in that building."

Clearly, Dench leads a fulfilled life. That much is apparent from a new book, Scenes From My Life, which offers not just a pictorial career-record but charming family shots of Dench with daughter Finty and grandson Sammy. And, even if the book offers poignant memories of Dench's beloved husband Michael, it gives off an air of domestic serenity. Whatever the circumstances of her private life, Dench is also strongly driven by her English puritan conscience and insatiable hunger for acting.

When I ask if retirement has ever crossed her mind, she lets out a heartfelt cry: "Please God, not. I simply want to go on acting. I suppose I could always be wheeled on stage if necessary. The great thing about acting is that it never ends. There's always some obstacle that a play or part puts in your way that you have to overcome. I'm also very lucky in that Mrs Brown gave me a film career which I never had before. And there's so much still to learn. Working with Cate Blanchett on Notes on a Scandal, I keep watching her and sensing that she understands that less is more and that I'm doing far too much."

When one adds up all the qualities that go to make up the complex figure of Judi Dench, that may be the real secret: a genuine humility that makes her realise that acting is not just a craft and a technical skill but a mystery as insoluble as life itself.

Thanks to `JP` for the alert.

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