Dame Judi Dench to accept lifetime achievement at European Film Awards

10-Sep-2008 • Actor News

Veteran British actress Judi Dench and the founders of the avant-garde cinema manifesto Dogma will pick up honorary prizes at this year's European Film Awards, organisers said Wednesday.

The laureates will be among the guests at a glittering awards ceremony December 6 in Copenhagen where the top European filmmakers and actors of the year will also collect prizes, the Berlin-based European Film Academy said.

Dench, 73, will accept a lifetime achievement award.

"Already established as a highly successful theatre and TV actress, Judi Dench rose to international fame for her screen roles" such as Queen Victoria in 1997's "Mrs Brown", "Chocolat" in 2000 and as the writer Iris Murdoch in "Iris" the following year, the Academy said in a statement.

Dench won an Oscar for her supporting role as Queen Elizabeth I in the 1998 hit "Shakespeare in Love" and has appealed to a global audience for her cameos as "M" in the James Bond movies.

The Danish filmmakers Lars von Trier, Soren Kragh-Jacobsen, Kristian Levring and Thomas Vinterberg will receive the European Achievement in World Cinema award "in recognition of a unique impulse to the world of film".

Their 1995 Dogma movement established a groundbreaking set of rules for filmmaking, banning tripods, props and sets, filming only on location and not crediting the director in a bid to create more "honest" pictures.

The most famous Dogma-influenced film was Trier's melodrama "Breaking the Waves". The first purely Dogma picture was Vinterberg's international art-house hit "Festen" (The Celebration).