It was the third Wednesday in March, and profound panic had arrived in Britain. Schools were in limbo, businesses were shuttering, and the streets had taken on the surreal air of a science-fiction film as the country hovered on the brink of lockdown. For many, the first true sense of what the coronavirus pandemic would mean for everyday life was finally descending.
As the early spring sunshine streamed down on a fractious nation, in the English countryside a cool, calm 85-year-old was handed a pair of plush white doggy ears. “I don’t do social media at all,” Judi Dench tells me on the telephone, chuckling at the memory. “It was only because I had been given the ears by my daughter, Fint. It was a spur-of-the-moment thing. A bit of light-hearted fun to try and make people smile, hopefully.”
Oh how they smiled. The ears led to a short video clip – filmed on her daughter Finty Williams’s phone – that was posted to Twitter and which you will have doubtless seen. “Oh… there you are!” says a sparkly eyed Dench, popping up the ears in surprise, as if happened upon in her garden. “Just keep laughing. That’s all we can do.” It turned out to be exactly the sort of digital tonic people needed – it clocked up millions of views in the gathering chaos – a flicker of continuity in a world on fire. Comparisons to Vera Lynn were duly drawn.
Read more: Judi Dench Covers The June Issue Of British Vogue
Dench is sticking by her motto, although she is a touch less sanguine. On top of the nationwide lockdown, she – by dint of her age, if not her moxie, and like some 10 million others in Britain – has embarked on an even longer stretch of imposed self-isolation. “I am sure I feel like everyone else, such unprecedented times are quite hard to comprehend,” she explains from her home, with its tree-filled gardens, where she has lived for more than 35 years. Her panic is for people who don’t have what she has. “What is a good thing is that it has made people aware of the predicament of others who are completely alone,” she says, thoughtfully. “If a great deal of kindness comes out of this, then that will be a plus.”
Read more: Please Enjoy This Video Of Judi Dench Doing A Tik Tok Dance Challenge
Some weeks earlier – before terms such as “herd immunity” and “flattening the curve” had entered the daily lexicon – I am at said home (built in 1690 and with an unusually tiny front door) in deepest Surrey for an audience with the actor, one of the world’s foremost theatrical dames. Naturally, it is a case of first things first.
“Can I see it?” I ask. “Of course,” says Dench, gamely springing into action. “If you really want to…” “I feel very naff asking,” I say. “Just a tad naff,” she rasps witheringly. “I should charge you.” At this, Dench – 5ft 1in and packed with poise – leads me through her beautifully cluttered, perilously low-ceilinged hallway into a sun-dappled sitting room. “You won’t send me up about it?” After I’ve promised, one of the nation’s most beloved citizens – perhaps even its most, if you don’t count David Attenborough – begins searching her awards-laden shelves. My eyes are darting. Is that six Baftas? “Don’t count!” she cries, literally wincing when I realise there are actually 11. “I don’t mean to be flash.” There follows an exquisite pause before she adds, “Here it is…” and hands me her Oscar.
There has always been a duality at the core of Judith Olivia Dench, the everywoman sprinkled with stardust. On the one hand, I’m pleased to confirm that she is absolutely the comforting national treasure you imagine. At home on this crisp, clear morning in the Surrey wilds she is a soothing vision in beige athleisurewear; kettle on, supermarket pain au chocolat on a tray, and the luvvie-meter set to a hundred. As she is a legendary champagne enthusiast, I brought her a bottle of Dom Pérignon Blanc Vintage 2008, the presentation of which provokes a first, delicious crack of the trademark voice: “Absolute heaven!” she beams. Her skills as an actor are so intense that for a second you believe no one has ever given her a gift before.
In fact, her powers are such that, in a wider act of seduction, it is safe to say Dench now commands public affection on an industrial scale. The merest glance at her six-decade CV suggests why. Bouncing from drama school to playing Ophelia at The Old Vic in the late 1950s, she ruled the National, West End and RSC for decades, chalking up bravura turns and delivering perhaps the most outstanding Lady Macbeth and Cleopatra of the late 20th century. Meanwhile, she ensorcelled Middle England on the small screen with homely sitcoms and period dramas before – boom! – winning an Oscar in 1999, aged 64, for playing Elizabeth I in Shakespeare in Love. (“Eight quick minutes with bad teeth,” is how she described her performance.) Her magic went global, so much so that when, some years ago, the writer Alan Bennett toyed with the most offensive slogan you could put on a T-shirt, musing over themes from terrorism to child abuse, he decreed nothing would outrage the public more than “I Hate Judi Dench”.
“Stupid, stupid, stupid,” she giggles when I remind her of this. But let’s be truthful. In an age of cancel culture, Dench now operates on a level beyond celebrity, as a kind of cultural tea cosy to be popped soothingly over the nation’s beleaguered identity in times of crisis. It was telling that, as the Covid-19 pandemic took hold, a video of her at her kitchen sink with Gyles Brandreth, washing her hands while throatily reciting The Owl and the Pussy-cat, also went viral. (Naturally, she featured in the many slightly ghoulish millennial tweets about “people we must protect at all costs”.)
Read more: Judi Dench Is Vogue’s Oldest Cover Star – Just Don’t Ask Her About Ageing
In uncertain times – especially uncertain for those who are a little older – Dench is comfort personified. To wit: “Dame Judi to raise Britain’s spirits as Coward’s mystic madame”, declared The Observer, when it announced her casting as Madame Arcati in a new adaptation of Blithe Spirit – her 60th film, give or take – set for release later this year. Along with Disney’s forthcoming $125 million spectacular Artemis Fowl, it proves that, in her ninth decade, Dench is still squarely present on the Hollywood A-list, one of a tiny elite who can get a movie green-lit. Still a star.
This extraordinary feat shows that there is another side to Dench. Having fondled the Oscar, we settle in a snug little study, where she takes a seat under a wall-sized portrait of herself in character as M in the James Bond movies. Up close, the thespy grandma vibe ebbs a little, to reveal something more. Is it the milky blue eyes, still hypnotic though they struggle to see these days? Or the magnificent cheekbones? It is certainly the voice, part silk, part gravel, the sum effect of which is to gather the listener up in aural cashmere. For all her determined lack of flash, the star power is off the charts. Think Beyoncé, if the Texan singer also bought her tracksuits from Sainsbury’s.
“I can be very difficult,” she says at one point, smiling mischievously, “if somebody takes me for granted.” You believe her. There’s nothing more glamorous than talent, and it is no coincidence that Dench – born in York in 1934 to a physician father and wardrobe mistress mother – is the oldest person ever to appear on the cover of this magazine. She has never wanted for charm, agrees Olivia Colman, who starred with Dench in 2017’s Murder on the Orient Express, and counts her among her professional mentors. “She inspires warmth, kindness, naughtiness,” the fellow Oscar winner tells Vogue. “She’s utterly instinctive. What she has is just in there. You want her to turn her face to you. ‘Please grin at me, include me in your world.’ God it looks like fun.”
Read more: 20 Heavenly Archive Images Of Judi Dench
Boy, is she funny. Inevitably, conversation drifts to Cats, the widely panned film adaptation of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical that, for its sheer madness, has gained cult status as a wonderfully distracting comedy-watch in the current crisis. Dench visibly prickles at its mention. “The cloak I was made to wear!” she cries. “Like five foxes f**king on my back.” Filmed in green screen, and with her eyesight impaired, Dench has yet to see the film in full but was far from pleased at how her Old Deuteronomy turned out looking in the pictures she’s seen. 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.”
Dench is happiest when things are lovely. A Quaker since her teens, she may be divinely potty-mouthed, but she is also meditative and kind to the core. Gesturing through the window to her six acres, she says, “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?”
Read more: Kate Phelan On Styling Judi Dench’s Joyous Vogue Cover, Plus Her “Champagne & Hummus” Rider
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.” But she worries, of course. “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.”
Age, for all the obvious current reasons, has been a subject much on her mind. Getting older is no cakewalk, she believes. While others busy themselves claiming that 80 is the new 70, or 70 the new 60, she is simply not having it. I ask her to tell me something that she enjoys about being 85. “Nothing,” she barks, deadly serious. 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…” she trails off, then snaps, “it’s horrible.”
“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.” According to Finty, 47, Dench’s daughter with the late, great actor Michael Williams, her mother is actually the one who people depend on, not least herself and her son Sam, 22. “She cares hugely about everybody. That’s something that I’ve always known and have been brought up with, you know. If people are hurting, they call her. But I think it gets her down a lot, yes,” says Williams. “There were lots of things that she used to be able to do that she can’t do anymore, you know, like needlework and handwriting letters.”
Read more: Every Beauty Product Used For Judi Dench’s Vogue Cover Look Came In At Under £20
Not that it’s all gloom. Far from it. Dench is so well connected, she famously sends out more than 400 Christmas presents each year and got her first tattoo – “Carpe diem”, inscribed on her wrist – on her 81st birthday. For the past few years, she has been in a relationship with fellow tree lover and local conservationist David Mills, 77 – “It’s very nice,” she smiles – whose obsession with University Challenge almost equals her own. Thanks to her grandson – he calls her “Ma” and they speak daily, sometimes multiple times – she has fostered surprising new passions for football and the music of Ed Sheeran. They even own “an ear” of a racehorse together. She is friends with everyone from Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall to Taylor Swift, and if this morning is anything to go by, the phone rings constantly. Scripts pour in, and while she is still willing to play queens, what she really wants is to play someone “who everyone thinks is a kindly, saintly, beatified kind of person, and she’s actually killing people”. Make of that what you will.
And yet, “It meant an awful lot to her,” says Williams of her mother being featured in Vogue at this moment in time. “This age thing, I think, affects very much how she feels about herself and this gave her just that little boost of confidence to make her go, ‘Oh, maybe I’m still OK.’” Williams starts to laugh. “Then of course after the photoshoot, she came back literally thinking she was Beyoncé.”
How does one become one of the most celebrated actors of a generation? Early exposure helps. Amateur dramatics were to the Denches in 1950s York what selfies were to the Kardashians in 2010s Calabasas. Yet, despite numerous childhood performances, Judi initially thought she would be a set designer, and was dissuaded only when she saw Michael Redgrave’s Lear at Stratford in 1953, with a whirling stage that was so beyond her imagining she decided to pivot to the boards.
Perhaps it was always meant to be. At Central in her early twenties (she was in the same year as Vanessa Redgrave, incidentally), she dazzled and – highly unusually in the hierarchical British theatre scene of the day – went straight into playing junior leads on the London stage. There is an accepted myth that Dench has never had a bad review, though it is worth noting that the London critics, who were even more hierarchical than the theatre crew, did not instantly warm to her. Even that heaven-sent voice didn’t always land with audiences. In the mid-1960s at Nottingham Playhouse she made front of house put up a sign that read, “Judi Dench is not ill, she just talks like this.”
Read more: 9 Life-Affirming Judi Dench Films To Watch Now
Yet soon she became indomitable, touring the country and the globe, gathering awards like others do fridge magnets. I’m completely fascinated by her love life during this era, which – aside from her late husband, Michael Williams, whom she didn’t marry until she was 36 – barely gets a mention in her memoirs. I ask how many marriage proposals she’s had in her life? “Oh honestly!” she snorts. It turns out four. Williams had to ask her twice, then there was a judge in the Midlands and “one other, early on”. Refusing to give any more details, she has a sip of tea and twinkles mysteriously. The message is clear, however: absolute heartbreaker.
She married Williams on the second go because the first time he asked her they were on tour in Australia, and she told him she couldn’t trust any proposal when the weather was so nice. “We had better wait for a rainy day in Battersea,” she told him, so he did. Low-key, theirs was one of the great actor love stories of the 20th century. They often worked together, notably in the hit sitcom A Fine Romance, and had legendary rows – but mostly they laughed. “He used to cry when he laughed,” she recalls, smiling. “The more he laughed the more he cried. Oh god, he made me laugh.”
Finty credits Williams with getting Dench to Hollywood. “My father was my mother’s greatest flag waver,” she says, explaining that he was the one to convince her to do the James Bond films in the mid-1990s, when she was unsure if she could hack it. In her first flush of success in the 1960s, a film director had told her that her looks meant she would “never have a film career”. The insecurity stuck.
But Bond led to playing Queen Victoria in Mrs Brown – her first Oscar nod – then to Shakespeare in Love. At this juncture, it is impossible not to acknowledge the spectre of film producer Harvey Weinstein, who – as then head of awards machine Miramax – championed Dench’s Hollywood rise in her sixties as vociferously as any starlet’s, casting her in seven films in total. She is visibly shaken when I bring up his name.
“My sympathies go to anybody who went through an experience like that,” she says of the convicted rapist’s victims. “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.” She’s becoming increasingly uneasy, and so we move on.
The talent was all hers. In Iris and Notes on a Scandal she was as good as it gets, while her golden touch at the box office with the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel films practically invented a new revenue stream with the “grey pound”. Then she died in front of many millions of viewers in Skyfall, and her status was set. Due to her eyesight, she is no longer able to act on stage, but she’s still got it. In the forthcoming Blithe Spirit, a frothy art deco affair with Dan Stevens and Isla Fisher, she inherits the mantle from Margaret Rutherford’s lauded 1945 turn as the psychic widow who can raise the dead. Somehow, in all the silliness, Dench delivers brand-new pathos.
Normally, actors talking about the craft can get pretty dreary – but, honestly, how does she do it? She once described herself to The New Yorker as “an enormous console with hundreds of buttons, each of which I must press at exactly the right times”. Does that still stand? “Well, yes. You sometimes think, ‘What if I press that, though? Or what about that?’” she says. “It’s a choice you make.”
“I absolutely love her,” gushes Colman. “She’s irreverent, and quick to giggle. She commands respect. She is, in short, practically perfect in every way.” Dench, of course, bats away the praise. In person, her heavenly manners feel like a lid of kindness placed over a cauldron of emotion. She confesses to being “wildly” insecure. But there is a keep-calm-and-carry-on spine of steel, too. She is, for example, straight-talking on modern casting debates, saying the problem for all actors is “there’s never been enough work”. Cultural appropriation makes her uncomfortable, but otherwise she thinks anyone should play anyone. Though, “I don’t think Ian Fleming would want a female Bond.” She’s all for female action leads but, “Call it something else, then?”
Read more: 3 Champagne Cocktails From The Vogue Archive To Make In Honour Of Judi Dench
Coronavirus having furloughed the film industry, her own career is on temporary hiatus, though she plans to “do something” with the director Simon Curtis (My Week with Marilyn) soon, and is due to film an episode of the BBC’s genealogy stalwart Who Do You Think You Are? “Who the f**k do you think you are, in my case,” she quips, adding that she’s desperate to find out whether a family rumour she’s related to Sarah Siddons is true.
But how do you feel about retirement, I ask casually. Immediately, it is as if the sun has gone behind a cloud. “No, no, no, no. Don’t use that word, Giles. Not in this house. Not here. Wash your mouth out!” Her voice becomes its most electric to quote Dylan Thomas. “Rage, rage against the dying of the light,” she booms, with all the skill and force of her RSC days. It’s quite something. “Never was a truer word spoken,” she adds. “Pretty depressing. Anyway…”
She looks determined. Her life now bookended by a world war and a global pandemic, the dame is still going strong, still incredible, still a byword for excellence. “I haven’t got my family with me, but we are keeping in touch lots by phone calls and FaceTime,” she will later tell me of her quarantine life. “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.
Worried, I ask if she will be able to see her Vogue cover well enough? “Just about. That’s all,” she says quietly. “Do you want another cup of tea?” For a moment, a little sadness hangs in the air. Then a sudden, mischievous smile returns to her face. “Or a glass of champagne?”
The June issue of British Vogue is out on newsstands and available for digital download on 7 May.
More from British Vogue:
