“I can’t see. I can’t hear much either,” Judi Dench told the audience at the Shelbourne Hotel in Dublin. For all that, Dench could hardly have been in sharper form as she engaged in a public conversation with Deirdre O’Kane before receiving the Irish Film and Television Academy (IFTA) lifetime achievement award from Catherine Martin, Minister for Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media. Dench had the audience in stitches throughout a lively exchange.
O’Kane was among several admitting that Ireland was keen to “claim” the actor for its own. It is not much of a stretch. Her father, from Dorset, and her mother, born in Dublin, first met at Wesley College in the capital. “I met new family members today,” Dench said. “My family was so rooted in Ireland and so were we as children – knowing all about it. So it is not a surprise to come back and feel unbelievably settled.”
Raised in York, she remembers, as a child, her parents telling her that they were about to take her to see a film called Night Boat to Ireland. In fact they were planning to take her on an actual ferry across the Irish Sea. “We came into Dún Laoghaire and I remember my father and mother standing there, completely overcome. That’s how much it meant to them.”
Initially trained as a set designer, she went on to study acting at the Central School of Speech and Drama. On graduation, Dench almost immediately secured a reputation as one of the great stage actors of her generation. Speaking via video at the IFTA event, Ciarán Hinds remembered, when he was a boy, his mother coming back from London to tell him she’d seen “this extraordinary actress on stage”. Half a century or so later Hinds and Dench received Oscar nominations for Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast.
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Unlike near-contemporaries such as Vanessa Redgrave and Glenda Jackson, Dench had, however, to wait decades for her film career to take off. That changed deep into middle age with acclaimed roles in such films as Room With a View and Mrs Brown. She secured an Oscar for Shakespeare in Love in 1999 and has now accrued eight nominations at those awards. One of those nods was for her role as Philomena Lee, the Limerick woman whose campaign for adoptive rights made her a contemporary heroine, opposite Steve Coogan in Steven Frears’s Philomena. “I met Philomena about four days before we started filming,” Dench said. “It was just like a door opening. She has a wonderful sense of humour.”
Dench became the first woman to play M in the James Bond series and it is some measure of her success that she was the only cast member to survive the reboot when Daniel Craig succeeded Pierce Brosnan in the title role. But even she has hit the odd speed bump. When O’Kane asked her if she had ever received any bad notices, she nodded towards a notorious 2019 debacle.
“Oh you’re joking,” she said with a cackle. “Have you ever seen the film of Cats?”
A tumultuous gale of laughter.
“I haven’t.”
