 One of the most respected and liked actresses of the last third of the 20th century, Judi Dench has been heaped with honours for her stage work, in plays classic and modern, and her TV series - A Fine Romance (LWT, 1981-84), opposite husband Michael Williams, and As Time Goes By (BBC, 1992-94) - brought her vast new audiences.
But, in 1994, she was still saying "...filming doesn't come naturally to me, ...and I don't enjoy it very much". As the decade wore on, she became in fact a film star, 30-odd years after her film debut in Charles Crichton's long-forgotten The Third Secret (1964). She had huge successes as Cleopatra, Viola, Madame Ranyevskaya and the ordinary housewife in Pack of Lies (1983) on stage, on which she first appeared as Ophelia in 1957, but film work remained incidental.
Her early films are hard to see (e.g., Four in the Morning (d. Anthony Simmons, 1965, BAFTA as promising newcomer) and at least one, Tony Richardson's disastrous Dead Cert (1974), is hard to watch, with Dench striding around stables in a red pants-suit.
Despite her disclaimers, though, in the 1980s she did superb character work: as a flamboyant novelist in A Room with a View (d. James Ivory, 1985, BAFTA as Best Supporting Actress), a touchingly restrained Nora Doel in 84 Charing Cross Road (d. David Jones, 1986, BAFTA nomination), and a wonderful Mistress Quickly, dirty and tear-stained, in Henry V (d. Kenneth Branagh, 1989).
Then in the 1990s, she came to filmgoers' consciousness as never before: as a feminist M in the Bond films, GoldenEye (d. Martin Campbell, 1995), Tomorrow Never Dies (d. Roger Spottiswoode, 1997), The World Is Not Enough (d. Michael Apted, 1999), and Die Another Day (d. Lee Tamahori, 2002) putting Pierce Bond Brosnan crisply in his place; as Queen Victoria, her first major starring role in films, in Mrs Brown (UK/Ireland/US, d. John Madden, 1997, BAFTA award and Oscar nomination); her glorious 8-minute stint as Queen Elizabeth in Shakespeare in Love (UK/US, d. Madden, 1998), for which she won both the Oscar denied her the year before and a BAFTA; and Iris (UK/US, d. Richard Eyre, 2001), for which she won a BAFTA for her playing of Iris Murdoch and should have won another Oscar too. She received the Women in Film and Television Lifetime Achievement Award in 1997.
It is easy when writing about her merely to list the awards, to chart the popularity and the versatility; it is less easy to encapsulate the moments of sheer pleasure - of greatness as a performer in all the media - which are her legacy. The career of this short, pretty, not conventionally beautiful woman, with a faintly husky voice, deserves serious analysis, certainly something better than John Miller's hagiography, Judi Dench (1998).
She is the mother of actress Finty Williams, who has appeared in several films, and the sister of stage actor Jeffery Dench.
Brian McFarlane, Encyclopedia of British Cinema
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