Judi Dench

The woman who came late to the movies

Judi Dench made her stage debut at the Old Vic in 1957, playing Ophelia. She was twenty-two years old and had a voice that already carried an authority unusual for her age. For decades, film was a secondary field for her, because London theater absorbed all of her creative energy.

And the British film industry took a long time to figure out what to do with her.

In 1997, she played Queen Victoria in Mrs Brown, and the world discovered that this sixty-three-year-old actress could carry a close-up with the same force as a Shakespearean monologue. That Oscar nomination changed her career forever. But it was not her only foray into royalty.

The following year she won the Oscar for Shakespeare in Love, appearing for just eight minutes on screen. It was one of the shortest performances ever awarded by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. But that brief time was enough for her portrayal of Elizabeth I to become fixed in the public's memory as the definitive image of British sovereignty.

The head of British intelligence

Her arrival in the James Bond franchise in GoldenEye (1995) broke with the male tradition of the M character. Pierce Brosnan and Daniel Craig had to learn to work under a woman who did not tolerate nonsense.

She accepted the role because her husband asked her to.

She played M in seven films of the franchise until her character died in Skyfall in 2012. That storyline decision closed a seventeen-year chapter in which Dench brought a necessary coolness to a universe that tended to overdo the testosterone. And she did it without ever picking up a gun or taking part in a chase.

In 2006 she starred in Notes on a Scandal alongside Cate Blanchett. Her performance as an obsessive and manipulative teacher earned her another Oscar nomination and confirmed that her ability to unsettle audiences was as powerful as her warmer side.

The Battle Against Darkness

Starting in 2012, she began suffering from macular degeneration, which prevents her from reading scripts on her own. Now she needs someone to read them aloud so she can memorize her lines by ear. Despite this physical limitation, she filmed Victoria & Abdul in 2017 and Belfast in 2021 under the direction of Kenneth Branagh.

The pace doesn't let up.

In 2022, she took part in the documentary Louis Theroux Interviews: Judi Dench, where she explained that she refuses to retire as long as her memory stays intact. She still lives at her home in Surrey, surrounded by trees she plants in honor of her late friends. Each one is named after an actor or director who is no longer with us.

In 2024, it was confirmed that her awards collection now includes one Oscar, two Golden Globes and ten BAFTA Awards. Her salary for her recent brief appearances in major productions is estimated at one million pounds per week of filming.