Oscar winner Dame Judi Dench goes on a festive journey into her family history to discover whether one of her ancestors ever crossed paths with her hero, William Shakespeare.
Oscar winner Dame Judi Dench will be turning detective this Christmas in a mission to discover if one of her ancestors met her hero William Shakespeare.
In Channel 4 documentary, Shakespeare, My Family and Me – airing on Boxing Day – she searches Danish archives to see if her eight times great grandfather met the bard in 1606.
Laughing out loud, she recalls her own colourful mishaps down the years acting in Shakespeare’s most famous plays.
She says: “I remember when I played Portia in The Merchant of Venice at Stratford-upon-Avon with my husband Michael [Williams], I got one of the words wrong in the script and ended up saying ‘erection’.
“We had a wind band about to play on stage with us and they left as they were embarrassed. It was exquisite agony. I was surprised I did not get the sack afterwards.
“Also, my wig flew off one night when I was in Twelfth Night. It was a very dark wig with a head-dress attached and it just went flying.”
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Now 91, she has acted alongside a gallery of stars and fondly recalls playing Cleopatra to Sir Anthony Hopkins’ Mark Anthony.
“I absolutely adored it,” she says. “Every night I used to haul Tony up and he used to die in my lap, as he was playing Mark Anthony. After he died on stage he used to whisper to me ‘Now, I am going for a nice cup of tea’ and that would be the whole of act five.
“I love Shakespeare, but I have fallen over in nearly every play I have done.It is something to do with my balance.
“And I have had bad reviews. Once when I played Juliet in Romeo & Juliet one critic wrote ‘she conveyed about as much as an apple in a Warwickshire orchard’.”
But, since she first stepped on stage at The Old Vic in 1957 in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the multi-award winning actress has more than redeemed herself.Most famous with younger audiences as MI6 boss M in seven James Bond films, she says with thespians of her generation the edict was “the show must always go on.”
She says: “When I started at the Oxford Playhouse, you did more than one role at a time.
“We would do a night at Stratford and there was this taxi driver and he used to drive me to London. There was no motorway then, it was like the A34 or whatever it was and we used to think nothing of it. It was exciting just to be working.”
Dame Judi says there was never a question of pulling out of a performance.“You can’t say ‘I don’t feel like it today’. You can’t do that,” she says.
“I remember when there was the Asian flu in the 1950s. I remember coming on as Ophelia in Hamlet and I cried the whole way through the scene, but I got through it.”
Passionate about theatre, she continues: “There are very few plays I have done that I have not enjoyed.”
“Theatre is my passion. It is a learning curve, but the learning starts with the audience.
“When we do a comedy and we don’t get the laughs that is when we know something is wrong and that is why living theatre is important. It is vital to life.”
But her most famous comedy role was undoubtedly in the TV series A Fine Romance, opposite her husband Michael Williams.She recalls a funny moment off-set, saying: “Once coming down Shaftesbury Avene we had a row in the car. I was looking one way and Michael was looking the other, then this woman came up to the car window singing A Fine Romance!”
Sadly, her failing eyesight due to the condition macular degeneration, means she is less likely to watch live performances these days.
She says: “When I go the theatre I can’t see. Hopeless.
“I have lost my eyesight now, so I can’t read now. I have to learn [a script] by somebody teaching it to me another way. I can’t see and I can’t read a book.”
But Dame Judi looks back on her career and the talented people she has worked with extremely fondly.
She says: “I wanted to be a designer when I started out. That is what I fancied being. I went to York Art School and my parents took me to see Michael Redgrave in King Lear at Stratford-upon-Avon and the set was simply sublime.
“There was an enormous circle that went round with a big rock in the middle. There was a throne and a cave and I thought, ‘this is what design should be and I don’t have the facility for it.’”
Realising she wouldn’t make it as a designer, she decided to follow her brother into acting.
She says: “My father was a doctor and there was no television then and my mother was wonderful at playing the piano. I did get to Central School of Speech and Drama and I went straight to the Old Vic and that was my training ground.
“My first role at The Old Vic was Ophelia. I learnt a lot and they kept me on.”
Like her millions of fans, Dame Judi will be enjoying festive TV over Christmas, although she has a very critical companion in her pet parrot Sweetheart – a gift from her partner, conservationist David Mills.
She says: “We watch television sometimes and the parrot suddenly goes ‘You noisy cow’. Not at me, but to the television!.
“It is a spectacular parrot, an African grey which David gave me for Christmas.”
Sweetheart belonged to a man living in Maidstone for 14 years, and Dame Judi continues: “She is called Sweetheart and is a female but talks like a man. She travels between David and me.”
Dame Judi will also mark the passing of friends she has last over the Christmas period, by spending time in the garden of her Surrey home, where she has planted memorial trees in their honour.
She also has a very unusual statue of Queen Victoria. She explains: “The statue was given to me. It is higher than me. I can’t possibly reach it. After we did the movie Victoria and Abdul we were in India and there was an enormous statue of Queen Victoria and it is made of papier mache.
“After the film they said ‘do you want that statue?’ And I said no’ but then I said ‘oh, just a minute.’ She is in my garden, where she stands with an orb and sceptre and the birds like her a lot. She is quite hidden, but I know she is there.
“I plant trees for all my friends who have died and there was a beautiful designer on that film who I was fond of and was very, very clever. He died startlingly young, so beside Queen Victoria I have a tree for him. So he is there as well. It is a very very nice thing to have.”
