The player queen; why Judi Dench rules the stage and screen.

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 21-JAN-02

Bookmark this article Print this article Link to this article Email this article Digg It! Add to del.icio.us RSS

COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

In the opening sequence of "Iris," an extraordinary film about the late novelist Iris Murdoch's descent into the limbo of Alzheimer's, Murdoch and her loyal man-child of a husband, the Oxford don John Bayley, are shown swimming like two plump sea lions through the murk of the Thames. They're happy in their underwater playground, which distorts light and form and contains the sediment of ages. They float freely but are always in contact, dodging among the rocks and weeds in joyful, directionless exploration. Water was Iris Murdoch's primal habitat; by no accident, it is also the favorite element of the woman who plays her here, Judi Dench. "There's a wonderful abandonment you feel in water," Dench says. "It's very liberating. It's like the unconscious. You're just floating around there and trusting that you're going to come up to the surface."

This is not the only point of intersection between the two women: the adventure of the unknown, the salvation of the imagination, the promotion of happiness, and a lifelong inquiry into goodness are all themes in the elusive lives of both Murdoch and Dench. Sir Richard Eyre, the director and co-author of "Iris," says that while writing the screenplay he tried to instill his sense of Dench into the character of Iris. "There was never a question of how do you bring Iris and Judi Dench together," he says. "Essentially, the character is Judi Dench-stroke-Iris Murdoch."

Dench, who has played both Queen Victoria and Queen Elizabeth I on film and was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1988, is beloved by the English public for her quintessential Britishness. "I think that in a lot of people's eyes she is the equivalent of the Queen -- she inspires such phenomenal affection," says the director John Madden, who launched Dench's late-blooming film career in 1997 with "Mrs. Brown." (Significantly, last month the seventy-seven British families that lost relatives in the Twin Towers catastrophe chose Dench to read at the memorial service at Westminster Abbey.) But she and Murdoch share an Anglo-Irish heritage, and each, in her own way, is a paradoxical amalgam of propriety and wildness.

With a leafy home in Surrey, a silver Rover, a taste for simple if expensive clothes, a commitment to charities (she is a patron of a hundred and eighty-three of them), and her obbligato of drollery -- what Billy Connolly, who starred opposite her in "Mrs. Brown," calls "that light, posh, self-effacing humor" -- Dench, who is sixty-seven, cuts a deceptively sedate, suburban figure. At work, however, she trolls her turbulent Celtic interior, a vast tragicomic landscape that ranges between despair and indomitability. "There's a sort of crimson place deep within her -- a fiery dark-red place that stokes all the things she does," Connolly says. "You don't get to see it. But you occasionally get glimpses of how tiresome she finds the doily-and-serviette crowd. You know, those English twittering fucking women -- they think she's one of them, and she isn't." This complexity is what Dench brings to her acting, which is nowhere more inspired than in her depiction of Murdoch. Her performance parses every nuance in the writer's trajectory of decline -- from embarrassment to bewilderment, from terror to loss, from nonentity to a final connection with an enduring life force, where, in the shuffle of dementia, Murdoch somehow finds a dance.

Dench is not much of a reader, but she has read most of Murdoch's novels, and before filming she went so far as to sit outside Bayley's house while he was away to absorb the shambolic atmosphere of the place. (She found his car in the driveway, unlocked and with a window open.) "I didn't want to miss that snapshot in my mind," she says. But her uncanny portrait emerged out of her own process, a combination of technical rigor and imaginative free fall, in which, according to Eyre, "she doesn't put anything of herself between her and the character." He explains, "I was really staggered at the way she transformed herself. Toward the end of the film, when Iris's mind has gone, and you look at Judi's face and see that implacability, the sense of peace and the absence in her eyes, that is alchemy. She didn't go to old people's homes. She didn't sit and study. It's intuitive. She's quick. I mean, really quick."

Except for time out to have a child and to nurse her husband of thirty years, the actor Michael Williams, who died last January of lung cancer, Dench has been performing almost constantly for four and a half decades. She appeared in the first season of the Royal Shakespeare Company, in 1961, and in the eighties was a founding member of Kenneth Branagh's Renaissance Theatre Company, for which she has also directed plays. Under the auspices of the Old Vic, the R.S.C., and the Royal National Theatre, she has turned in some of the greatest classical performances in recent memory. Her Juliet in Franco Zeffirelli's 1960 stage production of "Romeo and Juliet"; her Titania in "A Midsummer Night's Dream," directed by Sir Peter Hall in 1962; her Viola in "Twelfth Night" in 1969; her Lady Macbeth in Trevor Nunn's magnificent 1976 production; her Cleopatra in Hall's 1987 "Antony and Cleopatra" -- all are exemplars of contemporary Shakespearean performance. Her work in the modern repertoire -- as Anya in "The Cherry Orchard," as Juno Boyle in "Juno and the Paycock," as Lady Bracknell in "The Importance of Being Earnest," and as Christine Foskett in Rodney Ackland's rediscovered fifties classic "Absolute Hell" -- has also had a huge impact on English theatregoers. And Dench has inspired allegiance as well through her television career, which includes thirty-four films and two popular long-running comedy series, "A Fine Romance" and "As Time Goes By."

"See you on the ice, darling," she has been known to call out from her dressing room to an actor headed toward the stage. For Dench, "the crack" -- the Irish term for fun -- is riding the exhilarating uncertainty of the moment. To that end, she is famous (some would say notorious) for not having read many of the parts she accepts. Instead, she has someone else paraphrase the script for her. (Williams usually had this duty before he died; now it has fallen to Dench's agent, Tor Belfrage.) "Michael said, 'Just read that one line,' " Dench recalls of "Pack of Lies," Hugh Whitemore's successful spy story, in which she and Williams starred. "It was just one line. I read it, and I knew then that it would be all right."

"It often seems absurd to me that a woman as intelligent as Judi could roll up at the beginning of the rehearsal not having read the play," says Branagh, who directed Dench in his films of "Hamlet" and "Henry V" and has, in turn, been directed by her onstage in "Much Ado About Nothing" and "Look Back in Anger." Although this method allows Dench to arrive at rehearsals with, as Branagh puts it, "the right kind of blank page to start writing on," from a professional point of view it is also sensationally reckless. "I don't know what it is in me, this kind of perversity," Dench told me when I visited her at home last July. "I don't understand it myself. I think some people think it's an affectation. It's thrilling, though, isn't it? You don't know what's coming."

The habit of not reading scripts has, over the years, landed Dench in a few sticky theatrical situations, such as Peter Shaffer's turgid "The Gift of the Gorgon," in 1992. And at first she wasn't keen to take on her current West End outing, in a revival of "The Royal Family," the slim 1927 Edna Ferber and George S. Kaufman satire of the theatrical Barrymores, but her mind...

Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.