JUDI DENCH. Born Judith Olivia Dench in York, England, 9 December 1934. Attended the Mount School, York; Central School of Speech Training and Dramatic Art, London. Married Michael Williams in 1971; child: Tara. Stage debut, Old Vic Theatre, London, 1957; Broadway debut, 1958; actress, Old Vic Company, 1957-60; joined Royal Shakespeare Company, 1961; first television appearances, mid-1965; actor, dramas and situation comedies from the early 1980s; debut as stage director, Renaissance Theatre Company, 1988. Officer of the Order of the British Empire, 1970; Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire, 1988. Member: Royal Shakespeare Company (associate), from 1969; board of the Royal National Theatre, 1988-91. D.Litt: University of Warwick, Coventry, 1978; University of York, 1983; University of Birmingham, 1989; University of Loughborough, 1991; Open University, Milton Keynes, 1992. Recipient: Paladino d'Argentino Award, Venice Festival, 1961; Variety London Critics Award, 1967; Guild of Directors Award, 1966; Plays and Players Award, 1980; Society of West End Theatre Award, 1980, 1983, 1987; Evening Standard Drama Award, 1980, 1983, 1987; British Academy of Film and Television Arts Award, 1981, 1985, 1987, 1988; TV Times Funniest Female on Television, 1981-82; American Cable Award, 1988. Address: Julian Belfrage Associates, 68 St James's Street, London SW1A 1LE, U.K.

TELEVISION SERIES

1981-84 A Fine Romance
1992-    As Time Goes By

TELEVISION PLAYS

1959     Family on Trial; Hilda Lessways
1960     An Age of Kings; Pink String and Sealing Wax 1962     Major Barbara
1963     The Funambulists
1964     Parade's End
1966     Talking to a Stranger; Days To Come
1968     On Approval
1978     The Comedy of Errors; Langrishe Go Down 1979     Macbeth; On Giant's Shoulders; A Village             Wooing
1980     Love in a Cold Climate
1981     Going Gently; The Cherry Orchard
1983     Saigon: Year of the Cat
1984     Playing Shakespeare
1985     Mr and Mrs Edgehill; The Browning Version 1986     Ghosts
1989     Behaving Badly
1991     Absolute Hell

FILMS

The Third Secret, 1964; A Study in Terror, 1966; He Who Rides a Tiger, 1966; Four in the Morning, 1966; A Midsummer Night's Dream, 1968; Luther, 1973; The Third Secret, 1978; Nela, 1980 (voice only); Dead Cert, 1985; Wetherby, 1985; The Angelic Conversation, 1985 (voice only); A Room with a View, 1985; 84 Charing Cross Road, 1987; A Handful of Dust, 1987; Henry V, 1990; Goldeneye, 1995.

STAGE (actor)

Hamlet, 1957; Measure for Measure, 1957; A Midsummer Night's Dream, 1957; Twelfth Night, 1958; Henry V, 1958; The Double-Dealer, 1959; The Merry Wives of Windsor, 1959; As You Like It, 1959; The Importance of Being Earnest, 1959; Richard II, 1960; Romeo and Juliet, 1960; She Stoops to Conquer, 1960; A Midsummer Night's Dream, 1960; The Cherry Orchard, 1961; Measure for Measure, 1962; A Midsummer Night's Dream, 1962; A Penny for a Song, 1962; Macbeth, 1963; Twelfth Night, 1963; A Shot in the Dark, 1963; The Three Sisters, 1964; The Twelfth Hour, 1964; The Alchemist, 1965; Romeo and Jeannette, 1965; The Firescreen, 1965; Private Lives, 1965; The Country Wife, 1966; The Astrakhan Coat, 1966; St Joan, 1966; The Promise, 1966; The Rules of the Game, 1966; Cabaret, 1968; The Winter's Tale, 1969; Women Beware Women, 1969; London Assurance, 1970; Major Barbara, 1970; The Merchant of Venice, 1971; The Duchess of Malfi, 1971; Toad of Toad Hall, 1971; Content to Whisper, 1973; The Wolf, 1973; The Good Companions, 1974; The Gay Lord Quex, 1975; Too True to Be Good, 1975; Much Ado About Nothing, 1976; The Comedy of Errors, 1976; King Lear, 1976; Pillars of the Community, 1977; The Way of the Worldm, 1978; Cymbeline, 1979; Juno and the Paycock, 1980; Village Wooing, 1981; A Kind of Alaska, 1982; The Importance of Being Earnest, 1982; Pack of Lies, 1983; Mother Courage, 1984; Waste, 1985; Mr and Mrs Nobody, 1987; Antony and Cleopatra, 1987; Entertaining Strangers, 1987; Hamlet, 1989; The Cherry Orchard, 1989; The Sea, 1991; The Plough and the Stars, 1991; Coriolanus, 1992; The Gift of the Gorgon, 1992; The Seagull, 1994; Absolute Hell, 1995.

STAGE (director)

Much Ado About Nothing, 1988; Look Back in Anger, 1989; The Boys from Syracuse, 1991; Romeo and Juliet, 1993.

One of the leading classical actresses of her generation, Judi Dench is unique in having sustained a television career that, both in breadth and depth, more than matches her work for the stage. The three roles for which she received, in the same year, a clutch of Best Actress and Best Light Entertainment Performance awards--a cancer ward sister in the single drama Going Gently, Ranyevskya in The Cherry Orchard and the gauche but capable Laura in the situation comedy series A Fine Romance--epitomise the versatility of this distinctive and popular performer and the range of work with which she has been associated across a career spanning four decades and some thirty parts. She was made a Dame Commander of the British Empire in 1988.

Educated at a Quaker School, the spiritual discipline of which she has suggested deeply influenced her life and work, she trained at the Central School from 1954 to 1957. Her first television appearance, a small part in a live broadcast of the thriller Family on Trial, came within two years of her graduation and was followed soon after by the title roles in a six-part serialisation of Arnold Bennett's Hilda Lessways and a production by Stuart Burge of Major Barbara. She also played the part of a young tearaway in an early episode of Z-Cars by John Hopkins, a character that became the basis of the disaffected daughter Terry, created for her by Hopkins in his ground-breaking family quartet Talking to a Stranger and for which she received the British Guild of Directors Award for Best Actress.

Dench has given notable performances in television presentations of Shakespeare. She played Katherine of France in the cycle of histories An Age of Kings in 1960, and at the end of the 1970s was in two screenings of Royal Shakespeare Company productions, as Adriana in The Comedy of Errors and opposite Ian McKellan in Trevor Nunn's landmark chamber production of Macbeth. In 1984 she appeared in John Barton's series of practical workshops for Channel 4, Playing Shakespeare. Her classical work for television includes a substantial number of period dramas and serialised novels but it is in her commitment to a range of largely anti-heroic parts in contemporary television drama that she has most consistently won both popular and critical acclaim and where she has most effectively demonstrated her capacity for conveying what one critic called "transcendent ordinariness". In 1979 she played the real-life role of Hazel Wiles, the world-weary adoptive mother of a thalidomide child, in the BBC play On Giant's Shoulders and in 1981 she brought depth and complexity to the comparatively small role of Sister Scarli in Going Gently. In David Hare's Saigon: Year of the Cat, she played the reserved figure of Barbara Dean, an expatriate bank official caught up in a brief, passionate affair during the United State's final days in Vietnam--a performance described by the author in his introduction to the published script as "silkenly sexy and intelligent, as only she can be."

Indeed, one of Judi Dench's most instantly recognisable features is a vocal timbre so husky that an early commercial for which she had provided the voice-over had to be withdrawn because it was too suggestive. Other writers and directors have remarked not only on her vocal technique but on the subtlety and insight of her approach to character. Her physical appearance--stocky, soft but strongly-featured (she was told at a film audition early in her career that she had everything wrong with her face)--might lend itself to comedy but she has never fallen into the trap of comfortable type-casting. Her performance as Bridget, the ill-treated divorcee returning to play havoc with her husband's marriage to a younger woman in the four-part serial Behaving Badly, trod a fine line between dowdy despair and spirited heroism. In the two long-running situation comedies, A Fine Romance (in which she played opposite her husband Michael Williams) and As Time Goes By, she brought to her characters the same quizzical intelligence that epitomizes her more serious work.

These two popular hits sealed her reputation as one of the few classical actors able to move with ease between the differing disciplines of stage and television acting and, as was proved by the unexpected West End success of the somber stage play Pack of Lies in 1983 (in which she and Williams also played opposite each), confirmed the often neglected synergy that exists between the two performance media. In 1991 she played the lead in the BBC's production of Rodney Ackland's rediscovered play Absolute Hell, later reprising the role at the National Theatre to great acclaim: and her performance in the National's staging of A Little Night Music in 1996 demonstrated a remarkable balance between the projection and scale required by the musical form and the finely tuned minutiae of emotional insight which has been the hallmark of her work for television.

-Jeremy Ridgman