Bio

One of the leading classical actors of her generation, Judi Dench is unique in having sustained a television career that, in both 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 awards— a cancer ward sister in the single drama Going Gently, Rayevskya in The Cherry Orchard, and the gauche but capable Laura in the situation comedy A Fine Romance— epitomize the versatility of this distinctive and popular performar and the range of work with which she has been associated across a career spanning more than four decades and dozens of parts. She was made a Dame Commander of the British Empire in 1988 and, in 2001, was awarded the prestigious Fellowship of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts.

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 serialization of Arnold Bennett’s Hilda Lessways and a production by Stuart Burge of Major Barbara. She also played a 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 groundbreaking 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 Ariana in The Comedy of Errors and opposite Ian McKellan in Trevor Nun’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 also includes a substantial number of period dramas and serialized novels, but it is in her commitment to a range of largely antiheroic parts in contemporary television dramas 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 British Broadcasting Corporation (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 final days of the U.S. presence in Vietnam — a performance described by Hare in his introduction to the published script as “silkenly sexy and intelligent, as only she can be.”

Indeed, one of Dench’s most instantly recognizable 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 the character. Her physical appearance—stocky and soft but strong 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 typecasting. 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 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 Dench’s reputation as one of the few classical actors able to move with ease between the different disciplines of stage and television acting and, 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 other), confirmed the often neglected synergy that exists between 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 on stage to great acclaim; and her performance in the National Theatre’s 1996 production of A Little Night Music demonstrated a remarkable balance between the theatrical projection required by the musical form and the finely timed minutiae of emotional insight that had become the hallmark of her work for television. In 2000, after an absence from television (apart from several voiceovers) during which she took on a succession of major film and stage roles, Dench brought these two qualities together in Alan Plater’s one-off drama The Last of the Blond Bombshells. Starring alongside Leslie Caron, Olympia Dukakis, and Cleo Laine, she played a former saxophonist in a World War II era all-girl dance band attempting to reunite the old band members.