Awards for Britain's most versatile actress

Press, 1 June 1981, Page 10

Awards for Britain's most versatile actress

By

MICHAEL BILLINGTON,

drama critic of the “Guardian,” London

Judi Dench is an actress for all seasons. Short of stature but with a heart as big «as Waterloo Station, she can play almost anything. She was a huskily sexy Sally Bowles in the musical, “Cabaret.” She has caught the ambityion of Lady Macbeth, the ardour of Juliet, the wit of Beatrice on the Shakespearean stage. On television she was much-awarded for her performance as a girl returning to her family in John Hopkins’s BBC-TV quartet, “Talking To A Stranger.” Only the cinema has never really capitalised on her ability to combine larkiness of spirit with emotional depth.

But perhaps her quality as a real trouper — the kind of actress any director is always glad to have in his company — was best illustrated recently when she in-

ured an Achilles tendon durng rehearsals of “Cats.” This is an ambitious new Andrew Lloyd Webber musical based on T. S. Eliot's "Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats.”

Cast as Jenny Andydots, Miss Dench (now in her 47th year) gaily entered into the cavorting required by Gillian Lynne's choreography and had a nasty injury. But she came back'into the show in time for the first previews. It would, one feels, take a lot to keep Miss Dench off a stage once she had set her mind on it.

But, unhappily, she fell again, injuring the same leg and reluctantly had to give up the role. What is surprising is that she has overcome one of the greatest handicaps any actress can face: starting at the top. Brought up in York, in northern England, as a Quaker and trained at London’s Central School, she made her debut at 23 playing Ophelia to John Neville’s 1957 old Vic “Hamlet.” Acclaim was instant. And she stayed with the company four years to play a famous Juliet in Zeffirelli's turbulent Italianate “Romeo and Juliet.”

This was a girl desperately in love for the first time in her life; and one will always retain the image of her and John Stride anxiously trying to maintain fingertip contact as he descended an awkward, tree-lined balcony.

Despite her lack of height, it was clear that Judi Dench had what it takes to be a great classical actress: the ability to act as a conduit for untrammelled emotion. From the Old Vic, she joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford and London. Then she was reunited with John Neville in Nottingham, central England, where she played Lady Macbeth in a production that toured West Africa. “They found some of it,” she confesses, “terribly funny. Lines like ‘the thane of Fife had a wife’ were greeted with gales of laughter. But the audience were very quiet and attentive during the witchcraft bits.”

That was in 1963. But

although she vowed never to play Lady Macbeth again Judi Dench returned to the part triumphantly in 1976 in a production that opened at the Royal Shakespeare Company's Stratford studio theatre. the Other Place. It was a thrilling experience. The action took place inside a white-marked circle. Sound effects, like the rattle of a thunder sheet, were visibly produced in front of the audience. Above all, lan McKellen and Miss Dench, as the Macbeths. seemed like a real married couple rather than a pair of cardboard monsters.

"I believe,” she said, “that Lady Macbeth is driven on by the most tremendous ambition not for herself but for her husband. They must. be two people immediately recognisable; they must' not come in merely as the wicked King and Queen.” Truth, honesty, sincerity. These are the qualities Judi Dench has projected all through her career, whether playing Shakespearean heroines with the RSC (including Viola. Portia, Hermione, Imogen), leads in musicals ("Cabaret" and “The Good Companions”) or star parts on television.

On the surface she was slightly bizarrely cast as the worldly, green-fingernailed, cigarette-holdered Sally Bowles. And it must be admitted that her singing voice, with a delectable china-crack in it, is not one to give Joan Sutherland any sleepless nights. In fact. Judi Dench got so fed up with inquiries about her voice that she put a note on her dressing-room door saying: “Miss Dench is not suffering from a severe cold — this is her normal voice.”

Yet she made a triumph of the role, partly because .she lent the madcap Sally’ an element of pain and disillusion, partly because of the intensity with which she listened to other people. Second-raters go for surface effect. Real actors find

the kernel of emotional truth in whatever they are doing.

It may all stem from a single line, as in the RSC's 1976 "Much Ado About Nothing” production where Judi Dench seized on Beatrice's remark that Benedick had plaved her false before.

“1 think there was a big, big thing betwween them — it almost says so -- and something went desperately wrong,” she says. Out of that came a performance full of bruised tenderness and a desire not to be caught twice. Likewise the essence of her award-winning performance as Juno in Sean O'Casey's “Juno and the Paycock” at London's Aldwycli Theatre in 1980 seemed to come from a particular moment when, as the eternal Irish wife and mother, she applied herself to heaping coals on a fire in order to shut out sorrow. In the end. of course, the kind of actress one is depends very much on ones own private personality. On the one hand. Judi Dench is giggly, bubbly and funny. I vividly recall once doing a radio interview with her and Donald Sinden. As I tried to make the closing announcement, they retired behind a screen to chew potato crisps so noisily that I could barely speak.

But at the same time she is also a genuinely good and thoughtful woman. It is a little-known fact that when an elderly critic's wife was taken ill in Strat-ford-on Avon and the two of them were confined to their hotel, it was Judi Dench and her actor-husband, Michael Williams, who visited them every day and did all their shopping: not out of charity i but out of (unforced kindness, j

The quality Judi Dench brings on stage — a mix of j high spirits and emotionalveracity — is, in fact, the! very thing that also makesl her an exceptional human being.