Judi Dench — actress of many talents

Press, 28 February 1984, Page 17

Judi Dench — actress of many talents

By

PETER LEWIS,

contributor to “The

Times” and “Mail on Sunday”, London.

Admirers of Judi Dench as the distraught spinster of the television series, “A Fine Romance,” simply would not recognise her when she steps on to the stage in the play, “Pack of Lies,” which has been filling London’s Lyric Theatre since last November.

Neither would they recognise her husband in the play, as in life, Michael Williams. Laura and Michael, television’s all-time duffers at bringing romance to the boil, have transformed themselves into the Jacksons, a suburban couple of mind-paralysing ordinariness, whose predictable lives are overturned by the discovery that their neighbours and best friends are suspected of being Soviet spies. They have to collude with the security men in watching the friendly neighbours while continuing the friendship as if nothing had changed. The plot is closely based on what actually happened to such a couple in the London suburb of Ruislip in 1960, when their Canadian neighbours, the Krogers, were unmasked as part of a spy ring passing naval secrets to Moscow. Judi Dench has been nominated for yet another “best actress” award for her portrayal of this plain, flustered, apologetic mother in a housecoat who finds the strain of lying and deception, among the everyday life of darning, cooking, and crochet, undermines everything she took for granted. What attracted her to the part, she says, was not only sympathy for the character’s extraordinary plight, but the challenge of making her as credible and as ordinary as in real life. “She is not a heroic

woman,” says Judi, “not a Hedda Gabler, and I was constantly having to cut out behaviour that was too emotional, too demonstrative.”

Her performance has been paid the remarkable tribute of recognition by neighbours of the real “Mrs Jackson,” who died from a heart attack not long after the case. Her daughter, a teen-ager at the time, praises the honesty of the portrayal.

“It was difficult — unlike anything I have ever done,” Judi Dench admits — and this is probably the key to why it attracted her. She has made a career of deliberately playing the opposite of the part she last did. Last season, she won three awards for playing, simultaneously, Laura; Oscar Wilde’s dragon of the tea table, Lady Bracknell; and — in Harold Pinter’s latest play, “Alaska” — a woman awakening from a 29-year coma under the impression she is still a child.

By nature she is cuddly, bouncy, even giggly — someone who treats herself, with her fetchingly cracked voice, as a bit of a joke. A natural comedienne, one would have said. How is it that she is remembered for a long line of heart-stopping Shakespearean heroines? She made her debut as Ophelia at London’s Old Vic, straight from drama school (and was soundly trounced for her presumption by some critics). But she went on to give definitive accounts of Viola and Titania, and was the most harrowingly moving of Lady Macbeths — all for the Royal Shakespeare Company. Television has seen her, among many memorable

parts, as Shaw’s Major Barbara and Chekhov’s Madame Ranevsky. It is not the sheer number of parts that matters but her remarkable ability to touch an audience’s heart in them. As the daughter of “Mrs Jackson” put if after seeing “Pack of Lies”: “Other actresses can gradually bring a lump to your throat. With Judi you suddenly find you are crying.” Trevor Nunn, director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, said

of her Lady Macbeth: “She made us see that. Lady Macbeth was not a heartless, ruthless female politician, but a wife whose love for her husband was so great that it made her behave against her nature.” Sir Peter Hall, who directed her as an unusually young Lady Bracknell, says: “She belongs in a line of great, particularly English actresses — Ellen Terry, Edith Evans, Peggy Ashcroft — who all derived comedy from adversity. It

is very English to make fun out of adversity.” Interestingly, the one part in which she admitted complete failure was King Lear’s monster daughter, Regan. “She could find no love or redemption in that woman,” recalls Trevor Nunn. “It depressed her to the point where she could not go on. For her, acting is a missionary activity and she cannot play anything that denies all hope.”

As a person of unshowy but profound convictions — she went to a Quaker school in York, northern England, where her father was a doctor — she does not act primarily for self-satisfaction. “Being a Quaker means putting other people first,” she says. “By holding up a mirror to yourself on stage, you show your own failings and in them the audience may recognise theirs. They may say, ‘I have felt just like that’.

“This is what I do it for. I cannot make speeches. I am rotten at small talk. I cannot walk into a room full of people alone and be at ease. Acting is my way of communicating with people.” She and Michael Williams, who is a Catholic, did not decide to marry until both were 35 — and both have put family life with their daughter Finty, now 11, before their careers. They will not accept parts that take them both away from home at the same time, home being a tiny, wonky, eighteenth century cottage tucked away, not even reachable by road, in Hampstead village in north London. They are conscious of the irony that, after years of slogging in Shakespeare for very little money, it took “A Fine Romance” to bring them widespread recognition. “These days we are even recognised on the Hong Kong ferry to Kowloon,” Judi says, delightedly, “or if we walk into a hotel dining room full of Swedish holidaymakers.”

Their series is watched by viewers as far apart as Iceland and Zimbabwe, Finland and New Zealand. As they tie themselves in knots of embarrassment week by week as Laura and Mike they cannot help wondering what people make of them in Swaziland or Dubai. London Press Service.