Dame Judi Dench on tattoos, her parrot and why she's no national treasure

At 87, there’s still the air of a slightly mischievous child surrounding Dame Judi Dench. Take her hooting uproariously as she recalls how she decided to get a tattoo to mark her 81st birthday. ‘Well, it was my daughter Fint’s [actor Finty Williams] idea. We’d had lunch and were walking up St Martin’s Lane and she said, “Now! Let’s do it!”.’ So Judi had ‘carpe diem’ inked onto her wrist. ‘It didn’t hurt,’ she exclaims, in those deliciously familiar tones – half gravel, half satin. ‘Well, it depends on what your level of pain is – but it didn’t hurt me.’

As such a renegade spirit, she may be one of our most beloved actors, but she loathes being endlessly labelled a ‘national treasure’. ‘I hate it, it’s stuffy!’ she cries, her sapphire-blue eyes flashing contemptuously. ‘It sounds like you’re in a museum with the fossils.’

It wasn’t until her sixties that she conquered Hollywood, winning her first Oscar at 63 for her Queen Elizabeth in Shakespeare in Love. She’s had six more nominations for, among others, Iris, Mrs Brown and Notes on a Scandal. Films such as the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel franchise and her part as M in eight (‘actually nine, because I did a morning’s work on Spectre’) James Bonds made her an international superstar.

Now, she’s added to her lengthy greatest hits list with a star turn in Belfast, directed and written by Kenneth Branagh; a funny and deeply moving fictionalised (but not too fictionalised) account of his boyhood in Northern Ireland, where his close-knit family is torn apart by the Troubles.

After months of lockdown, she was absolutely overjoyed to be back on a film set. ‘It was a real release!’ she exclaims. ‘Ken had organised it, so it was unbelievably carefully done. Every single member of the crew was tested every single day, nobody overlapped with anybody, so you had no fear. But how wonderful seeing people again.’

Yet one subject fills her with gloom: ageing. ‘I don’t recommend it,’ she says vehemently. I had a frightful fall not long ago. I tripped over the carpet and there was nobody in the house, and I was lying on the ground unable to get up for half an hour. I have a wonderful parrot who kept saying, “What are you doing? What are you doing?” This is when you need a very convenient parrot who would phone somebody but she didn’t. After half an hour I just got up.’ It sounds scary. Does she have panic buttons installed? ‘No, no, no! Nothing like that.’

During lockdown, she was diverted by University Challenge and the Channel 5 documentary Our Yorkshire Farm about shepherdess Amanda Owen and her nine children. ‘I just love it!’ It turns out that Judi had hoped to have six children. ‘I wanted a house full of them. I would have loved to have had that. But it didn’t happen, alas. I didn’t get married until I was 36, so I left it a bit late. I wouldn’t have minded not working, not at all.’ Instead, the daughter of a doctor and a stage wardrobe mistress from York ended up creating a different kind of extended family, when they moved in 1995 from their London home to a house near Stratford with her widowed mother and Michael’s parents. ‘My first dream had always been a family community. All our parents jumped at it, so we bought a house and all lived together with Fint as a little girl. We had all our high days and holidays there, both our Mas died there. It was lovely,’ she sighs.

To read more on Judi’s relationship with long term collaborator Kenneth Branagh, boyfriend David Mills, Bond and continuing to work with age related muscular degeneration, subscribe to Saga Magazine.

Belfast is out now.

The full version of this interview is in Saga Magazine, February 2022

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