E-mail a friendJudi Dench
original airdate April 23, 2008
A long-revered stage and screen star in her native England, Tony- and Oscar-winning thespian Dame Judi Dench is known for playing strong-willed women in positions of authority. She began her career on the stage and is equally adept at comedy and the classics. She's earned critical acclaim and award nominations too numerous to list. Dench can be seen in PBS' Masterpiece Classic three-part miniseries, Cranford, and is set to return as James Bond's boss in the upcoming 007 film, Quantum of Solace.
Judi Dench
Tavis: I'm pleased to welcome Judi Dench to this program. The acclaimed actress has enjoyed so much success in film and television, earning six Oscar nominations in her career. She just thanked me for telling her it was six; she didn't even know that. And a win, of course, for her role in "Shakespeare in Love."
We are delighted here at PBS that she's back in a new "Masterpiece" miniseries called "Cranford." The three-part project begins right here on Sunday, May 4th. Here now a scene from "Cranford."
Tavis: First of all, an honor to have you on the program, and we're delighted you're back on PBS in a new series.
Judi Dench: Thank you, Tavis.
Tavis: No, we're glad to have you here. Let me start by asking - I've been dying to ask you this one question above all else, which is why you think that this stuff plays so well on American television. After all, this is like 1840 in your native homeland, and it plays so well on American television.
Dench: Yes, it played very, very well on British television, too, which - well, it's jolly nicely done, I must say. It's beautifully designed.
Tavis: That's a good first step.
Dench: And it's a very, very good adaptation. And I think in our case it was because people know about Jane Austen, they know about Dickens, and they know of Emily Bronte. But this - Elizabeth Gaskell was a considerable writer, and not many people know her books. And so it was - nobody quite knew what was going to happen. So it was rather unexpected and, well, I hope it will go well here. You never quite can tell.
Tavis: Well, you've got a great track - well, we can. You have a great track record of bringing what is seen first in Britain to American television, and again it just always amazes me - it is good stuff, but it just amazes me that it just plays - we can't get enough of it on PBS, apparently.
Dench: Yes. Well, long may it last.
Tavis: Yeah. (Laughs) I'll let you tell them about the storyline. What is the storyline of Cranford?
Dench: Oh, it's about a community of people, it's set in a place, Knutsford in Cheshire, actually, Cranford is, and it's just about a close community of mostly women, and it's the arrival of the industrial revolution, the railways, and how that will upset everything, and they all get very alarmed about that. But on the way to that, there are a lot of births, marriages, and deaths, really.
Tavis: What do you take, if anything, when you get a chance to study and to read and to say nothing of act in a period piece like this about the role of women then?
Dench: Well, you realize how hard it was, and how incredibly difficult. Actually, the threat of somebody catching something and suddenly dying was absolutely crucial - potent all the time. And I think they had a quite hard life, but I think what caught peoples' imagination about it was that it's a community who knew everything about each other and went to each other's help, and just watched out for people.
Sometimes extremely irritatingly watching out for people - kind of twitching curtains all the time, a nightmare to live with. But nevertheless, they were there for each other, to support each other through things. There's a huge kind of class awareness also in it, which thank god we're not so aware of now anymore. But it was a hard time for them.
Tavis: You just gave me a new phrase I'm going to hold on to. I live in a neighborhood where people - I live in a neighborhood right now where people are always twitching curtains.
Dench: Twitching curtains. (Laughter)
Tavis: I'm going to write that down. There's my neighbor twitching her curtains again. (Laughter) That said, you're turned on by period pieces? What do you like about them?
Dench: Well I don't know, I don't - I never quite understand the term "period piece." I suppose it means "in clothes that we don't wear now," I always think. And as I've spent most of my 51 years in Shakespeare, some of that's pretty tricky. But I think it's quite - it is called period pieces; that's what it's called here, and costume drama.
But it's a bit constricting, I think, that, and perhaps it is entirely to do with the fact that we don't - it's a piece that you don't have a washing machine (unintelligible), and a hair dryer.
Tavis: Well, you said constricting - constricting in what way?
Dench: Well, constricting in the fact that suddenly you say period piece or drama and you're put in a little box that has not really anything to do with now, and I think there's a great deal of (unintelligible) has got to do with now. I've just put my name to - they're trying to build an eco-town outside Stratford-on-Avon at home, and I put my name to saying it's not a good place to do it, and I suddenly felt - I thought this is what they felt about the threat of the railway coming, it will change the countryside.
It will change all our jobs, and in actual fact, I don't think we can sustain a town where they propose to put it.
Tavis: Not that the United States of America is the end-all, be-all, not that anybody should want to move here to live here as opposed to anyplace else in the world, but you have been in and out of Hollywood for a lot of years now, and unlike some of your British actor cohorts, you've decided not to move to the U.S. of A. but to stay in Britain, stay in England. Why?
Dench: Well, I've never done a film in Hollywood. I've only ever come here to speak to people like you. (Laughter) Anytime, I'll come over and have a chat. So it's never really presented itself. We have a house outside London in a village rather like Cranford - twitching curtains. (Laughter) And it's never really presented itself to me, and yet I'm not a particularly nationalistic person. But I've never thought of going anywhere else.
Tavis: You mentioned Shakespeare earlier, and you have, to your point, spent a lot of your career doing Shakespeare. We know, of course, how universally regarded he is, but for Judi Dench, for you personally, what is it about Shakespeare that just so -
Dench: Well, my husband, Michael Williams, and I used to call him all our married life the gentleman who pays the rent, because we were both employed at the Vic and at Stratford in the National Theater, all in Shakespeare. And he was the man who paid the rent. And I went very, very early to see my brothers at school in "Macbeth," and I was completely captured. That's all I ever wanted to do.
Tavis: You were how old then?
Dench: Nine.
Tavis: Nine, wow.
Dench: And yet I trained to be a designer, a scenic designer, and kind of a quarter of the way through that training I suddenly thought I would try and be an actress. And then I came out of drama school and went straight to the Old Vic and played Ophelia in "Hamlet." Not very well. (Laughter) I got (unintelligible) to do it.
Tavis: What gave you - I hear at nine years old being turned on by Shakespeare and by the profession of being on stage. You go to train for being a scenic designer. What happens that allows you, that says to you that I want to move from being a designer to being on the stage?
Dench: Do you know, I went to Stratford as a young girl and saw Michael Redgrave as Lear, and I know - I know that the night I saw that something in me completely changed. And I can actually put it down to that one -
Tavis: That one night.
Dench: - night. But then my brother ahead of me, has always wanted to be an actor, so I suppose I caught it, in a way, like measles, from him. (Laughter) And I'm terribly pleased I did, because I love it. Absolutely love it.
Tavis: You love what most about it?
Dench: I like the people I work with. I love being part of a company. My husband used to say it's because I'm very nosy. I have to know what everybody's - twitching curtains. The whole thing is twitching curtains.
Tavis: Yeah, it keeps coming up. (Laughter) It just keeps coming up.
Dench: But I do, I love it. I just love the society of actors. Whatever people say about actors, they're unbelievably magnanimous and kind and true to each other.
Tavis: You mentioned earlier - not mentioned, I asked you earlier about why you had never decided or thought about moving to the United States; you gave a wonderful answer, which raises this question for me. When do you think - can you mark when American audiences came to know Judi Dench?
Dench: Oh yes, I know exactly when.
Tavis: When was it?
Dench: It was when we made the film of "Mrs. Brown," about Victoria, for television in England, and Harvey Weinstein saw it and said, "This shouldn't be for television; this should be for a movie." And it was, and I, having been with the Old Vic to America in 1958 - 38 years later I came back to do all the publicity for "Mrs. Brown."
And I was asked by everybody, apart from "Mrs. Brown" and M in the Bond films, what else have you done? (Laughter) So I thought, oh, well, that's the whole of Shakespeare, Chekov, Gibson, David Hare, it's gone straight past, and I've just got - it's good, isn't it? Refreshing.
Tavis: Yeah. (Laughs) I'm a Bond fanatic. Everything from the very first - I have the whole collection in my house. I love Bond films and was so pleased when you started playing M. What has that meant for your career? How much do you enjoy it? What's it like playing M?
Dench: I love it. I get to give him a very hard time.
Tavis: Yeah, yes you do.
Dench: I've got Pierce Brosnan to give a hard time to; now I have Daniel Craig to give a hard time to. And it's got me a fan base of about 11-year-olds - 11 to 15.
Tavis: There's M.
Dench: And it goes down so well. My grandson, it's very good street cred. (Laughter)
Tavis: I'm glad we got this on tape. First of all, seeing Judi Dench use the phrase "street cred" on PBS -
Dench: Is it rude?
Tavis: I've seen it all. No, it's not rude at all; it's just funny, that's what it is. (Laughter) You have a lot of street cred because of that, though.
Dench: I do, with the 11-to-15 generation.
Tavis: That's very important, though.
Dench: Well, quite.
Tavis: They spend money on them tickets.
Dench: Well, and they might come to the theater to see a period drama.
Tavis: Yeah. (Laughter) Has it been important for you in your career to try to reach beyond the audience that we think is the Shakespeare-Chekov theater audience?
Dench: Yes, but in the way, the other way round, because my passion is the theater. And if you can actually - quite seriously, if you can get somebody of a very young age, one Shakespeare production to children that is not good will put them off Shakespeare forever. So try and do something or whatever if they come and see James Bond, then they might suddenly think oh, I might go and see "Hamlet" with her in it, or - well, they won't anymore, because I've finished doing all those parts now. Except Hamlet.
But it's just catching peoples' imagination, isn't it? Well, you know all about it, you do it.
Tavis: You are as delightful in person as I heard that you would be.
Dench: Thank you.
Tavis: And I'm honored to have you on the program.
Dench: And likewise.
Tavis: Thank you so much. Her name, of course, Judi Dench. "Masterpiece" is back, and we are so delighted here at PBS to have Judi Dench back as a part of it. "Cranford" is the new one, and over a couple different nights here, so check out your local listings, and Judi would appreciate your tuning in.
Dench: Yes, I would.
Tavis: Yes, as would the rest of us here at PBS.
Back to April 23, 2008