Dame Judi Dench, one of the UK’s best-known and most-loved actors, has said her eyesight has now deteriorated to the extent that she is no longer able to see on film sets.
Speaking to the Sunday Mirror, the actor, 88, said that she was still continuing to try and find workarounds, but “I can’t see on a film set any more” … “and I can’t see to read. But you just deal with it”.
She continued: “It’s difficult if I have any length of a part. I haven’t yet found a way. Because I have so many friends who will teach me the script. But I have a photographic memory.”
Dench has long been open about the effects on her professional life of her age-related macular degeneration and the need for her to memorise lines orally before going on set. The actor has recently appeared in the likes of Belfast, for which she received an Oscar nomination, and Allelujah, Richard Eyre’s adaptation of the Alan Bennett play.
She continues to work, she said, because “I have an irrational fear of boredom. That’s why I now have this tattoo that says carpe diem. That’s what we should live by.”
Other key big screen roles include eight James Bond films and Shakespeare in Love, for which she won an Oscar. Dench has also had a highly sustained and successful stage career, winning a Tony and eight Olivier awards. Key TV shows include the sitcom As Time Goes By, with Geoffrey Palmer, and A Fine Romance, with her late husband, Michael Williams.
She also spoke to the Mirror about her partner, the conservationist David Mills, whom she met in 2010, nine years after Williams’ death.
She said: “I’ve had many, many good friends, but it’s been very unexpected to have somebody who is as caring as my partner, David. Someone to be able to share things with … I feel very lucky indeed. And to laugh with somebody is terribly important. We laugh about everything.”
The couple recently attended King Charles’s coronation in London; last year Dench wrote a letter to the Times accusing Netflix series The Crown of “crude sensationalism” in its depiction of the royal family. Allowing its fictionalisations to pass without a disclaimer was, she said, “cruelly unjust”.
Dench was also cited by the actor Kevin Spacey in his testimony last week during his trial for sexual and indecent assault. Spacey was found not guilty on Wednesday.
One complainant had accused Spacey of grabbing his crotch “like a cobra” at a gala event at a theatre in central London in 2005, an allegation which Spacey dismissed, saying: “It’s madness. It never happened.”
The event had been organised by Dench, of whom Spacey said: “I love her. I would do nothing to ever embarrass her or embarrass myself in such a way.”