Command Performer

Invited to play Cleopatra in a National Theatre production, Judi Dench responded to noted Shakespearean director Peter Hall, “Are you sure you know what you’re doing? Cleopatra as a menopausal dwarf?”

Then 52, Dench was as she is today, 12 years later, earthy and self-deprecating. Nevertheless, playing opposite Anthony Hopkins, she went on to triumph as the beautiful Queen of the Nile, as she has in so many other roles. Dench is a darling of the London stage, and thus it seemed particularly fitting to many in that world when she rose last month to accept the best supporting actress Academy Award for her imperious, theater-loving Queen Elizabeth in “Shakespeare in Love.”

Yet millions of others in the television-viewing audience who saw her brilliant eight-minute performance as Gloriana Regina, or her modest Oscar acceptance speech, may have mistakenly pegged her as something of a late bloomer.

After all, few in this country had ever heard of her until 1997, when her emotionally complex performance as Queen Victoria in the film “Mrs. Brown” earned her an Oscar nomination for best actress. In Britain, however, over a 40-year career on the stage she has assayed roles of every stripe, hue and rhythm, from Shakespeare to Sondheim, from Mother Courage to Sally Bowles. Indeed, in 1988, the year after she appeared in “Cleopatra,” she was named a Dame of the British Empire--the female equivalent of knighthood--by Queen Elizabeth II.

But, whatever you do, don’t call her Dame Judith.

“A lot of people here say ‘Dame Dench,’ that’s really hopeless,” the actress says with a laugh in her distinctive smoky voice, which early in her career caused some to think she had a chronic cold.

“If anyone called me ‘Judith,’ they’d get a black eye. Judi. Judi, I like best.”

And so Judi it is in the course of a chat in her dressing room at the Barrymore Theatre, where on Thursday she will open in David Hare’s “Amy’s View,” reprising her role in the Royal National Theatre hit production. In a span of nearly two decades, the play graphs the volatile relationship between Esme, a West End stage legend, and her daughter Amy.

Wearing a crisp white blouse and tan outfit, her silver hair in the pixie cut she wore on Oscar night, the 64-year-old Dench comes across as a feisty and sensual presence, still glowing from what she describes as her “dreamlike, lovely” Hollywood adventure. But in a manner that is surprisingly and charmingly guileless, she makes clear that she’s just as thrilled to now be occupying the dressing room used by Marlon Brando when he was doing “A Streetcar Named Desire,” or to be returning to Broadway for the first time since her 1961 New York debut in a repertory of plays from London’s Old Vic.

And what a return it is. Police barricades at the stage door are needed to control the 50 to 100 fans who gather after each performance of “Amy’s View.” Advance ticket sales currently are nearing $5 million, besting the season record held by “The Blue Room” with its nude scene by Nicole Kidman. Shortly after her Oscar win, Dench entered a popular theater restaurant in Manhattan to see the entire place burst into spontaneous applause. She nodded shyly, then turned crimson. Used to sedate British audiences, she admits to being bewildered by all the sudden attention. “It’s wonderful,” she says simply.

John Madden, who directed her in both “Mrs. Brown” and “Shakespeare in Love’, doesn’t expect an overnight transformation of the actress herself. “No disrespect to the academy but the award won’t mean anything at all to her as a person,” he says, “because she’s the most extraordinarily humble person, who can’t understand why the world is showering her with awards and recognition.”

What emerges in the course of an interview is a surprising bundle of contradictions: a distinguished Dame of the British Empire with a blue sense of humor, a deeply serious theater artist who insists on having fun in the process, a devoted wife and mother who’s “not very good on my own” but who also needs the “quietness of soul and solitude” she receives from her devout Quakerism.

What binds all these different aspects together?

“I suppose I’m open to anything, I’d try anything,” she says, after a thoughtful pause. “I’d like to be in a circus, you know. Not one that uses animals, because I don’t approve of that, but maybe Cirque du Soleil. Have a go on the high wire. But I don’t think they’d let me.”

Despite her recent success in film--of late, she has been also been seen as M in the last two James Bond flicks, and she co-stars with Joan Plowright, Cher, Maggie Smith and Lily Tomlin in Franco Zeffirelli’s upcoming “Tea With Mussolini” as a dilettantish aunt--Dench remains very much of the theater.

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The daughter of a Yorkshire doctor, she came of age, like her peers Vanessa Redgrave, Smith and Eileen Atkins, in the wake of acting greats like John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier and Peggy Ashcroft.

For those who know her well, she is carrying the torch of those who came before: “I see a link from Edith Evans to Peggy Ashcroft to Vanessa Redgrave and Judi Dench, and that link is a profound sense of comedy and tragedy,” says director Hall, who has worked with her frequently since the late ‘50s. “I just finished directing Judi in ‘Filumena’ [by Eduardo de Filippo] in London, [as] a getting-on-in-age Italian whore. She didn’t put on an accent, but she was so of the gutter, so rough and tough and, above all, so unsentimental, that she was just tremendously moving.”

It is exactly that acting tradition that comes under fire in “Amy’s View” through the character of Dominic, Esme’s son-in-law, a successful television and film producer who derides the theater as irrelevant, old hat, finished. Though Dench claims that similarities between herself and Esme are largely superficial--both are established West End actresses, both are fiercely devoted to their daughters--she and the character she plays are at one when it comes to defending the theater. In fact, Dench has done Esme one better recently by joining up with such British theater artists as Tom Stoppard and Harold Pinter to form a political coalition to lobby the Blair government on behalf of the theater. She despairs that because of government cutbacks, her daughter Finty, a 26-year-old actress, will never have the same opportunities to practice her craft that Dench did.

“Esme’s far from me, but I believe in the anger she feels when she’s told that it’s all moved on and that there’s no longer any room for theater,” Dench says. “I get on my high horse about this constant criticism of the theater as silly and parochial, but Esme gets on her very high horse indeed.”

Nonetheless, some of Dominic’s missiles hit their mark because Esme is something of a relic, a woman who lives in the past. No one could ever say that of Dench, says Richard Eyre, director of “Amy’s View,” who also directed her in productions of “Hamlet” and “The Cherry Orchard.”

“She has an emotional volatility, wit and understanding of the actor’s life, which makes the character seem tailored for her,” he says. “But Esme’s a character withdrawn from the world, and I can’t think of anyone more involved with the world than Judi. She goes out to greet it.”

Indeed, a restless curiosity about life is a major tenet of Judi’s View. And unlike Esme, Dench is not a snob when it comes to television. She’s had recurring roles in British sitcoms, among them “As Time Goes By” and “A Fine Romance,” in the latter of which she appeared opposite Michael Williams, her husband of 28 years.

Over and over, one hears from Dench’s colleagues that she brings a serious commitment to any role she undertakes, whatever the range, whatever the medium. And she has little ego when it comes to her physical appearance--one critic memorably and aptly compared her Mother Courage in Brecht’s wartime drama to “a cockroach scurrying across the stage”--though she does want everyone to know that her teeth are not as rotten as Queen Elizabeth’s in “Shakespeare,” thank you very much.

“It is true what I said to John Madden after ‘Mrs. Brown,’ that I would have done anything in his next film, a nonspeaking role, because I believed in him,” she says. “I don’t believe you’ve got to go on doing bigger and bigger parts, I don’t think that’s right. You have to elasticate yourself, to do different things, to go into a territory you haven’t explored before.”

In fact, Dench says she recently received an offer from director Trevor Nunn to do a role at the National Theatre but turned it down with a note that said, “I want to come back but not this part. Can’t you hand me anything more frightening?”

Dench uses her fear of failure as “petrol” to fuel her performance. “Like deep sorrow or great love, nerves produce adrenaline which is what you have to use,” she says. “I’d be frightened if I wasn’t frightened.” Her nerves sometime get the better of her. Dench was originally cast as Grizabella in the London production of “Cats” until she walked, early in rehearsals, convinced that she could never handle the part. She begged Hall to allow her to drop out of playing Lady Bracknell in a production of “The Importance of Being Earnest,” but he refused. And she became so flustered with her inability to learn the part of Esme in “Amy’s View” that she asked Eyre to release her after three weeks of rehearsal. The actress recalls, “He said to me, ‘Are you losing your memory?’ and that gave me such a severe fright, I was so insulted by the question, that I went out and got my act together.”

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For Dench, that means “asking hundreds of questions about every line, about the essence of the character, of what the author is trying to say through you.” Hare encountered that aspect of the actress when she was filming his television movie “Saigon: Year of the Cat,” directed by Stephen Frears, in 1983. Recalls Hare, “Judi came up to me with the script and said, ‘David, this line, “Yes,” what does it mean?’ And I said, ‘It means “No.” ’ And she said, ‘Fine,’ and in the next take, she said ‘Yes’ to say ‘No.’ As a writer, you have total technical freedom because she has technique to burn and yet she never displays it. It appears effortless.”

Dench says, “I think of myself as this enormous console with hundreds of buttons, each of which I must press at exactly the right time.” That means acting is not only full of variety but also a work-in-progress. “That’s why I always want to make a speech at the end of a performance, ‘If you don’t like it this evening, come back tomorrow because it may be ever so much better!’ That’s something you can’t do with film or television. That’s why I can’t bear to look at myself [on film]. I want to change it.”

Her skittishness about making movies is changing though, as she gets more and more opportunities. The Oscar will no doubt lead to even more film offers, says Madden. “Up to now she’s been suspicious of the camera, she doesn’t feel that she can marshal her talents and skills to meet the demands in the way she can for theater. I hope that’s now been totally disproven.”

Dench concedes that she’s beginning to see more movies in her future. “I do have to say that I enjoy films much more, learning about them, working with such terrific people. I’ve been lucky because John Madden and Michael Apted [director of the upcoming “The World Is Not Enough”] are very much theater people; they know the process and the fears. Since winning the Golden Globe for ‘Mrs. Brown,’ I’ve had many more film scripts to consider, and that can be troubling because I’m just not very good at choosing. It does have to be something I’m right for.”

Whether on film or stage, there is something vividly sensual about her, whether she is playing such famously repressed ladies as Elizabeth or Victoria or even Lady Bracknell. Say what you will about Edith Evans’ classic interpretation of Wilde’s grand lady, sex had little to do with it, and yet British critic Michael Billington praised Dench’s Bracknell as “oddly young and sexually susceptible.”

Asked about the sexual undercurrents eddying throughout her roles, Dench mock-glowers. “Who said that?” she demands. Without missing a beat, she adds, “Well, whoever did, I’m delighted. It’s not something I’m aware of. When it came to Lady Bracknell, I was rather young to play her, and my family and I went to Scotland and we were going through Inveraray, the castle there. And I thought of Margaret, Duchess of Argyll, who was this great beauty, very, very pale face, great slash of lipstick and piles of black hair. She was in this terrible scandal, two-way mirrors, that sort of thing, up to no good. And I thought that’s how I’m going to play her. Not that she was exactly like Lady B, but it gave me a thread. So I used to play the whole thing with my hand much too much on Algie’s knee.”

Esme in “Amy’s View,” too, is a creature who has sewn her wild oats, though when the play opens she has long been widowed by a once-famous British artist. In the course of the play, the losses add up to an almost Job-like degree so that by the end she is left with only her integrity and her love of the theater. With her own daughter close in age to Amy, Dench concedes that Esme is one of the toughest roles she’s ever assayed.

“It’s very, very painful,” she says. “It’s just all very mixed up, the picture of Sam [Samantha Bond, who plays Amy] and my daughter Finty. I would know the pain of losing a daughter, very acutely, and, at the same time being aware that it’s Amy I’m losing, the pain is very real. Esme is very real to me. I can’t personally divide her from me. It’s indistinguishable.”

Which makes it nearly impossible for Dench to answer the next question. Does she personally ascribe to Amy’s view--that love conquers everything?

“Yes, I think I do,” she says after a long pause, her head in profile. “I’ve never thought about it before, really. Because as Esme I’m so busy fighting Amy about certain things that I’ve never considered. But, yes, I think I do.”

Dench particularly worries that Finty has suffered too much as the daughter of celebrated parents. When Finty had a child out of wedlock the London tabloids picked up on it. The family closed ranks, and Dench and her husband dote on their 2-year-old grandson, Sam. Dench went ballistic, however, when one critic dared to compare one of Finty’s performances, unfavorably, to those of her mother.

“It’s very, very unfair, it’s terrible,” says Dench, who at the time of the review attended a luncheon at which the critic was also scheduled to appear. “I told his editor, who was there, ‘If he’s at this lunch, I will make a scene, I will black his eyes for him.’ And I would have. It was really unforgivable.”

Chalk up that combativeness to being raised by an Irish mother and a father from Dorset, though Dench herself grew up in Yorkshire and now lives in Sussex. Dench and Williams spend a lot of family time in Scotland and Ireland, which they love for the severe beauty and bracing air. Dench says she wouldn’t mind retiring there, though her adieu to the stage seems a long way off, if ever. She thought of abandoning the theater when Finty was born, in 1972, but Williams discouraged her from doing so. “I just want to go on doing good work really,” she says. What she likes best is the collaborative effort of acting, being a conduit from writer to audience. “It’s a way of giving a present to the audience,” she says. ‘If you’re doing it for yourself, you might as well do it in your living room.”

Says Hare, “Judi’s contract with the audience is mystical. I’ve long held that, as you get older, who you are is what the audience responds to rather than what you do. Certain shallow actors become less interesting with years, people who are profound become more fascinating. My case is triumphantly proved by Judi Dench. Some actors use acting as a mask. She invites the audience to look into her soul.”

All the encomiums and awards are not likely to interfere with that contract, though Dench admits winning the Oscar raises expectations. (“People always take six steps back and say, ‘OK, prove yourself,’ ” she says.) While she takes her work very seriously, she observes, “There has to be a part of you that can laugh or you’d go absolutely mad.

“Once when we were at Stratford doing ‘A Comedy of Errors’ on this dreary afternoon, I caught sight of a rather sad-looking lady in a blue coat in the second row, and I said to the others, ‘Let’s just all do it for her, like it’s her birthday or something.’ So we all worked very, very hard, pouring out our hearts. Except that at interval, she left.”

Dench howls. “You can’t win them all, can you?”