Roles Abound for This Dame

“Grief produces energy,” Dame Judi Dench was saying over tea--in her case, coffee--in the stately foyer of the landmark Savoy Hotel. Sadly, she knows the subject all too well.

The petite 67-year-old English actress, unfussily elegant in a brown suede jacket and camel scarf, was referring to how the British and American people, after slogging through a shellshocked, post-Sept. 11 malaise, had seemed to spring to life.

“So many people since then have turned to the kind of creative side of them, to want to look at art, to want to go to the theater, to want to listen to music, you know, a huge kind of surge of that,” she said in her distinctively soft voice that, nonetheless, is imbued with authority. “I think always when there’s been some terrible thing that’s happened, there is a surge of energy it produces. I think it’s quite life-affirming that we want to somehow look after our spirit.”

Dench has found herself trying to do the same over the past year. In January last year, her husband of 30 years, actor Michael Williams, died of lung cancer. “There’s a natural thing where you feel so heavy-hearted a lot of the time, and then at some point you see that there’s something you can do to move forward,” she said.

Between sips of coffee, she speaks matter-of-factly with the knowledge that sorrow and moving on are part of a universal natural cycle.

After Williams died, Dench filmed major roles in “The Shipping News,” “Iris” and “The Importance of Being Earnest” before returning to the London stage to star in the Edna Ferber-George S. Kaufman 1927 comedy “The Royal Family,” which opened in November and is still playing.

Of those projects, her role in “Iris” seemed the most emotionally loaded. Dench plays celebrated British author Iris Murdoch in her late years as she succumbs to Alzheimer’s disease while her devoted husband, John Bayley (Jim Broadbent), tries to keep her comfortable and happy at home. (Murdoch died in 1999.)

Playing out the final years of a loving, long-standing marriage wasn’t necessarily at the top of Dench’s want-to-do list.

“I dreaded it, but I had no need to dread it because in actual fact it was all right,” she said. “It was fine. I knew everybody [on the film] very well. And somehow it’s better when you’re working with people [who], if they know your circumstances but nobody refers to it, you can get on with life. It’s when out of the blue somebody might say something that catches you unawares--as along as that doesn’t happen, you can manage, you can get on.”

Meanwhile, the activity was a tonic.

“It was good that I had so much work and so much traveling and so much to concentrate on for those months after Michael had died,” she said. “Funny enough, it hit me much worse in the summer when I stopped.”

In a sense, Dench doesn’t have to do most of the heavy lifting in “Iris.” The movie alternates between scenes of Murdoch’s early life, with Kate Winslet and Hugh Bonneville playing the couple, and the period of the author’s illness, as Bayley tries to cope while Murdoch fades.

“In a way, it’s worse for the [caretakers of people with] Alzheimer’s than it is for the person themselves, although the early stages of Alzheimer’s--when someone who’s very intelligent [becomes aware of her] mind starting to shut down--must be desperate,” Dench said. “Once it has, in a way they’re in their own world, and it’s the John Bayleys of the world one feels the grief for.”

Still, Dench’s performance is receiving the kind of recognition that, for her, has become almost routine. The Screen Actors Guild and British Academy Film Awards have nominated her not only for best actress for “Iris” but also best supporting actress for “The Shipping News.” The Academy Award nominations, to be announced Tuesday, may very well follow suit.

Of course, Dench wouldn’t be able to work so often if she weren’t getting the roles, which is no small feat at a time when most veteran actresses are struggling to find worthy projects. Dench is hot now, yet before she starred in--and received an Oscar nomination for--John Madden’s “Mrs. Brown” in 1997, her movie career highlights were playing James Bond’s boss, M, and appearing in supporting roles in films such as “A Room With a View” (1987), “A Handful of Dust” (1988) and Kenneth Branagh’s “Hamlet” (1996--and she’s only in the long version).

Dench has a simple theory for why she’s in such demand.

“Harvey Weinstein is the answer,” she said, referring to the Miramax honcho whose company has made her a fixture in such films as “Mrs. Brown,” “Shakespeare in Love” (which earned Dench a best supporting actress Oscar for her memorable turn as Queen Elizabeth), “Chocolat,” “The Shipping News,” “Iris” and “The Importance of Being Earnest” (scheduled for release later this year).

She ‘Sets the Tone For Everybody Else’

“My film career would have been as it always was, spasmodic in the extreme, if he hadn’t taken up ‘Mrs. Brown,’” she continued. “And if John Madden hadn’t directed ‘Shakespeare in Love,’ I might just have done ‘Mrs. Brown’ and then gone back to the theater.”

Weinstein is happy to be unofficial president of the Judi Dench fan club.

“I think she’s one of the definitive actresses of her time,” he said from New York. “She’s incredibly professional and sets the tone for everybody else. And I have a major crush on her.”

He added that he plans to continue casting Dench whenever possible.

“If there’s a role within that age category, she’s the one,” Weinstein said. “And if there’s a role not in that age category, I’ll rewrite the script to tailor it to her. And if there’s a sex-change operation involved, I’ll do that too.”

In fact, a male professor role in an upcoming Miramax movie is being reworked for Dench, he said.

Lasse Hallstrom, who directed Dench in “Chocolat” and “The Shipping News,” said he marveled at how she was able to be consistently believable without showing any effort.

“You never really see her go off-track or have bad moments,” Hallstrom said from upstate New York. “There must be a technique in some way, but during the course of these two movies, I’ve never seen it show on screen. It’s just always an emotional presence and a credibility in everything she does.”

To Dench, her film career is frosting on a rich, thick cake whose ingredients include years performing with the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Royal National Theatre, the Old Vic Theatre and the Nottingham Playhouse. Movie stardom, she said, was never a concern.

“It’s a huge surprise, and I’m extremely glad because it means I get work, and I want to work,” Dench said. “Long may it last.”

Nevertheless, for Dench the stage still has its advantages.

“What I don’t like about film is I haven’t got control over it,” she said. “I have that control in the theater. I can do a better performance tonight and know at the end of it. I know by the fact of whether you get a laugh or not. You know where a laugh is, and you don’t get it and don’t get it, and quite suddenly you say it in a slightly different way and you get the laugh, and you think, ‘That’s how that’s done.’ Too late in film. Too late.”

For what it’s worth, Dench doesn’t have any special duties for having been royally anointed a dame in 1988.

“No, nothing at all comes with it except that a lot of people call you Dame Dench, which is very funny. Dame Smith. Dame Dench,” she said, referring to her similarly venerated colleague Maggie Smith. “Nobody knows it’s the equivalent of a knight. But what is extraordinary is if you’re knighted here, your wife becomes ‘lady.’ And if you’re made a dame, which is equivalent to a knight, your husband doesn’t become ‘sir.’”

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Mark Caro writes about movies for the Chicago Tribune, a Tribune company.